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Family Friendly? Tinker Belles and Evil Queens; The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out
A few years ago, sitting in a movie theater with a group of gay friends watching Disney's animated "classic" Mulan, I was emotionally overcome listening to the title character sing about not being allowed to be true to her heart and longing to express her innermost wishes and desires. For Mulan, the pressures to conform had always trumped self-agency and individuality. When our little group of gay guys went for coffee afterwards, we shared our thoughts about the film, and everyone reported a similar sensation when hearing Mulan sing; we felt, as one friend commented, that that song "just must have been written by a gay guy."
As I began to think about Mulan and how much I responded positively to the film, it occurred to me that many of my favorite media images -- as a gay man -- have come from Disney films, television shows, or products. After all, we were heartbroken when Disney's Ellen was pulled from the air, and I couldn't get enough of Aladdin, with its campy humor and good-natured insistence that it's better just to be yourself than to try to be someone else. Such a simple, appealing moral refrain has been sung repeatedly (and profitably) throughout many Disney films of the last decade -- with words and tunes often written by gays (from Howard Ashman to Elton John) and with sentiments that most of us who have struggled with the closet can readily understand.
Considering the great appeal of Disney to queer audiences, as well as the many ways in which the Disney Corporation has seemingly sought to promote (and capitalize) on that appeal, it is surprising that more critical analyses of this complex relationship do not exist. As though to fill this void, Sean Griffin's Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out offers us a highly engaging, eminently readable, and theoretically subtle examination of the Disney/Queer connection -- ultimately suggesting that we might do well to think critically about the seemingly "family friendly" Disney corporation.
According to the author, "One of the main purposes of this work...is to explore what particularly there might be within the...