DISNEY POC »

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.

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The "Kuzco is a Disney Princess!" meme has always bugged me, primarily because it seems to stem from the idea that a man remotely concerned about his appearance or has a flamboyant personality is somehow coded as "feminine". Regardless of whether or not they identity as such or created that way, the aforementioned male is seen as less "masculine" or "manly" as say Kronk or Pacha. Kuzco's an emperor, dude ranks above a "Disney Princess" technically, financially, politically and metaphorically. Most importantly, he can still be fabulous in all his particularly vain ways without being labeled a "princess". [SOURCE: 1, 2, 3]

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.

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