Copyright George Mason University, Communication Department Fall 1999In Search of Sandbox Dreams: Examining the Decision-Making of Disney's Female and Male Animated Heroes
Carma L. Matti and Joanne M. Lisosky, Pacific Lutheran University
What follows is an extended abstract of a paper that originated as part of a research presentation in a gender communication class. The presentation spurred much conversation in the class. Subsequently, the authors began further research on how Disney characterizes its heroes, male and female.
Cantor and Bernay (1992) claim that young men identify with "distant heroes" and "accessible mentors" when they build a developmental state of life that psychologist Daniel Levinson called "the dream" (129), and that "women have ambition and career dreams when young, but the desire for love, approval, and connections drives the dreams underground" (137). We explain these expectations by gender schema theory, which suggests that children learn cultural definitions of gender and its roles in part from cultural myths (Bem, 1981, 1993). Since some sociologists suggest children may acquire gender schema from cultural myth portrays in popular mediated messages, we examined gender images in movies by Disney Corporation, one of the world's largest distributors of popular media to children and one reported to be making a concerted effort to demonstrate a shift in gender role behaviors in its characterizations.
We analyzed three of Disney's most popular recent animated feature files, assessing how they related gender and portrays of power and decision-making. We analyzed the primary female and male character from each film: Pocahontas and John Smith from Pocahontas; Aladdin and Jasmine from Alden (1992); and Belle and Beast from The Beauty and the Beast (1991). We selected each time one of these characters made a powerful decision, which is one defined as one involving risk, potential harm to oneself and/or others; and which is followed by some action. Each decision was identified as: a command decision (an independent, one to many decision that involves high risk to self and others, made with no input or influence from any other characters, and with language that demonstrated command authority, i. e., no "please" or "thank you"; personal decisions (independent, one to self, decision involving high risk to self and possibly other, made with no input from other, but not in the form of a command; influenced decisions (dependent, one with another, where decision and subsequent action are influenced by an advisor. We also examined the context surrounding the decisions and the outcome of the actions that followed the decisions.
Command decisions were primarily made by the male characters; personal decisions were either made more often by females or equally by both characters. But the distribution of influenced decisions varied widely. Pocahontas was much more influenced in decisions than was John Smith; Alden was more influenced than Jasmine; Belle and the Beast were equally influenced in making personal decisions. Each powerful decision occurred as a pivotal moment in each film's story. In all three films, the young female character takes action toward independence, ventures that come with reservations and often result in a heavy burden. When the female characters are portrayed initially as desirable, powerful, autonomous, in control and independent they make decisions that are often evaluated in the film as a failure, with the characters blaming themselves for the negative consequence. The issue of fault occurs only once with a male character. When the female characters made power decisions they brought potential risk only to themselves and possibly one other person, while male characters' decisions affected or brought potential risk to the whole community. In addition, the decisions made by the male characters were often rewarded with the exact outcome that the decision-maker had intended. We concluded that these characterizations reinforce the stereotype that women are incompetent as risk takers and powerful decision-makers. Thus, Disney captured the "new" images of young women as high-risk, decision-makers while simultaneously reinforcing the traditional stereotypes that females are less qualified for leadership roles.
References
Bem, Sandra L. (1981). Gender Schema Theory: A Cognitive Account of Sex Typing, Psychological Review, 88(4), 354-364.
Bem, Sandra L. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Cantor, D. W. & T. Bernay. Women in Power: The Secrets of Leadership. Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 1992.
Joanne M. Lisosky, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Theatre at Pacific Lutheran University. Her research focuses on many issues surrounding children's entertainment.
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