The Reception of Frozen among Young Women in Turkey: A Feminist Film or Not?

Abstract

This article focuses on the reception of Frozen by young Turkish women, posing three major questions: (1) How did young women in Turkey describe Elsa? (2) What are the differences between Frozen and other princess movies? (3) Do young Turkish women think Frozen is a feminist movie? The most interesting findings of this research have to do with the third question. Here a superficial view of the responses would suggest that the research participants agree with those critics of Frozen who claim that it is not a feminist film. However, once one takes a closer look at their responses, one can see that this agreement holds only in form, and not in content, as the research participants recognize feminist qualities in the film but without being willing to label them as feminist. The reason for this has to do with the negative connotations of the terms “feminism” and “feminist” in Turkish mainstream language. Here, a feminist viewpoint has to be expressed in terms of “women – men equality” instead. This particular finding points to the more general need in any cross-cultural research to ascertain the translatability of central terms having evaluative connotations, like “feminism” and “feminist” in this case.