Julie C. Garlen

Magic everywhere: Mapping the Disney curriculum

Recently, The Walt Disney Company announced that it would expand its digital movie-viewing service, Disney Movies Anywhere, to include a wider range of web platforms and digital-streaming devices, providing more consumers easy access to 450 Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel titles (Rainey 2015). In other words, like the vast multitude of good, services, and experiences that constitute the massive media juggernaut itself, Disney Movies Anywhere is now everywhere. Indeed, “Magic Everywhere,” the parade anthem introduced in 2012 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Disneyland Paris, might be a fitting theme song for Disney’s digital ubiquity: consumers are but one wish (or in this case, one click) away from all they’ve dreamed. Of course, the film industry is but one domain of the vast Disneyverse. Currently, The Walt Disney Company generates over

Happily (n)ever after: the cruel optimism of Disney’s romantic ideal

52 billion per year (Iger 2015) and continues to expand markets within and beyond the United States through theme parks, television and radio stations, publishing, licensed merchandise, language programs, educational materials, sports, music, urban development, a gated resort community, and many other products and entertainment arenas. Yet, the company’s decision to invest in the expansion of digital media offerings reflects the growing cultural presence of on-demand, universally accessible, interactive content constituting the ever-evolving phenomenon known as new media. Disney’s continually expanding market share and influence on global popular culture illustrate what Ritzer (2007) defines as grobalization, which is “the imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations, and the like and their desire, indeed need, to impose themselves on various geographic areas” (15). As the term suggests, Disney and other multinational corporations strive to have their power, influence, and profits grow. The Walt Disney Company, in particular, is a master of expansion through acquisition, continuous promotion, and synergistic marketing strategies that sell the Disney brand. As Ritzer (2010) explains, “Disney in general and its theme parks in particular are revolutionary in many senses, but perhaps above all they are part of a ‘selling machine,’ capable of marketing Disney to an unprecedented degree” (5). These feats of mass marketing have expanded Disney consumers to include a vast global audience of children and adults who are exposed to, engage with, and buy Disney products through consumer

The child in question: Childhood texts, cultures, and curricula

Abstract Drawing on Ahmed’s articulation of the performativity of affect, we analyze how Disney love, as it is constructed in Disney Princess films, acts pedagogically as a “happy object” that orients the happiness of women toward the acquisition of love. We assert that the happiness we derive from loving Disney is a form of what Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” in which we become attached to fantasies of happiness and fulfillment that are unsustainable and detrimental. The cruel optimism we learn from Disney Princess films manifests as an incitement to pursue an impossible ideal of romantic love, or what Heise calls a bridal fiction, that reinforces the supremacy of a white heteropatriarchal family ideal and keeps us attached to “compromised conditions of possibility” that limit female agency and impede social progress.

Escape from Tomorrow: Disney, Institutionalized Whiteness, and the Difficult Knowledge of Being

What is a child? The concept of childhood is so familiar that we tend to assume its universality. As Davin (1999) notes, “We all ‘know’ what we mean by child and childhood. Yet its properties are multiple and elusive; its limits elastic” (p. 15). The lived experience of childhood is defined by the cultural and economic contexts in which it occurs, and thus, considering the vastly different experiences of children across the world and throughout history, it is impossible to imagine a universal definition. Indeed, the boundaries that differentiate children from adults shape the subjectivities of both. When we speak of the child, we are referring to the relationships, contexts and legacies through which the concept of childhood is mediated. Indeed, the meaning of childhood is always being negotiated not only by the imaginations of adults, but also by nations, markets, history and children themselves. Childhood is thus a discursive conflict zone upon which cultural, political and economic engagements are waged. This special issue’s unifying theme, “The child in question,” emerges, in part, from Davin’s observation: that childhood has boundaries far more elastic than can be held by the familiar notion of the child as providing unmediated access to truth or innocence. The title pays homage to the work of sociologist, Gittins (1998), who explores the shifting meanings of children and childhood and how those meanings impact the lives of children. Contemporary laws, educational policies and social customs about and for children, such as those highlighted in this issue, reveal the ways that the properties of childhood remain as multiple and elusive as ever. Precisely because the concept of childhood is complex and constantly changing, it demands critical inquiry, for as elusive and elastic as they may be, social constructions of childhood have real material consequences for the children whose lives they shape. For Walkerdine (1993), the challenge is to look at the ways that social discourses “cut up and shape reality” as well as to account for “the real effects they produce” (p. 454). “Something real,” she argues, “is produced out of fiction” (p. 454). In turn, the embodied lives of children can impact the metaphors we use to describe them. Duane (2010) describes this affecting dynamic of language as “the material grounding of metaphorical thought” (p. 12). The pages of this issue are filled with “question-children” who represent both the material and metaphorical qualities of childhood that complicate the fantasy of a certain truth. Indeed, for Britzman (2006), the question-child figure reminds us that uncertainty is the ground of research, including research about children. In her words, this child figure

Disney, Culture, and Curriculum

In January 2013, Escape from Tomorrow, Randy Moore’s directorial debut, premiered at the Sundance film festival. The surrealist fantasy follows Jim White (actor Ray Abramsohn), a newly-laid off, sexually frustrated father on a family trip to Walt Disney World, as he encounters the darker side of “The Happiest Place on Earth” and subsequently suffers a mental, and eventually, physical breakdown. Touted as a feat of guerilla filmmaking techniques, the film was shot almost entirely inside the gates of Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida and Disneyland in Anaheim, California, without the permission of The Walt Disney Company, a fact that has brought the film considerable media attention. In April 2013, Escape from Tomorrow was hand-selected by Roger Ebert to be screened at his film festival in Champaign, Illinois. On the festival website, Michal Oleszczyk (2013), while acknowledging the film’s shortcomings, praised its “effrontery” and described the central theme of the film as “the terror of ubiquitous entertainment” (para. 5). In spite of the enthusiastic reception it received at Sundance and the endorsement of famed critic Roger Ebert, the film has been far from a commercial success, grossing just

Teaching with Disney

63,297 in its opening weekend in October 2013, when it was simultaneously made available to the public via Video On Demand and theater screenings in select cities (IMDb 2013). Clearly, Escape from Tomorrow was not destined to garner the box office figures achieved by the blockbuster hits that opened the same weekend, but it nonetheless achieved the purpose set forth by Randy Moore, who describes the film as his “personal attempt to make sense of what felt like a very artificial childhood, brought on by our cultural obsession with these fake, manufactured worlds of so-called fantasy” (quoted in Carey 2013, para. 10). Neither that cultural obsession nor those manufactured worlds of fantasy are accidental; rather, both are carefully cultivated via entertainment corporations, none of which seems to have as much global influence as Disney. The Walt Disney Company is a major multinational entertainment corporation,