Learning to Read (Gender): Children’s Animation and the New Heterosexism

Abstract

This paper examines and compares two American animated productions targeting elementary and middle school children, and in doing so aims to elucidate the handling of gender in similar television programs and feature films of the past three decades. These animated works are treated here as a Foucauldian apparatus, one predicated on the force of systematically structured observation, which functions to manipulate power relations in the favor of hetero- and cis-male order. The Disney feature Beauty and the Beast supplies a case for investigating the heterosexist discourses of these contemporary animated media. However, as will be shown, comparatively feminist animated works have proven equally deft in their subversion of patriarchal patterns; for an example of such indirect but radical rereading and rewriting of gender codes we will turn to the television cartoon program Adventure Time.