From Mouse to Mermaid : The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture

by Bell, Elizabeth; Haas, Lynda; Sells, Laura

• ISBN13: 9780253209788
• ISBN10: 0253209781
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-10-01
• Publisher: Ingram Pub Services

Summary

From Mouse to Mermaid, an interdisciplinary collection of original essays, is the first comprehensive, critical treatment of Disney cinema. Addressing children's classics as well as the Disney affiliates' more recent attempts to capture adult audiences, the contributors respond to the Disney film legacy from feminist, marxist, poststructuralist, and cultural studies perspectives. The volume contemplates Disney's duality as an American icon and as an industry of cultural production, created in and through fifty years of filmmaking. The contributors treat a range of topics at issue in contemporary cultural studies: the performance of gender, race, and class; the engendered images of science, nature, technology, family, and business. The compilation of voices in From Mouse to Mermaid creates a persuasive cultural critique of Disney's ideology.The contributors are Bryan Attebery, Elizabeth Bell, Claudia Card, Chris Cuomo, Ramona Fernandez, Henry A. Giroux, Robert Haas, Lynda Haas, Susan Jeffords, N. Soyini Madison, Susan Miller, Patrick Murphy, David Payne, Greg Rode, Laura Sells, and Jack Zipes.

Author Biography

ELIZABETH BELL is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the Unviersity of South Florida. LYNDA HAAS is Assistant Professor in the Writing Program at Ithaca College. LAURA SELLS is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University ofSouth Florida.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction Walt's in the Movies	1	(20)
Elizabeth Bell
Lynda Haas
Laura Sells
I. Sanitizations/Disney Film as Cultural Pedagogy
Breaking the Disney Spell	21	(22)
Jack Zipes
Memory and Pedagogy in the ``Wonderful World of Disney'' Beyond the Politics of Innocence	43	(19)
Henry A. Giroux
Pinocchio	62	(10)
Claudia Card
Disney Does Dutch Billy Bathgate and the Disneyfication of the Gangster Genre	72	(14)
Robert Haas
The Movie You See, The Movie You Don't How Disney Do's That Old Time Derision	86	(21)
Susan Miller
Greg Rode
II. Contestations/Disney Film as Gender Construction
Somatexts at the Disney Shop Constructing the Pentimentos of Women's Animated Bodies	107	(18)
Elizabeth Bell
``The Whole Wide World Was Scrubbed Clean'' The Androcentric Animation of Denatured Disney	125	(12)
Patrick D. Murphy
Bambi	137	(11)
David Payne
Beyond Captain Nemo Disney's Science Fiction	148	(13)
Brian Attebery
The Curse of Masculinity Disney's Beauty and the Beast	161	(14)
Susan Jeffords
III. Erasures/Disney Film as Identity Politics
``Where Do the Mermaids Stand?'' Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid	175	(18)
Laura Sells
``Eighty-Six the Mother'' Murder, Matricide, and Good Mothers	193	(19)
Lynda Haas
Spinsters in Sensible Shoes Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks	212	(12)
Chris Cuomo
Pretty Woman through the Triple Lens of Black Feminist Spectatorship	224	(12)
D. Soyini Madison
Pachuco Mickey	236	(19)
Ramona Fernandez
Contributors	255	(4)
Index	259