Embodying Disney Dreams: the Representation of Femininity and Whiteness in Recent Disney Animated Films

<p>This thesis proposes to critically examine the ways in which whiteness and femininity are represented in recent Disney animated films. It will be contended that the Disney text is an influential part of the popular cultural discourse on femininity and whiteness but this is often obscured or made invisible by the ways in which the films work to naturalise these constructions. The work of this thesis will be to unpack the constructions of femininity and whiteness through an analysis of the figuration of the Disney heroine. This thesis will argue that idealized whiteness and femininity are discursively embodied in these Disney heroines in complex and contradictory ways, and that Disney works on and through these bodies to fix and contain the ideological constructions of gender, race, and sexuality.</p>

Embodying Disney Dreams: the Representation of Femininity and Whiteness in Recent Disney Animated Films

<p>This thesis proposes to critically examine the ways in which whiteness and femininity are represented in recent Disney animated films. It will be contended that the Disney text is an influential part of the popular cultural discourse on femininity and whiteness but this is often obscured or made invisible by the ways in which the films work to naturalise these constructions. The work of this thesis will be to unpack the constructions of femininity and whiteness through an analysis of the figuration of the Disney heroine. This thesis will argue that idealized whiteness and femininity are discursively embodied in these Disney heroines in complex and contradictory ways, and that Disney works on and through these bodies to fix and contain the ideological constructions of gender, race, and sexuality.</p>

Literary Neurophysiology

Writing about neurophysiology more than a century ago, what were US authors doing? Literary Neurophysiology: Memory, Race, Sex, and Representation in U.S. Writing, 1860–1914 examines their use of literature to experiment with the new materialist psychology, which bore upon their efforts to represent reality and was forging new understandings of race and sexuality. Sometimes they emulated scientific epistemology, allowing their art and conceptions of creativity to be reshaped by it. Sometimes they imaginatively investigated neurophysiological theories, challenging and rewriting scientific explanations of human identity and behavior. By enfolding physiological experimentation into literary inquiries that could account for psychological and social complexities beyond the reach of the laboratory, they used literature as a cognitive medium. Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Gertrude Stein come together as they probe the effects on mimesis and creativity of reflex-based automatisms and unconscious meaning-making. Oliver Wendell Holmes explores conceptions of racial nerve force elaborated in population statistics and biopolitics, while W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins contest notions of racial energy used to predict the extinction of African Americans. Holmes explores new definitions of “sexual inversion” as, in divergent ways, Whitman and John Addington Symonds evaluate relations among nerve force, human fecundity, and the supposed grave of nonreproductive sex. Carefully tracing entanglements and conflicts between literary culture and mental science of this period, Knoper reveals unexpected connections among these authors and fresh insights into the science they confronted. Considering their writing as cognitive practice, he provides a new understanding of literary realism.

‘All Tee, No Shade’: A manifesto for a subtle critical practice negotiating queer, East Asian masculinities through T-shirts

‘All Tee, No Shade’ is a practice-led research project that explores the use of the men’s T-shirt to challenge and disrupt hegemonic subjectivities that contribute to the marginalization and discrimination of the queer Asian diaspora. Through an exploration of my pilot project of the same name, produced as part of the arts programme of Virgin Australian Melbourne Fashion Festival in 2020, I propose that norm-critical design methodologies exploring intersectional experiences of fashion and dress can produce material outcomes that challenge the discrimination and oppression associated with compounding conditions of race and sexuality. I use the notion of ‘subtle’ traits as a condition of the East Asian diasporic experience to reveal how race and sexuality might be expressed through fashion production to disrupt conceptions of ‘otherness’. This is achieved with T-shirts that have printed graphic configurations that align with contemporary streetwear but with ‘subtle’ signifiers embedded through the signs and lexicons of Asian and queer communities. Using an autoethnographic approach, the work is informed by my past fashion design industry experience and reflects on racial and queer marginalization and discrimination through styling and fit. The project contributes to broader discourses aimed at decentralizing dominant narratives in fashion practice and responds to a lack of academic research into diasporic Asian experiences of dress and, more specifically, queer diasporic Asian dress.

Let’s Get Loud: Intersectionally Studying the Super Bowl’s Halftime Show

The study of popular culture has always been closely related to the study of class, gender, race, and sexuality. An increasing number of authors have called for an intersectional approach. However, the contradictory, fluid meanings articulated in popular culture render such an approach difficult, and many ignore the call for intersectional analysis. We will not. We will try to engage with an intersectional analysis of popular culture, using Shakira and Jennifer Lopez’s performance at the 2020 Super Bowl Halftime Show as a case to study the intersections of identity markers. We aim to bridge the different meanings attributed to their performance and to understand them as different elements in the intersectional configuration. A discourse analysis of the performance, and of reviews thereof, was performed to unravel five elements highlighted in the discourse: the quality of the show, Shakira and Lopez’s empowered performances, the incorporation of Latinidad elements, the performers’ sexiness, and perceived political messages. Our aim to understand how the contradictory discourses about these elements arose urges the reader to use listening to grapple with the complexity of intersectional analysis. Truly listening includes putting effort into opening up academic cultures, finding other voices. It is important to recognize global gender inequity, but we need to start investing far more to understand the politics of media representations as a transnational affair that causes multiple conceptions of gender (and other related) concepts to clash, mesh, and integrate.

Barbaric Women: Race and the Colonization of Gender in Interwar Egypt

This article analyzes the sensationalized media coverage of a serial murder case during the Egyptian revolution of the early interwar era. Despite conflicting evidence, the media blamed the murders on two sisters from southern Egypt named Raya and Sakina. Through a close reading of Egyptian editorials and news reports, I argue that middle-class nationalists constructed Raya and Sakina as barbaric women who threatened to pull the nation back in time in order to legitimize their claim to power. Borrowing from Ann Stoler's analysis of the relationship between race and sexuality and Maria Lugones's concept of the modern/colonial gender system, this article maintains that race was as central to nationalist conceptions of female barbarism as gender, sexuality, and class. The enduring depiction of Raya and Sakina as the quintessential barbaric Egyptian women symbolizes the way in which the modern woman was constructed at the intersection of race and sexuality.

Entitlement’s Enablers: Peers and Popular Culture

Chapter 4 further explores the development of entitlement. This chapter is divided into two parts as it considers two areas of developmental influence: the peer group and mass media. The chapter begins with a look at the impact of social dominance goals (e.g., establishing power) of the peer group and the degree to which these goals affect peer interaction and disruptive classroom behavior. Homophobic bullying and gender policing are also addressed in this chapter. The price for entitlement is the all-out avoidance of femininity and all-in conformity to male norms. Boys and men may come to see conforming to rigid gender rules as a relatively small price to pay for privilege and entitlement. Sexualized violence is then considered through the lens of entitlement. In some male peer groups, the mistreatment of girls and women is not condemned, but rather it actually helps men gain status within that group. Chapter 4 next considers the influence of media and popular culture on the valuing of dominant groups over subordinated groups. The different representations of gender, race, and sexuality in mass media facilitate entitlement in dominant groups. Finally, the impact of media is considered with a review of experimental and correlational research on how media messages affect viewers.