Language and gender in children's animated films: Exploring Disney and Pixar investigates linguistic features in relation to gender in popular children's movies over the past decades. Specifically, it examines how linguistic patterns are used in given contexts by gendered characters to uncover what messages about gender are communicated. In so doing, the authors Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer shed light on the problems and progress in linguistic representation of gender in Disney and Pixar animated movies.
Chapter 1 defines the concept of gender as socially constructed and identifies language as one of the tools that people use to construct gender, revealing the necessity of research on the linguistic representation of gender in scripted media. Chapter 2 unfolds the historical, political, and cultural contexts of gender representation in Disney and Pixar, with a particular focus on how feminism has shaped female character portrayal in Disney princess movies over the years. Chapter 3 provides a general view of skewed gender representation by demonstrating how male characters and male speech are overrepresented in each film and across films.
Chapters 4 to 7 are devoted to sociolinguistic inquiries of gender representation in a range of linguistic acts, namely compliments, directives, insults, and apologies. Each of them from a distinctive perspective of quantitative and qualitative analysis substantiates the preliminary findings in chapter 3. Chapter 4 analyzes gender-linked differences in compliment topics and uses. It identifies compliments, together with mitigated directives in chapter 5, as an unmarked linguistic act of politeness for females to establish rapport. Chapter 5 unveils how the syntactic forms of directives vary with gender, particularly in contexts of institutional power. It is found that mitigated use of directives is associated with female authority. Chapter 6 shows that insults are mostly used by male characters for social bonding and have no negative impacts upon their representation even though insults are impolite in nature, in stark contrast with female counterparts. Chapter 7 demonstrates that while the use of apologies is not found to be gender-oriented, the use of non-apologies is specifically linked to male characters.
Chapter 8, from a complementary perspective to binary gender, presents a qualitative analysis of queer representation, examining what linguistic features are employed to construct queerness and how these features of gender-nonconformity are correlated with villain characters. The concluding chapter 9 summarizes the problems and progress in gender representation discussed in chapters 3 to 8 and sets out the vision of a progressive future where gender representation is more diversified.
Overall, this volume provides a panorama of language use in the media representation of gender on the basis of relatively large groups of films. It reveals to us the value of sociolinguistic study on scripted media. It is of great significance for those engaged in linguistic research and media analysis, offering a viable paradigm for media criticism, and is also a valuable resource to the general public interested in language and gender in popular media.
