Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out Read Online Free PDF Page B

concentrated on the “naturalness” of heterosexuality. Yet, the company’s discourse on heterosexuality during Walt’s lifetime also impacted the parameters of discourse on homosexuality that lesbian and gay audiences could find in these texts.
    Of course, Disney is not in some manner unique or solely responsible for championing a heterosexual imperative. Rather, the messages historically constructed in Disney texts mirror the concepts of sexuality espoused by the Western hegemony in which it operates. Disney is only one voice in a multitude of discourses that attempt to fix, regulate and naturalize a certain version of sexuality. In fact, research into the history of Walt Disney and his studio reveals how other voices worked to help fashion Disney’s representation of sexuality and the body. (To distinguish between Disney the man and Disney the company, I shall hence-forth designate the man as “Walt” and the company as “Disney.”) The influence of other, larger forces in molding the “Disney mystique”
    is easy to discern because Walt and his animators presented very different conceptions of sexuality and the body during different periods.
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    M I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY
    Disney’s wholesome image began to coalesce as a specific method to maintain economic power and control.
    The history of the Walt Disney Company’s representations of sexuality and the body during the tenure of Walt Disney himself can be roughly separated into four periods: 1924–30, from Disney’s first animated films to the success of the early Mickey Mouse cartoons; 1931–41, often described as Disney’s “Golden Period,” when his studio dominated the animation market worldwide; 1942–50, as World War II and the immediate postwar years changed and expanded what types of films the studio produced; and 1950–66, when the studio consolidated its financial successes and its corporate image. The “Disney mystique”
    had so solidified by the end of this era that when Walt died in 1966, the company seemed to continue apace with its image unfaltering for the next decade. The changes that occur at the borders of these periods point out how Walt and his studio consciously refashioned their representations of sexuality and the body, due to the influence (and sometimes specific economic support) of consumers, the Hollywood film industry, corporate America and even the federal government.
    EARLY DISNEY: THE CARNIVALESQUE (1924–1930)
    Contrary to the “Disney mystique” described in the letter from the Florida representatives, the very early Disney product seems to revel in the possibilities of sexuality and the potentiality of the body in every frame of film. Sexuality is not isolated in these texts; rather, it is always ready to assert its presence. The body is not a sacred temple with a sturdy foundation; it is a polymorphous sight of pleasure and excess.
    Consequently, unlike the cartoons aired on television or released on video, the cartoon characters from Walt’s earliest series display bawdy humor and sexual aggressiveness—even that paragon of virtue, Mickey Mouse.
    In his examination of Walt Disney’s silent films, Russell Merritt finds Walt’s traditional image as a moral conscience sorely tested.
    Rather than teaching the importance of hard work and respect, “Disney’s sympathies are generally with those who goof off or tear the community apart. Authority figures are invariably absurd. . . . He shows kids cutting school, shoplifting and playing hooky, hoboes flee[ing]
    from having to work, prisoners escaping prison or Alice simply run-M I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY
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    ning away to have adventures.”8 Alice, the live-action heroine of Disney’s first nationally distributed cartoon series, often led her cartoon friends on adventures that included escaping the police or other authority figures. In Alice Gets in Dutch (1924), for example, Alice (Virginia Davis) is forced to wear the dunce cap after misbehaving