#duffett

When I was a young girl I was drawn into the Disney fandom by the look and appeal of the princesses they portrayed. As I wanted to be one, it made me want to dress like one and own toys that looked like them, because the way Disney portrayed it all girls wanted to be princesses and in most of their content a lot of girls were. This led me to want to dress up like other Disney characters and buy other merchandise associated with the brand, moving me on from princesses to Disney as a whole. This can be explained by Hill’s idea of how fans can have differing levels of “affective ‘intensity’ and activity with cyclical shifts away from discarded fan objects and toward newly compelling objects.” (Hills, Fan Cultures, 803) Williams explains this as fans becoming tired of objects, which leads them to move on to new related territories and objects. My move of interest from just princess to Disney is explained through this idea, as I grew tired of just having princess dolls and clothes and so branched out to the related object of Disney as a whole.

Over time as I grew more self-aware of the content I was consuming I became aware of the gender stereotypes that Disney was presenting, the idea that girls were helpless damsels in distress that needed a prince to come save them. Many fans of Disney like myself found this irritating, as we were old enough to know this was wrong and could potentially have impacted us growing up. Duffett states, “Gender is associated with particular social conventions, rules, roles and expectations.” (Duffett, 191, 2014) As myself and many other Disney fans watched from such a young age means that the gender stereotypes shown through the movies could have formed what social conventions we deem applicable now, and what roles we expect ourselves to have. However, Disney became aware of this and changed their content to suit the new audiences, by making films such as Moana and Frozen that show strong female leads that don’t need men to save them, as they end up saving themselves. Which will become the new norm for younger audiences and older audiences, following Duffett’s idea that gender is a cultural construct and can change if society changes its view of gender stereotypes.

Having formed this cultural identity at such a young age, I now find myself judging my love life or lack of, by the Disney movies I watched. By my age most of the Disney princesses had already found their one true love and got married, and I can’t help the small nagging in the back of head that makes me think I should be in a relationship too before I get too old, like many of the adult female characters shown in Disney films, usually as villains. As the girl, I feel responsible to be the attractive one who is singing out of tower windows with my perfectly styled hair blowing in the breeze.

 Bibliography

‘Fandom, gender, and sexual orientation’ in Duffett, M (2014) Understanding Fandom. London: Bloomsbury. PP 191-207.

Hills, Matt. ‘Fan Cultures.’ London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. “Patterns of Surprise: The ‘Aleatory Object’ in Psychoanalytic Ethnography and Cyclical Fandom.” American Behavioural Scientist 48 (2005). PP 801–21.