[ecrea] Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art 7.2 published

Intellect is happy to announce that Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching 
Art 7.2 is now available! For more information about the journal, click 
here >> https://bit.ly/2QMjWWF

Special Issue: ‘Dream Big, Princess’: Identity, Gender, Power and 
Nostalgia in Twenty-First-Century Disney Culture

Articles & Editorial:

‘Dream Big, Princess’: Identity, gender, power and nostalgia in 
twenty-first century Disney culture

Authors: Linda Beail
Page Start: 87

Conforming beasts and compliant princesses: A radical appraisal of 
Disney’s 1990s Americana rhetoric

Authors: Samantha Seybold And Massimo Rondolino
Page Start: 95

This article provides a systematic analysis of the Disney Renaissance 
films’ narrative tropes as a way to discern the particular social world 
they collectively depict and promote. Taking these popular cinematic 
productions as expressions of their authors’ and artistic creators’ 
world views, it argues that they all effectively legitimize a particular 
American ethos conventionally and frequently equated with the ‘happy 
ever after’ life ideal of the United States’ white, Christian middle and 
upper classes of the post-World War II era. Ultimately, based on the 
textual analysis of these films, the article urges us to consider the 
cultural and social implications of these narratives, particularly in 
light of their global distribution and the narrow world view they 
promote and legitimize.

What does a prince do?: Postfeminist girlhood and boyhood in Disney 
Junior cartoons

Authors: Kelli McCoy
Page Start: 111

The Disney Junior television network provides 24-hour-a-day programming 
aimed at preschool-aged children. Its popular animated series depict 
female characters in ways that are stronger than ever before. The girls 
are brave, heroic, adventurous, and are the moral anchors for the shows. 
However, their efforts are undermined by many of the male characters, 
who tend to represent stereotypical tropes of masculinity, including the 
braggart, the buffoon and the reckless younger brother. Therefore, these 
programmes are representative of a postfeminist and neoliberal culture, 
in which girls are expected to do more than boys in order to be 
successful, while boys take risks with few negative consequences.

‘Better in stereo’: Doubled and divided representations of postfeminist 
girlhood on the Disney Channel

Authors: Linda Beail And  Lindsey Lupo And Caroline Beail
Page Start: 125

Disney’s cable channel has global reach and the highest audience share 
among 9–14 year olds, demonstrating its powerful influence in 
constructing narratives for young citizens. It has produced several 
films and television shows aimed at tween girls, which embody the 
paradoxes and ‘double entanglements’ of postfeminism discussed by Angela 
McRobbie. These representations demonstrate many postfeminist 
characteristics, such as a focus on girls’ empowerment and neoliberal 
agency; temporal anxiety and time travel; commodification of racial 
difference; affluence and consumerism; the assumption of gender 
equality, even as its achievement makes it politically irrelevant; and 
femininity/romance as girls’ free and natural choice. This paper 
examines current Disney Channel hits such as Liv and Maddie, Girl Meets 
World, K.C. Undercover, Teen Beach Movie and Teen Beach 2. The doubling 
of female identity – following the Hannah Montana pattern of a double 
life, and replicated in K.C. Undercover and the Teen Beach movies by 
creating past/present dyads of characters from the 1960s/1970s and the 
present day – creates the opportunity to represent contrasting ideas of 
femininity and feminist history, engaging a politics of nostalgia that 
erases feminism as a political movement, while reaffirming a neoliberal 
notion of postfeminist girlhood.

My little princess: Exploring mothers’ experiences of their daughter’s 
parasocial relationships with Disney princesses

Authors: Melissa J. Newman
Page Start: 141

The proliferation of the Disney Princess line of media and products has 
been a pervasive part of American culture for several decades. In this 
study, mothers of young girls were interviewed to better understand how 
they restrict their children’s parasocial relationships (PSR) with 
Disney princesses as a result of their peer reference group influence. 
Results suggest that mothers were cautious of too much Disney Princess 
media consumption by their young girls but they did not go to extreme 
measures to prevent them from having a PSR with a Disney Princess 
character. Although some mothers felt the pressure of social comparison 
most were primarily concerned with their daughter’s healthy social 
development and representation of good role models in the 
princess-related movies and products.

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