‘Balancing family time with fighting villains’: Gender, agency and social action in the representation of Disney Heroes.

Coffey-Glover, Laura and Mackenzie, Jai (2023) ‘Balancing family time with fighting villains’: Gender, agency and social action in the representation of Disney Heroes. Gender and Language, 16 (4). pp. 359-381. ISSN 1747-6321

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Abstract

This study provides a feminist stylistic account of gendered agency in a set of ‘Disney Heroes’ collectible trading cards designed for young children to play with. Through a mixed-methods analysis of grammatical, semantic and social agency in the texts, we show how the representation of male and female characters in these cards reinforces limiting, and potentially damaging, gender norms around men being more socially agentive, having more impact on the world around them, and ultimately being more ‘heroic’, than women. There is some cause for optimism in terms of the improved representation of female characters over time, and the foregrounding of female heroes’ agentive roles in their worlds, but ultimately the cards uphold the hegemonic status quo. The quantitative and qualitative dimensions of this analysis also revealed quite different insights, demonstrating the importance of analyses that account for the way linguistic strategies are deployed in context, and in combination with a range of other resources.

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	Faculty of of Arts, Society and Professional Studies > Department of Art and Humanities
Depositing User:	Ms Hazel Barham
Date Deposited:	11 Jul 2022 09:04
Last Modified:	25 Jan 2023 10:37
URI:	https://newman.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/17320

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