Abstract
A recent trend in Disney scholarship attends to postfeminist readings of Disney film and media. This paper contributes to that conversation by focusing on the representations of masculinity that accompany postfeminist sensibilities in and through Disney media and its reception. With a sociological focus on postfeminist masculinity, this article reviews several Disney characters to argue for a new model of postfeminist masculinity advanced in recent Disney films, with a particular focus on the Incredibles films, and examines how this representation has been received in popular media.
Highlights
A recent trend in Disney scholarship, in the wake of the blockbuster animated film Frozen, attends to postfeminist readings of Disney film and media (e.g., Frasl 2018; Macaluso 2016; Stover 2013)and public reception of these films
This paper contributes to that burgeoning conversation but focuses mainly on the representations of masculinity that accompany postfeminist sensibilities in and through Disney media and its reception
Though much work has been done to examine cinematic depictions of postfeminist masculinities in general (e.g., Abele and Gronbeck-Tedesco 2016; Gwyne and Muller 2013), this paper looks at Disney and Pixar films’ constructions of this concept, as previous conversations have typically concentrated on the portrayal of women and girls
Summary
A recent trend in Disney scholarship, in the wake of the blockbuster animated film Frozen, attends to postfeminist readings of Disney film and media (e.g., Frasl 2018; Macaluso 2016; Stover 2013). Because of Disney’s questionable history of perpetuating dangerous gender stereotypes on film (e.g., Bell et al 1995; Giroux and Pollock 2010)—and perhaps because of its implicit acknowledgement of this history, as evidenced by a recent string of movies with female leads—this postfeminist line of inquiry seems especially apt. This paper contributes to that burgeoning conversation but focuses mainly on the representations of masculinity that accompany postfeminist sensibilities in and through Disney media and its reception. With this question in mind, recent scholarship examines Disney films to offer more productive critical discourse around masculinity (e.g., Davis 2013; Wooden and Gillam 2014). How do Disney movies, as important texts of cultural production, reinforce a model of postfeminist masculinity? I review several Disney characters to push back against simplistic categories of Disney men and to argue for a vision of masculinity that Disney seems to promulgate in its most recent films. With a sociological focus on masculinity in particular, this paper responds to Rumens (2017) call for “more engaged research in the complicated ways in which discourses of postfeminist masculinities are historically patterned and intermingle with cultural . . . discourses” (p. 245)
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