“If all the Disney Princesses fought in a cage match, who would win?” The pantheon of Disney Princesses is arguably one of the most universally recognized groups of fictional women, and also likely one of the most frequently adapted and examined. Artists, gamers, cosplayers, and scholars have reimagined the Princesses in countless ways, including as their male counterparts, superheroes, Jedi Knights, tattooed pin-up girls, and potential cage fighters.
The questions that form the spine of this paper are: Why is it that we can’t stop loving the Disney Princesses—these animated archetypes of play that we do not abandon even as we grow out of childhood—and yet also can’t stop trying to change them? What is it about these characters that draws Disney fans irresistibly to them while also urging fandom communities to ascribe to them new attributes? And what deeper understandings about society and culture can be gleaned from these and similar “breakings and remakings” (Conquergood) of Disney performance and performativity? I am intrigued by how such questions can be addressed within the context of not only literal performances of women in the traditional theatrical/filmic sense, but also in the realm of performative acts that reconstitute gender, race, and so on—that is, performative “action that incessantly insinuates, interrupts, interrogates, antagonizes, and decenters powerful master discourses” (Conquergood). These acts can be witnessed in reactions from fan communities who wish to wrest Disney’s portrayals of women into new worlds of activist possibility.
In this paper, I address how the original canon and indoctrinated mythology of the Princesses perform and dictate gender norms. I wish to then demonstrate how revisions and re-envisionings of the Princesses can be read as an attempt to imbue archetypal female characters with fresh feminist energy.
About the presenterKatelyn Elizabeth Gendelev
Katelyn Gendelev is a third-year PhD student in the department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University, where she is the current chair of the student-run Elsewhere theatre program. She works primarily through the lens of Performance Studies, with focuses including gender and sexuality, fandom, and the activist power of storytelling.