Disney, Culture, and Curriculum

Jennifer A. Sandlin, Julie C. Garlen, Jennifer A. Sandlin, Julie C. Garlen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317340577
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A presence for decades in individuals' everyday life practices and identity formation, the Walt Disney Company has more recently also become an influential element within the "big" curriculum of public and private spaces outside of yet in proximity to formal educational institutions. Disney, Culture, and Curriculum explores the myriad ways that Disney's curricula and pedagogies manifest in public consciousness, cultural discourses, and the education system. Examining Disney's historical development and contemporary manifestations, this book critiques and deconstructs its products and perspectives while providing insight into Disney's operations within popular culture and everyday life in the United States and beyond.

The contributors engage with Disney's curricula and pedagogies in a variety of ways, through critical analysis of Disney films, theme parks, and planned communities, how Disney has been taught and resisted both in and beyond schools, ways in which fans and consumers develop and negotiate their identities with their engagement with Disney, and how race, class, gender, sexuality, and consumerism are constructed through Disney content. Incisive, comprehensive, and highly interdisciplinary, Disney, Culture, and Curriculum extends the discussion of popular culture as curriculum and pedagogy into new avenues by focusing on the affective and ontological aspects of identity development as well as the commodification of social and cultural identities, experiences, and subjectivities.

1 Introduction

Feeling Disney, Buying Disney, Being Disney

Jennifer A. Sandlin and Julie C. Garlen

As has been noted by many educators who report “special difficulties in getting students to develop critical approaches in the face of the distinctive Disney mystique” (Budd, 2005, p. 3), Disney is in some ways “beyond criti cism.” Wasko, Phillips, and Meehan (2001), who surveyed 1,250 respondents in 18 countries for their “Global Disney Audiences Project,” found that the vast majority have very favorable attitudes towards Disney and consider critiquing Disney to be taboo. One of the reasons Disney is so difficult to critique is the way the company capitalizes on the nostalgia that its fans feel, cultivating an image of family-friendly fun and projecting the idea that our individual and collective engagements with Disney and its products are nothing more than wholesome entertainment. Disney thus purposely facilitates a “close association with and appropriation of childhood innocence as a personal and cultural memory for several generations of parents and children in many countries” (Budd, 2005, p. 2). The power of this personal and cultural memory is exemplified by Julie’s early experiences of Walt Disney World, which she visited over two dozen times between the ages of 3 and 33. Having grown up in South Georgia, Julie spent most of her family vacations in Orlando, including one Thanksgiving when her entire extended family (parents, both sets of grandparents, and her aunt and uncle) spent the holiday there. When Julie became a young mother, she continued the tradition, embarking on a winter tour with her 18-month old daughter and a full entourage of family members. Thus, for Julie, Disney is strongly associated with her own memories of familial intimacy and childhood innocence.

These patterns of repeated engagements with Disney that begin for many in infancy create strong emotional and consumptive bonds that complicate critical analysis. In her own teaching, Jenny has found that students resist problematizing Disney because they hold it as a cherished part of their childhoods and an important element of their identities. A few years ago, when Jenny taught a course on Disney to undergraduate students at Arizona State University, she encountered many students who, like Julie, considered themselves as having grown up in ‘Disney households.’ Their resistance surprised Jenny, who, having had limited interaction with Disney as a child other than one hot, short, and exhausting family vacation to Disney World and occasional exposures to Disney movies and books, had little trouble taking up critical analyses of the company. Inspired by a desire to better understand her students she took her son to Disneyland over Thanksgiving break that semester to experience it with fresh eyes. After having a great time at the park, she returned with a new appreciation for the pleasures of Disney and a realization that successful Disney scholarship must take this pleasure seriously. Quite simply, people have fun when they engage with Disney products or spend time in Disney theme parks, and it is precisely this pleasure that makes critique so imperative. Pleasure, we assert, is a profoundly powerful pedagogue.

In this volume, we take up a perspective that positions viewer-consumers as active participants in the meaning-making process who derive pleasure from and engage critically with the cultural texts and artifacts produced by The Walt Disney Company. The authors here take seriously the idea that people (including us) are invested in Disney as a source of pleasure, but also provide sustained critique of Disney products and perspectives. Unlike Disney enthusiasts who have written about the pleasures derived from engaging with Disney, we take up pleasure not only to acknowledge that people engage with Disney in such ways—and to argue that these ways of engagement are important and legitimate—but also to appreciate and understand how The Walt Disney Company uses these very pleasurable engagements to influence education and individual and social identity in the United States and beyond.

While we believe that our acknowledgement of Disney’s pleasures makes possible a form of critique that recognizes the viewer as an agentic individual who can both appreciate and critically analyze a cultural text, it is critique nonetheless, which might raise eyebrows and ire among devoted Disney fans who do not necessarily want to engage Disney in these critical ways or among academics who do not take the study of Disney seriously. This is a risk we are willing to take. Drawing from Ahmed’s (2010) concept of the “feminist killjoy” we claim the role of ‘Disney killjoys.’ For Ahmed, feminist killjoys expose and critique how emotions such as happiness are used to control, justify, and subjugate—for example how the construction of the “happy housewife” and “happy slave” were used to regulate and normalize gendered and racist institutions and social norms, to construct them as “social goods” that cause happiness. We are enacting similar practices of killing joy in our engagement as Disney killjoys, accepting that our “intensity” about the ways in which Disney’s pleasures perpetuate social norms will likely “become tension” (Ahmed, 2010). For us, as for Ahmed, this is an ethical stance, because critique, as an act of cultural activism, necessitates a struggle against happiness and the other emotions that Disney produces, markets, and sells.

For us, this ethical stance begins with the assumption that, despite its efforts to argue to the contrary, The Walt Disney Company’s products and experiences constitute much more than wholesome entertainment; its reach is global and its influence is profound. Disney generates over $48 billion dollars per year (Iger, 2014) and continues to expand markets within and beyond the United States through animated and live-action films, theme parks, television and radio stations, publishing, licensed merchandise, schools, museums, sports, music, urban development, a gated community inside Walt Disney World, and myriad other products and entertainment arenas. Disney’s 2009 acquisition of Marvel Entertainment, which produces movies based on comic book characters and storylines from the iconic Marvel Universe, further increased the company’s share of the lucrative media market and expanded the target audience for Disney films. Meanwhile, in Japan, the new “Tsum Tsum” (“stack stack”) franchise, which includes a smartphone game based on a line of stackable stuffed animals by the same name, has quickly become a cultural phenomenon. Since its launch in 2014, the application has been at the top of Apple and Android charts in Japan and has been downloaded more than 14 million times (Graser, 2014). Japanese fans have also purchased millions of the plush toys, which have now found their way into US Disney stores. These various products and experiences are consumed by hundreds of millions of people each year across the globe and have a significant impact on shaping individual and group cultural identity. Schickel (1968) argues that Walt Disney has been “a primary force in the expression and formation of American mass consciousness” (pp. 360–361), while Giroux and Pollock (2010) contend that Disney is a “teaching machine” that “exerts influence over consumers but also wages an aggressive campaign to peddle its political and cultural influence” (p. xiv). Disney is thus a kind of public pedagogy extraordinaire.

We envision Disney not only enacting a broad-reaching [corporate] public pedagogy (Savage, 2010), but also position it as part of a ‘big’ curriculum (Schubert, 2006; see also Cremin, 1976, and Schubert, 1981) that permeates cultural discourse in myriad ways. This ‘big’ curriculum of public and private spaces resides in both liminal and distant proximities to formal educational institutions such as schools (Stearns, Sandlin, & Burdick, 2011). As such, we argue that Disney, which is an increasingly salient part of individuals’ everyday life practices and identity formation—as well as a major cultural force that helps shape conceptions of family values, gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, ‘Americanness,’ childhood, pleasure, entertainment, education, and community—must be recognized as an influential element within the big curriculum. Schubert’s (2006) perspective on the big curriculum aligns with Pinar’s (2004) view of curriculum theory as an “interdisciplinary study of educational experience,” with curriculum broadly defined as the educational experiences gained both through and in spite of the structures of formal schooling. We posit that The Walt Disney Company constitutes and enacts just such a curriculum—both inside and outside of schools—that helps to shape the ways we think, learn, and live.

Within the field of education, scholarship on Disney typically critically analyzes how Disney engages with race, ethnicity, and gender in animated films (see, for example, Golden’s [2006] or Padurano’s [2011] articles on Pocahontas, or Giroux’s [2004] examinations of Disney animated films in Steinberg and Kincheloe’s [2004] book Kinderculture). This work also often focuses on ‘princess culture’ more generally and how it shapes children’s gender identity construction (see, for example, Wohlwend’s [2009, 2012a, 2012b] work on boys’ and girls’ gender identity consumption and production through Disney princess play). While some of this work is outstanding, there is a surprising lack of work on Disney within education, and especially work that takes up analyses of more recent films and other Disney products and that positions Disney within the frameworks of public pedagogy and the big curriculum. That is, education scholars tend to focus on how educators can use Disney in classrooms (critically and otherwise). While that scholarship is important, it tends to underestimate the vast educational import of Disney in the broader public sphere.

One scholar within education who has studied Disney extensively and whose work has been instrumental to our own thinking around public pedagogies in general and Disney as curriculum and pedagogy more specifically is Henry Giroux. Giroux has written prolifically about the relationship between popular culture, schooling, and learning and, since the early 1990s, has critically analyzed the Disney corporation and its products—including both animated and live action films, Disney’s town of Celebration, Florida, and Disney marketing and cross promotion—as public pedagogy. Along with Grace Pollock, with whom he wrote the second edition of The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence in 2010, Giroux analyzed the Disney Company as a site of public pedagogy where identities are shaped, childhood is created, and nostalgia is crafted; they present a critical analysis of The Walt Disney Company not as a purveyor of wholesome entertainment, but a conglomeration driven by power, politics, and ideology. Our book complements, extends, and updates Giroux and Pollock’s work, as authors engage with Disney’s curricula and pedagogies by critically reading Disney films and theme parks as texts, exploring how Disney has been taught and resisted outside of traditional learning environments, examining how fans and consumers develop and negotiate their identities through and with their engagement with Disney, and analyzing how race, class, gender, sexuality, and consumerism are constructed through and within Disney discourses. Authors also focus on Disney products and experiences that have been pro duced in the last five years, including new technologies such as the myMagic+ wristbands used in the parks, and new films such as Brave, Frozen, and Maleficent. The essays herein take discussions of Disney as curriculum and pedagogy into new avenues of exploration—what we are calling “feeling Disney” (focusing on the affective and ontological aspects of identity development), “buying Disney” (focusing on the commodification of social and cultural identities, experiences, and subjectivities), and “being Disney” (focusing on how Disney shapes our desires for both freedom and control and how we participate in these practices). In what follows, we first present a brief overview of previous Disney scholarship before turning to a more extensive discussion of these new avenues of exploration.

A Brief History of Disney Scholarship

This volume follows a long history of the cultural analysis of Disney, which began as early as the late 1930s (Budd, 2005). As Wasko (2001) notes, “since the first Mickey Mouse cartoons were released, Disney films have been analyzed in the popular press by film critics and analysts, who have mostly employed an assortment of aesthetic and art criticism and literary analysis” (p. 109). Wasko (2001) argues that critics in the 1930s and 1940s “were mostly positive about, and typically gushed over” Disney’s films, “praising his artistic development” (p. 125); Budd (2005) further argues that critics celebrated the “anarchic energy and carnivalesque rudeness” of Disney’s very early Disney films (p. 7). After World War II, however, “more harsh criticism emerged,” as critics argued that Disney had “become conventional, static, and less exciting than other studios’ animated productions” (Wasko, 2001, p. 125). During the 1940s and 1950s, critics focused on “the mass-cultural blandness and aesthetic banalities” (Budd, 2005, p. 7) that the Disney studios infused into their versions of classic fairy tales. Reminiscent of the elitist ‘high culture’ critiques of popular culture emerging from some Frankfurt School intellectuals, these critiques focused on the “Disney fication,” or the “sanitization, homogenization, and American ization” (Budd, 2005, p. 7) of the original source material that Disney turned into popular culture. This criticism was based mainly in aesthetic and moral judgment that sought to maintain cultural hierarchies between high and low culture.

According to Budd (2005), this early period of Disney criticism came to a close with Richard Schickel’s (1968) The Disney Version, which sat at the threshold between this early criticism and what Budd (2005) calls “Contemporary Disney Studies,” which emerged in the late 1980s. Budd (2005) explains that Schickel’s influential book “was written at a historical moment when an older tradition of US cultural criticism aspiring to publicness was largely exhausted, while a newer, narrower, and more radical academic cultural studies had yet to develop” (p. 10). Schickel’s work rejected the tendency in early Disney criticism to level ‘high culture’ aesthetic and moral critiques against Disney as ‘low culture,’ as it extended and updated a tradition of cultural criticism in the US “based in aesthetic and moral judgment but attempting to reach out beyond … class snobbery and narrow moralism … to create a more inclusive and democratic public culture based in an expanding and educated middle class” (p. 8). Schickel recognized that “older standards of morality and aesthetic discrimination were inadequate if not entirely impossible bases on which to build a critical understanding of Disney” (p. 8). Instead, Schickel attempted to move away from the elitist intellectual critique of Disney and called for cultural critics to understand and engage with popular culture (Budd, 2005). At the same time, during the 1960s and 1970s, strict cultural hierarchies were eroding in the US, as “young people rejected the cultural hierarchy of high and low art, embracing them both with seeming equanimity” (p. 9). Budd (2005) posits that while Disney was often the object of critique during that time as “antithesis to radical social change,” (p. 10) those critiques lessened by the late 1970s as the stigma of embracing Disney eroded for the wealthier and more educated classes, and as Disney found new ways to market to more affluent customers.

While early critiques of Disney were written for a general public, university professors began what became known as “Disney Studies” in the academy beginning in the mid-1970s (Doherty, 2006). Academic-based Disney Studies, an interdisciplinary enterprise from the start begun by a “small but growing academic left” who “developed a new interest in mass culture” (Budd, 2005, p. 11) continues to flourish. While some work on popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s under the purview of cultural studies uncritically celebrated popular culture, obscuring the power relations in herent in its production and overemphasizing audience agency, more critical projects during this era focused on the politics of “cultural production, circulation, and reception” (Budd, 2005, p. 11). Disney Studies emerged within this context, as academics began producing work for a smaller (academic, not public) audience, which allowed for more “precise and rigorous” (p. 11) work, with “extended and detailed” (p. 11) analyses. Budd also argues that what made this new work “deeper” and “richer” (p. 12) was the fact that these new Disney academics ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword: Ruining Disney? A Gentle Point of View
• Preface
• Panning the Field: Museum Placard: Mexican-American (b. 1976)
• 1 Introduction: Feeling Disney, Buying Disney, Being Disney
• Part I Feeling Disney: Disney Fears and Fantasies
• Part II Buying Disney: Commodified, Caricatured, and Contested Subjectivities
• Part III Being Disney: Freedom, Participation, and Control
• About the Contributors
• Index