...For most of the movie, Mulan has felt out of place. She doesn’t know where she fits in. Covering herself in femininity doesn’t work, like, at all. The scene of the matchmaker…I don’t even have to explain to show you how much that is not her. But then she runs away and poses as a man. She tries her hardest to blend in and be a guy, but at the same time, covering herself in the masculine just doesn’t work. She’s still awkward and out of place. The men eventually embrace her as one of their own, see her as a guy, but they see her as a strange guy, a very effeminate man. But this scene, this final part of the movie, she has finally found her place. She is short haired (masculine) and wearing a woman’s outfit. She has found her place as a tomboy, somewhere in the middle of extremes.

Just for fun, try taking your daughter to the movies this weekend. See if you can find something cheap to watch. Wreck It Ralph might be playing still, or maybe even Rise of the Guardians. Whatever movie you choose, I want you to count up all of the female characters. It won’t take long. Now count the male characters and give me the ratio of them next to the female characters.

Think it will be 50-50? Try again. Female sare disproportionately represented in films, which presents a number of problems. Firstly, it’s completely inaccurate and stupid, given that half of the population is missing from a movie. So unless it’s about, say, pod people from another planet who only have one sex, it’s irrelevant to half of the people watching it.

iamabutchsolo:

I was in the Disney store at the mall yesterday and as usual I gaze at all of the merchandise for my favorite character, Mulan. But as usual, I see her featured exclusively in this particular outfit, her “matchmaking” clothes. It actually frustrates me a bit to see her constantly marketed and commodified in this outfit because it’s the outfit that she feels least comfortable with wearing and the one which embodies everything about her journey that she’s trying to leave behind. But of course, because it’s the most “princess-like” and the most feminine, it has to be the outfit that is sold, as if it’s supposed to be her most iconic look. Not only that, but she’s in these clothes for maybe fifteen minutes at most, and only in the beginning. There should be dolls and representations of her in her training uniform, in her soldier’s armor, in short hair, in any of the several other outfits in the movie that better illustrate who Mulan is.

The merchandise intentionally plays down Mulan’s heroic journey in order for her to conform to the “princess” label. Merchandizing her in only this outfit inadvertently erasing all of Mulan’s heroic qualities rather than allow her to stick out amongst the “Disney princesses” to show a more well-rounded group of women.

Nathyn/Nome recently posted a commentary on zan blog about how Disney is going to go off princesses, but we really don’t need any more of their princesses anyways. One of the commentors disagrees with zan complaint of Mulan, but added “I’m more worried about the ethnocentrism. In America, we love to read Woman Warrior at college and make fun of how sexist they are in China and how enlightened we are in the Occident. We also love to appropriate oriental stories, both mythological and contemporary, to give them the Hollywood treatment.”

This is something that is definitely important to notice. China is not the only country to have problems with subjugating women. The US did it, and there are still problems in the present (trigger warning: rape, rape apologism). China also doesn’t have a homogenous history of constantly oppressing women, they also had Empress Wu who improved the status of women, had scholars write history of women, invented entirely new characters to show her greatness, and declared herself Maitreya Buddha, 900 years before Queen Elizabeth. The point- everywhere has good and bad parts of its history, and it’s problematic to think otherwise.

This was initially where my last post about Disney, Sexism and Racism was going until I realized that Disney’s racism really does deserve it’s own topic. If not a series of them. The problematic issues brought up in that post are still true in this one. I also suggest everyone read ColorQ’s review which goes down how incredibly inaccurate Mulan is to the source material as well as Chinese culture at the time and a few other points as well, and this post in no way refutes them- they’re all true.

Aside from the numerous problems (which are inevitable, this being Disney and Hollywood in general), I do like Mulan, I like the way it approaches sexism because it isn’t in an over-the-top approach of smashing anyone over the head with an aesop or trying to invalidate feminists, it wouldn’t be an awful way of showing it in our culture. Unfortunately, Mulan would probably be completely unacceptable if she were white and in white culture.

“This research paper is designed to look into gender identity and gender roles through Disney movies. In order to do this, Disney princesses are being researched through four main Disney movies that have a quintessential Disney princess. The research is designed to look at how media exposure affects gender, in particular young girls. It is done in order to see how identity is transformed through long term ideals and virtues set forth from the animated films and from the standard viewpoints of feminists.”

[...]“Four themes emerge from a study done by Towbin, Haddock, Zimmerman, Lund, and Tanner (2011), three themes emerged related to what it means to be a girl/woman:

(a) A woman‘s appearance is valued more than her intellect;
(b) Women are helpless and in need of protection;
(c) Women are domestic and likely to marry. Women‘s appearance is valued more than their intellect. ―In Dwarfs, the Queen‘s motivation to kill Snow White derives from the Queen‘s jealousy that Snow White is the fairest in the land. In Sleeping, the first gift given to the baby princess is beauty.‖ (Towbin et. al, 2011) Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Tiana from Princess and the Frog are admired for their appearance and intellect, but their intellects are ridiculed in the films for love of reading or owning a restaurant. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty show how women are helpless and in need of protection, Belle and Tiana are independent but also show a need for protection. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Belle are all domestic and show a desire for marriage. None of these three themes are conducive to the atmosphere of playing princess that little girls would be playing and imitating.” [READ PDF]