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Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

4-2014

Culminating Project Type

Thesis

Degree Name

English: M.A.

Department

English

College

College of Liberal Arts

First Advisor

Catherine Fox

Second Advisor

Tim Fountaine

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Keywords and Subject Headings

Disney Franchise, feminism, ideology, resistance

Abstract

The Disney Princess franchise has been commercially successful and culturally influential. While popular culture idealizes the Princess products, this thesis uses a feminist perspective to argue that the brand promotes an ideology of essentialized, traditional femininity that inhibits the ability of preschool girls to create complex identities. This problematic ideology is exacerbated by a transformation of the brand into a type of cultural hegemony that makes it seemingly impossible to resist the troubling influence of Disney's Princess.

Yet, in order to counteract a sense of determinism, there must be a way for individuals, especially parents and daughters, to exercise agency and resist the hegemonic power of the Disney Princess franchise. Through an analysis of the project "Not Just a Girl" by Jaime C. Moore, this work argues language has the capacity to inspire counter-hegemony and create spaces ofresistance. Ultimately, the analysis of the rhetorical strategies of Moore's project provides an opportunity to extrapolate the foundation for a broader theory of counter-hegemony through language.

Comments/Acknowledgements

I dedicate this project to my children who inspired it and my husband who sacrificed so I could write it.

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