Do actions speak louder than verbs? A Critical Discourse Analytic account of ideologies of gender and sexuality in the Disney films Mulan (1998) and Frozen (2013)

From an early age, children are exposed to a range of ideologies relating to the ‘successful’ performance of gender – through talk, TV and film. Disney is a global corporation which provides children with role models in the form of movie characters. This paper explores how children can be shown that there are multiple possible ways to perform gender (Butler, 1999; cited in Harrington et al., 2008). Although Disney have recently begun to shift from more traditional gender stereotypes (e.g. the ‘helpless princess’, the ‘bold prince charming’) this study uses Critical Discourse Analysis to explore how such ideological representations might be further progressed. Specifically, the research reported here focuses on the films Mulan (1998) and Frozen (2013). While it seems that through their actions, female characters are now being portrayed as strong, independent and successful women; transcriptions of key scenes enable consideration of how language is (mis)aligned with such representations. Using CDA (Fairclough 2010) it becomes apparent that although both films show characters whose actions break away from ‘conventional’ ideas of what it means to perform gender: Mulan saves China, Anna saves her sister. The appropriation of linguistic material ‘given’ to these characters by the scriptwriters fails to match those actions in the same way. In brief, it seems that in these Disney films, at least with respect to the construction of gendered identities, actions do still speak louder than words!