Disney's Gender Binary

*SPOILERS FOR WRECK-IT RALPH AND OZ:THE GREAT AND POWERFUL*

Oh god, okay.  Hi guys.

Few things make me feel ranty enough to just want to spew.  I prefer, if I can, to sit down with a cup of tea and mull things, to be rational like my daddy taught me - because if there's one thing the patriarchy hates, it's an irrational, emotional woman.  An irrational, emotional, foaming-at-the-mouth woman is merely on her menses and must be hidden away with all the other irrational, emotional, foaming-at-the-mouth women so the menfolk can go about being rational and ingenious and reinventing the wheel.  Right.  About that.  Screw that.

Those who know me are entirely aware that I have a certain penchant for Disney.  I love Disney.  The more I look at it the more I firmly believe that all those years of pretending to be Ariel from The Little Mermaid and making my dad do Sebastian's voice over and over really transformed me into some introverted version of Ariel herself.  I mean, I'm adventurous, bright, a pack rat, and I have an inhuman adoration for sea food; I also spent my adolescence and early adulthood trying to get the opposite sex to validate me so I could become a good little wifey and a good little mummy.  Now?  Not so much.  But I'm still curious as to what the hell Disney did to my impressionable little brain while I was growing up.  So I ran off and wrote an essay on the way the Disney Princess franchise molds and shapes gender roles for young girls in the US.  It was so good and I loved it so much that I'm planning on running off to do my PhD on that exact thing.  Goddess willing.
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So Disney and their portrayal of women...it's a thing with me.  It's not so much a thing that I'll flat out yell "DISNEY DISEMPOWERS WOMEN" because Disney made Mulan, Pocahontas, Princess and the Frog, and Brave.  All of the women in these movies are strong, capable, active, not obsessed with marriage, and independent.  Mulan saves China!  Pocahontas unites her people!  Tiana opens a restaurant!  Merida bucks the stability of her kingdom so she can keep her freedom!  What's more, Pixar let Merida buck Disney tradition entirely by steering her right clear of marriage.  She didn't even have a boyfriend or fall in love!  I can't think of another Disney princess, not even the forgotten ones like Kida from Atlantis, whose story didn't end with even the most tangential attachment to a guy.  So while Disney hasn't done women any favors since Snow White, dammit, the company is evolving.

I wish...I wish I could say that Brave's success at the Academy Awards (Best Animated Film for 2012) drove Disney and Pixar on to create more strong female characters, that women who can hold their own in a fight, are clever, and stand up for themselves are rapidly becoming the norm.  And Disney tries, oh, they've tried.  But they still can't totally get it right.

In November 2012 Disney released Wreck-It Ralph, a fun, family-friendly romp that appealed to the nostalgia gamer in me as much as it appealed to my younger cousin's need for racing and fart jokes.  The hero, Ralph, is a villain in an arcade game, Fix-It Felix Jr.  Tired of being ostracized simply because he's the bad guy, Ralph decides to game hop so he can win a medal and eventually win his fellow game characters' respect and friendship.  Along the way Ralph encounters two very outspoken and well-rounded female characters: Vanellope von Schweetz from the game Sugar Rush and Sergeant Tamora Jean Calhoun from Hero's Duty.  Like Ralph, Vanellope is an outcast, not because she's a villain but because she's the racing game's glitch and glitches are best kept out of sight.  With candy haphazardly stuck to her hair and an obsession with farts, she wrangles Ralph into helping her construct a go-kart so she can be a playable avatar in her own game.  My hatred for Sarah Silverman aside, Vanellope is an excellent character.  She is a tomboy who transforms her disability - flickering and teleporting at random - into a strength.  Hell, Vanellope and her almost all-female Sugar Rush competitors are the reasons why Wreck-It Ralph passes the Bechdel Test (1. Are there more than two female characters? 2. Do they talk? 3. Do they talk about something other than boys?).  Believe it or not, the number of movies that can boast that is pretty low and only a small handful of Disney's princess movies past the test.
At the end of the movie Ralph discovers Vanellope isn't a glitch at all.  As it turns out, she is a major character in the game whose code has been corrupted, namely the princess of Sugar Rush.  When Ralph helps Vanellope realize this, she opts out of the confining life of a princess (and equally confining, ridiculous poofy dress) and chooses to be president instead.  Disney's Princess culture is a fact of life for so many little girls in the US, the fact that Vanellope outright rejects this almost compulsory aspect of Disney's gender coding is a bold, brilliant move.  I'm doing a dance just thinking about it.
But as the Nostalgia Critic points out, Vanellope's character design has an unfortunate flaw: Vanellope never has any real governing power.  In the movie Sugar Rush has a king, King Candy, but never has a queen.  Instead Vanellope is a princess, a Disney archetype that represents all things feminine.  Usually Disney's princesses are sweet, kind, loving, good cooks, etc. with all the privileges but none of the governing power that comes with being royalty.  This isn't to say that Disney never shows women as queens, they do: Snow White's step-mother, Aurora's mother, Simba's mother (The Lion King), Rapunzel's mother, and the Queen of Hearts (Alice in Wonderland) are only a few queens in Disney's vast movie canon.  However, the queens who are good usually do not speak and their husbands wield all or most of the political power (Aurora's mother and Rapunzel's mother).  The queens who do speak and rule on their own in Disney's movies are often evil, cunning, and cruel like Snow White's wicked step-mother or the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland.  The only queen I can think of that breaks up this silent good mother/vocal evil ruler is Queen Elinor from Brave who not only is a good mother to Merida, but is respected as a ruler as well.  She is the one who organizes her daughter's marriage in order to keep the peace among the kingdoms and the one who is able to break up a fight between her husband, King Fergus, and the other three clan leaders (yet another reason why I love Brave).  Sarabi, Simba's mother, also falls into this liminal category of "good, speaking female rulers" but she is defined more as "Mufasa's wife" and "Simba's mother" than a character that has any governing power in her own right.  She is never shown making decisions about how many zebras the pride should hunt that day (even if she is the one hunting them) and she does submit to Scar's rule when he takes over as king.
But even when queens are allowed to be be politically active in their communities, princesses are not.  Snow White, Pocahontas, Tiana, Cinderella, Ariel, Jasmine, and Belle are never seen ascending the throne in the span of their own movies - they're never given any real power.  Nala from the Lion King is an exception: you see her go from falling in love with Simba, to helping him win back the Pride Lands from his Uncle Scar, to her son's christening as the new prince of Pride Rock.  However, like Sarabi, Nala's royal status is only because she married the king and her only job is to produce a royal heir.  The only princess that ascends the throne, rules alone, and is portrayed as "good" is Kida from Atlantis.  Kida, Nala, and now Vanellope all fall into the "forgotten Disney princess" category, the princesses that Disney didn't induct into the official Princess franchise and will ultimately be eclipsed by Snow White, Cinderella, Jasmine, Tiana, and the rest.

So that's Vanellope.  But really, Vanellope's "princess-not-queen" issue is small compared to my problems with Sergeant Jean Calhoun.  Like Vanellope, I love Sergeant Calhoun.  The character alone is excellent and worth of several fist-pumps.  She's the leader in the "boy" game, Hero's Duty, bossing around burly men twice her size and leading them to fight the evil, evil cybugs.  She's tough, she's smart, and she's vocal.  I about squealed when I first saw her on the screen.  But it's what Disney does with her character that bugs me. Because even though Calhoun is tough, brave, and smart, Disney felt they had to normalize her somehow.  Her intensity isn't her fault, a soldier says, she was programmed with the most tragic backstory possible.  And for a woman solider, what could that be?  A family member dying?  Her whole platoon being eradicated by the cybugs?  Nope.  A cybug killed her husband on her wedding day.  Calhoun can't be a strong leader in a "boy" game because that's who she is, she has to be an anomaly explained by the fact that she lost the man in her life.  I don't know about you, but this tells me that a woman solider (or any woman that participates in the "male" sphere) is a powerful, alien force that can only be produced by a freak accident.  What's more, Calhoun is a powerful, alien force that must be captured, normalized, and re-integrated into socially acceptable gender roles in order to be socially acceptable.  In the course of the movie she teams up with Fix-It Felix Jr. to find Ralph and somehow the two just fall in love.  Actually, Felix compliments Calhoun, the compliment reminds Calhoun of her deceased groom, and then they fall in love.  Because women are that tractable.  *sigh*  Regardless, Calhoun and Felix fall in love and get married and the movie ends.

So, yes, in many many many ways Wreck-It Ralph demonstrates that Disney has come a long way in depicting less strident gender roles in their movies.  Vanellope is a glitchy tomboy who turns down being a princess and Calhoun is a smart, brazen soldier who could knock down ten men twice her size in one hit.  But the fact that Vanellope doesn't become queen and Calhoun's story arc is defined by the man she marries...the strides aren't so great after all.  I still feel like Disney thinks women are not meant to have agency or power, that somehow these sorts of women are dangerous and must be tamed.

Yes, I know, earlier in this post I was doing a jig over Merida, a smart, positively portrayed young lady who doesn't have to get married at the end of the movie.  She has all the agency and power many of the previous official Disney princesses lack.  But Brave is a girl's movie with a girl's heroine.  The intended audience is little girls who will buy the dolls and wear the costumes for dress-up.  Wreck-It Ralph is a boy's movie with a boy's hero.  The intended audience is little boys who will wear the t-shirts and run around the house yelling, "I'm gonna wreck it!" all day.  Comparing the movies side by side it seems that Disney wants to teach its girls they can have power and freedom and don't have to get married, but then whisper an aside to its boys, "Oh, no, they're just silly little girls with silly little visions of agency.  The real power still lies with you."

Think I'm delusional?  Not too long ago my will to remain calm was tested to its limits when I had to sit through all 130 minutes of Oz: the Great and Powerful, directed by Sam Raimi.  Even before Oz hit theatres in early March, the trailer  showed little more than three women fawning over this strange new man and crying out that he is the one to save them.  The outright misogyny is enough to make the most mild of the "Women are pretty cool" brigade's head spin, so to keep from having yet another aneurism I'm going to list everything out and then go lie down.

1) Conman magician, Oscar Diggs, gets swept out of Kansas by a tornado and dropped in the middle of Oz, a magical land where three extremely powerful lady witches are quarreling over the throne.  Diggs is hailed as a prophet and a powerful wizard who will save the land, despite the fact that he doesn't have any powers and no real brains.  Instead he uses his "magic" so he can rule over Oz and claim all its gold and riches in the royal vaults for himself.
Let me repeat that: non-magical man crash lands in a magical world where three magical, incredibly powerful female witches are competing for the throne.  All three of these ladies could destroy him with their wand, their fingers, or their fire-balls of death but they don't.  Instead they hail him as a magical prophet who will deliver their war-torn land to a world of peace and freedom.  Oh, and this power vacuum was left when the king died.  Because there's no way a woman could lead, not even the king's daughter.
2) The first witch we meet, Theodora, is entirely obsessed with Oscar.  The moment he lands in Oz she practically pounces on him, announcing that he's the man they've all been waiting to save them and that she's absolutely in love with him.  Theodora's obsessive infatuation is entirely manic and she insists that they will rule as King and Queen once he delivers Oz from the grip of the evil wicked witch without once wondering what Oscar might have to say about their "relationship".  When Theodora believes the great wizard loves someone else she goes on an angry, tear-stained rampage that destroys all of Oz.  Essentially Theodora is every bachelor's nightmare, their most infantile fears of women and long-term commitment come to life to destroy their care-free playboy lifestyle.  This might be extreme to say, but I think Theodora's behavior in this movie only serves to confirm these fears and reaffirms the idea that there is something inherently wrong with women; that somehow we need men to be our rational, better halves to survive and we are utterly, dangerously irrational in the face of that need.  Also, I think they CGI'd Theodora's ass into those tight, shiny riding pants.
3) The second witch we meet and Theodora's sister, Evanora, isn't as obsessive or naive when she meets the great and powerful wizard, thankfully.  She realizes Oscar is a bit of a greedy hack and sends him out to test his skills before she hands over the royal coffers and the throne.  Later we discover that Evanora is the true wicked witch, bent on conquering Oz and dooming its inhabitants to a dark and miserable existence.  The worst part about her character is that her evil nature is tied up with her cleverness just like every other vocal, ambitious woman in Disney's canon.  A woman can't be strong, independent, and ambitious without being inherently evil.
4) The porcelain doll.  When Evanora sends Oscar out to destroy the wicked witch, Oscar finds a little porcelain doll whose legs have been broken when the wicked witch attacked her home.  This little doll follows Oscar for the rest of his journey to defeat the real wicked witch, Evanora, and has enough screen presence to make her a major character in the movie.  Yet somehow, for reasons I can't fathom, she doesn't get a name.  Not even in the credits.  She's just "Porcelain Doll".  Why?!  Why is it that one of Oscar's best allies in the movie doesn't deserved to be named??  The implications of her character, that little girls are delicate and need to be fixed by the great amazing men wizards of the world, make me want to puke.  I spent too much of my life convincing myself that I wasn't made of glass and that I didn't need a guy to "fix" me for Disney and this wizard to come along and negate all that.  What's more, when Oscar tries to tell her she can't help him kill the wicked witch she stamps her little porcelain feet and screams and cries until he finally gives in.  Right.  Because women are incapable of making rational arguments or asking for what they want in a mature way.  We always scream and cry like spoiled little children until our daddies cave and give us what we want.
5)  Glinda the good witch.  Again, like Theodora and Evanora she has her own magical powers and is more than capable of claiming her late father's throne and bringing Oz to peace.  And again, like the other two witches, she hails him as a savior.  It's incredibly disappointing, then, that Glinda knows Oscar is a feckless conman with no leadership capabilities and no physical power.  Yet she still massages his ego and coaches him into leading the denizens of Oz into a bloodless battle so he can claim the throne.  She is the king's daughter, filled with her father's wisdom and courage and power!  It should be her throne!  But no, a man has to save them all.  [/aneurism]

But do you see what I mean?  With Brave Disney tells our daughters and our own inner children that we can be free and shoot arrows and we don't have to get married.  We don't need men to support us or save us or validate our lives.  But with Wreck-It Ralph and Oz: the Great and Powerful the company tells our sons and men's inner children that this simply isn't true.  Women are irrational, volatile, delicate, dangerous creatures who are unfit for any sort of power and need a man to step in and save them from themselves and the big, bad, scary world around them.  When Disney fixes that, when Disney allows its heroes to recognize its heroines as equals, then I'll be happy.  Until then, Disney, you and I need to have a serious conversation about women.