Academic Research

Gender, Linguistics, & Walt Disney

With Professor Carmen Fought, PhD (Pitzer College). 2011-present

The Disney Company is considered to be the largest media conglomerate in the world. Perhaps not surprisingly, there has been a substantial amount of scholarly work on Disney, both the company and the films, across a number of fields such as Media Studies, Feminist Studies, or even Family Therapy.  This research tends to be overwhelmingly qualitative in nature, and even quantitative studies tend towards subjective measures.  Where these studies touch even briefly on questions of language, such observations tend to be unscientific and uninformed by linguistic research.

Carmen Fought’s and my work seek to fill this gap in the literature by applying well-established language & gender methodologies to children’s media, specifically the Disney Princess films and the Pixar movie canon. We hope to prove that linguistic analysis, specifically discourse analysis and gender-based sociolinguistic analysis,  can give a more objective picture of gender representation in these beloved films. We ask the following questions:

  • In what ways do Disney and Pixar films use language to characterize gender differences?
  • How do the films’ linguistic depictions of gender compare to gendered patterns of speech in real communities?
  • Has there been any change in how gender and language are portrayed in Disney and Pixar films over time?

Publications:

Fought, Carmen & Eisenhauer, Karen. “A Quantitative Analysis of Gendered Compliments in Disney Princess Films.” Linguistic Society of America. Mariott Marquis, Washington, D.C. 17 January 2016. Conference Presentation.

Recent studies find that children use animated films in constructing their gender identities (e.g. DoRozario 2004, Baker-Sperry 2007), however little is known about how gendered language is presented in children’s media. Data on compliments in the Disney Princess films were analyzed for gender of speaker and recipient, and for type of compliment given/received (following Holmes 1986). The proportion of compliments received by female characters declined in the more recent films, although females overall received significantly more compliments on their appearance. These results illuminate how ideologies about language and gender are packaged and presented to children.

Read the presentation.

Fought, Carmen & Eisenhauer, Karen. “Gendered Compliment Behavior in Disney and Pixar: A Quantitative Analysis.” New Ways of Analyzing Variation. Simon Fraser University, Victoria, B.C. 06 November 2016. Conference Presentation.

This study explores how language is presented as gendered in children’s animated films from Disney and Pixar. To begin with, male characters outnumber female characters and dominate the talking time in both sets of films. Overall, male characters in Disney films spoke 61% of the total words, and in the Pixar movies they spoke 76%. Our quantitative analysis of compliments showed that female characters in Disney films were more likely to receive a compliment on their appearance than on any other topic. In addition, they were more likely to be complimented on their appearance than on their skills (35% vs 29%), while for male characters the trend was reversed. In the Pixar films, male characters received only 7% of compliments on appearance, with 52% on skills. Female characters received 25% of compliments on appearance and 30% on skills, which is comparable to the trend in the later Disney movies. 

Publicity:

The Princess Project has only a single set of published results as of January 2016, but those results drew national and international attention. Our conference presentation was covered by over  100 news outlets, including USA Today, CBS News, Entertainment Weekly, MTV, National Geographic, and our own fields’ Language Log

My interviews were featured in USA Today College and live on ABC Australia’s Radio National Drive.

I was also featured in the NC State Linguistics Program’s “LingLab” Podcast, which you can listen to here.