‘Balancing family time with fighting villains’

Abstract

This study provides a feminist stylistic account of gendered agency in a set of Disney Heroes collectible trading cards designed for young children. Through a mixed-methods analysis of grammatical, semantic and social agency in the texts, we show how the representation of male and female characters in these cards reinforces limiting, and potentially damaging, gender norms around men being more socially agentive, having more impact on the world around them and ultimately being more ‘heroic’ than women. There is some cause for optimism in the improved representation of female characters over time and the foregrounding of female heroes’ agentive roles in their worlds, but overall the cards uphold the hegemonic status quo. The quantitative and qualitative dimensions of this analysis also reveal quite different insights, demonstrating the importance of analyses that account for the way linguistic strategies are deployed in context, and in combination with a range of other resources.