Abstract
This article contributes to the discourse of the body and the voice in feminist psychoanalytic film theory by exploring the currently under-theorised notion of the singing body in particular, as this notion finds manifestation in Disney’s Singing Princess as filmic trope. Analyses of vocal musical coding follow her trajectory across 13 Disney princess films to reveal deeper insight into what she sings, how she sings, and why she sings. In this manner, it is argued, the Singing Princess gradually emerges from her genealogical roots as innamorata, a position of vocal corporealisationand diegetic confinement, to one wherein her voice assumes a position of authority over the narrative, and from one of absolute submissiveness and naïve obedience to a greatly enriched experience of her own subjectivity.
Highlights
Tropes are rhetorical devices that consist in senses other than their literal ones
This article contributes to the discourse of the body and the voice in feminist psychoanalytic film theory by exploring the currently under-theorised notion of the singing body in particular, as this notion finds manifestation in Disney’s Singing Princess as filmic trope
Analyses of vocal musical coding follow her trajectory across 13 Disney princess films to reveal deeper insight into what she sings, how she sings, and why she sings
Summary
Tropes are rhetorical devices that consist in senses other than their literal ones. While they are useful in rendering the unfamiliar more familiar, and while understanding figurative language is part of what it means to be a member of the culture in which such language is employed, tropes retreat to an Potgieter & Potgieter / deconstructing disney’s divas undetected state — they are “not something we are normally aware of” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 3) — from which enigmatic position they are able to anchor us in dominant assumptions within our society, sustaining our tacit complicity almost beyond our volition. She is ever present on our television screens, in our children’s books, DVDs, home décor, clothing and toys[1] From her first appearance as Snow White in 1938 to her most recent manifestation as Elsa in Frozen in 2013, she marks the Disney Company throughout its history as an “influential purveyor of gendered images” (Brocklebank 2000: 270), and on these grounds Disney’s princess films have long been the subject of sustained scrutiny. Typical vocal gestures from 13 Disney princess films are briefly analysed here in order to consider three things: how the princess sings, what she sings, and why she sings[2]. This article seeks to contribute to the ever growing number of works devoted to discourses of the body in psychoanalytic film theory, but among which the notion of the ‘singing body’ remains as yet noticeably under-theorised
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