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“Nearly Everybody Gets Twitterpated”: The Disney Version of Mothering

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Abstract

This essay makes the case that during the American cold-war era, Disney’s animated film classics worked in tandem with their True-Life Adventure series of nature documentaries to reproduce traditional mothering ideology under patriarchy. The animated films do this not by animating the realities of marriage, childbirth, and mothering work for girls to model after but instead by idealizing the dream of romance that leads to the making of the traditional patriarchal family. Through the use of anthropomorphism in the True-Life Adventures, scripts of manhood and motherhood are represented as natural and essential rather than socially constructed. Because of their continual promotion as “timeless masterpieces” and their widespread popularity, Disney animated films and documentaries produced before the second wave of feminism therefore continue to seduce girls toward their own erasure and disempowerment under patriarchy.

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Notes

  1. Someone in every class is bound to know (or be) someone who just got engaged or married at Cinderella’s castle, and one student’s grandparents took the whole family to Disney World for their 50th wedding anniversary.

  2. My transcription of quotations from the films and bonus materials comes from the four-volume set of DVDs released in 2006. The abbreviation TLA in my citations refers to this edition.

  3. The Disney Archives in Buena Vista, California denied me access to their trove of source materials, but there is a workaround that can provide glimpses into first-hand accounts of Walt’s antifeminist views of women and power: the Richard G. Hubler Collection at Boston University, which holds Hubler’s notes and manuscripts for a biography the company commissioned him to write in 1968 as a counter to Richard Schickel’s expose The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney published that year. However, the family nixed the publication of Hubler’s manuscript, probably (I’m guessing) because it repeated too many juicy tidbits from interviews with Disney staff, such as the Kimball and Davis quotation above.

  4. Disney films often mock royalty, and the laziness of the male lion may also suggest an implicit African stereotype. Though less prevalent than gender stereotypes, racial slurs occur throughout the the True-Life Adventures as speciesism. For example, in The Living Desert we are told that coatimundi are immigrants from Central America, and the young “rascals aren’t as innocent as they look. They’re bandits down to the masks on their faces,” and “egg stealing is their favorite pastime.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Eastern Connecticut State University, 83 Windham Street, Willimantic, CT, 06226, USA

    Lisa Rowe Fraustino

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  1. Lisa Rowe Fraustino
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Correspondence to Lisa Rowe Fraustino.

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Lisa Rowe Fraustino is a professor and chair of the English Department at Eastern Connecticut State University and on the visiting faculty in the Graduate Program in Children’s Literature at Hollins University, teaching both literature and creative writing courses. In addition to publishing academic scholarship on mothers, anthropomorphism, Disney, and publishing history, she has edited three collections of short fiction for young adults and authored several critically acclaimed books for young readers, including the 2010 Milkweed Prize winner, The Hole in the Wall.

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Fraustino, L.R. “Nearly Everybody Gets Twitterpated”: The Disney Version of Mothering. Child Lit Educ 46, 127–144 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9250-6

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