Disney's Animal Pedagogy

In class last week, we discussed Disney narratives complicity in heteropatriarchy and white racism. No surprise, other students were extremely resistant to recognizing any problems with Disney. Disney has done such an incredible job at hoodwinking the public of its innocence through its strict censoring and infiltration into the American family ethos, that it has become almost invulnerable to criticism, especially any criticism along the already taboo lines of thought on gender and race.

I was shocked that Abigail, normally a relatively progressive student in the class reacted with such vehement disgust that people would dare challenge Disney's mulitnational corporate media empire. All those gasps she made during the documentary I thought were disgust at having once been naive to the racism in the film, but no, it was because people attack the inventors of her childhood. Childhood. It's the closest to home, it is the home we discover ourselves thrown in; it's language (what Heidegger calls the "house of Being") the house of our narrative identities, the fertile soil of the roots of our subjectivities. To threaten and shame such "comfort food" (perhaps as much so as critiquing "meat") is to threaten identity, to throw one into self-criticism, to dare one with an opportunity to change, to open an abyss of possibility and an abject perspective to reassess one's child world. It is to choose bad faith, to choose cowardice over responsibility to at least critically reflect.

White Male Privilege of Naivete
Fortunately, this wasn't the first time I had been exposed to these criticisms of Disney. I had been reading Sociological Images for a couple years and connected to some other sources. For instance, Nostalgia Chick's take on Disney Princesses (Pocahantas, Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, and Hercules.):

One thing people have trouble wrapping their heads around is that racism need not be intentional and that context matters. Gwen at Sociological Images had this to say about the Princess and the Frog:

Depicting Cinderella as a maid doesn’t play into pre-existing stereotypes of White women; it’s just an individual portrayal. A Black character cast as a maid, to many people, reproduces an image of Black women that goes beyond the individual–whether the creators intend to or not, such images bring with them associations to the Mammy character and real oppression of African American women in a culture that saw them primarily as servants for more privileged groups.

In other words, depicting a white woman and a black woman as a servant will resonate with two very different historical and cultural contexts through which we make sens of the narrative, and that certain representations may be chosen simply because of implicit biases and correlations within world of narrative in which we live. White middle-class ablebodied heterosexual males, and the like, have certain privileges in which they take for granted their own race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc, something not afforded to the vast majority of the world. To become reactionary verses well-reasoned to such criticism is exposing a serious level of naivete.

While some have argued with films like Mulan and The Princess and the Frog, Disney has finally become more race conscious and more empowering to women, there are still issues. As Lisa from Sociological Images notes

But, to be fair, these princesses aren’t radical. They aren’t pushing the envelope of femininity. They are only reflecting the fact that ideal femininity in the West has changed such that the perfect woman now incorporates some masculine character traits. “Some” is the operative word here. Today’s ideal woman is still feminine, but she works, wears pants, and plays sports. She may even be a sports fan and drink beer. But she also preserves her femininity, especially those aspects of femininity that mark her as “for” a (just barely and totally benevolently of course) dominant male. She still doesn’t disagree too vigorously or laugh too loud. She marries a man who is slightly older, more educated, larger, taller, and makes a bit more money at his job that is just slightly higher prestige. And, no matter what, she looks, dresses, and moves in pretty, feminine ways.

Put another way, Disney's representation of princesses is lagging behind cultural attitudes about women rather than simply being ahead or even with the times. And this isn't saying much either, given that, in my opinion, our culture has become hypersexualizing of both men and women (and not in the liberatory sense, but the commodification sense) in addition to giving preferential treatment to the hyperfeminine and male archetypes).

Responses to my Classmates
I prodded Teresa to speak and at last she did. I gave her a round of applause as did some other students, but regrettably the other three graduate students, two of which who are in Women and Gender Studies did not contribute. According to them, they were too infuriated to say much, too hopeless to expect the class to understand the theory.

I was glad I could finally cut in my critique at the end of the ignorance that saturated the petrified sponges that were some people's brains. I made several points: 1) NON-INNOCENT: Disney is a multinaitonal corporation that seeks above all else profit, not art. 2) POWERFUL: Disney is a dominant figure in American media, and its work has international influence. 3) DOMINANT DISCOURSE: Disney plays into fabricated narratives that are neither traditional nor progressive, but simply racist (stereotypes, symbolic annihilation, orientalist, villainous accents) and sexist (no mothers, sexualized, victims, white middle/upper-class and conventionally beautiful). 4) SUBJECTIVITY: Children who watch these seek models for social behavior, which is bad enough, but some children have no one to identify with in the film or have more racial identification with stereotypes and animal others (i.e. how do Amerindian children feel when they see the Indians in Peter Pan or the Africans feel when they identify with gorillas?). Finally, 5) RECOGNITION: People are not just creating a hissy-fit for entertainment; at the very least, the dominant demographic should be willing to take into consideration, to hear out, marginalized groups who feel they are being caricatured.

Of course, there are always criticisms in regards to this. Some will argue that 1) we teach the same American narratives in school (so two wrongs make a right), 2) corporations are businesses and aren't responsible for content (so we shouldn't hold businesses accountable for racism and sexism), 3) that its damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't (so you are critiqued both when the majority of your films are entirely absent of diversity and when you include racial stereotypes in your movie--as if there weren't an alternative), 4) kids either aren't effected or walk away from it later when they know its false (so then there is no reason people would be so invested in defending Disney), and 5) kids shouldn't know the truth and stereotypes make it easier to think (WTF????).

The Human Race of a Different Species
Disney has had a long history of racist iconography: Fantasia's (1940) pikaninny slave, Dumbo's (1941) sambo crows, Peter Pan's (1953) rendition of "Indians," Lady and the Tramp's (1953) Siamese cats, The Jungle Book's (1967) orangutan singing "I want to be like you," Aladdin's (1992) demonization and orientalization of Arabs, The Lion King's (1994) hyenas, Pocahantas' (1995) (mis)telling of the truth of American colonialism. and Tarzan's (1999) absence of Africans admits the African rainforest. Although I'm no 21st century American historian, it seems that some of these racial depictions were made at corresponding times of racial tension in American history. For instance, the Siamese cats were in theaters during the Korean War, the Jungle Book was made amidst the civil rights movement just prior to the assassination of MLK Jr., and Aladdin was released shortly after the Gulf War. Coincidences? I don't know.

What I'm particularly interested in is how "animals" function in cartoon fables to displace the realness and ugliness of real moral problems and crimes onto uncanny others, thereby making the adult and horror appropriate for child fantasy. As Harrit Ritvo (1987) discusses in her seminal book, Animal Estate,

As material animals were at complete at the complete disposal of human beings, so rhetorical animals offered unusual opportunities for manipulation; their position in the physical world and the universe of discourse was mutually reinforcing... both discussed and exemplified a central theme of domination and exploitation. Animals were uniquely suitable for rhetoric that both celebrated human power and extended its sway, especially because [the English] concealed this theme at the same time they could express it…. Talking about [animals] offered people who would have been reluctant or unable to avow a project of domination directly a way to enact it obliquely (5-6)

Through animal representations, largely made possible through the disappearance of an unmediated encounter, projected meanings took on a new "reality" in which, through animal tales, one could likewise make representations of others seem "natural." So the power relations in a particular society become inscribed on animal representations and get read back through a circular logic that has forgotten the lies.

It is difficult not reading the song "I wan'na be like You," written by two white men and sung by Lois Armstrong in Disney's The Jungle Book, a colonialist narrative itself, as anything but racist,especially since it went into production shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what botherin' me
I wanna be a man, mancub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!

Oh, oobee doo
I wanna be like you
I wanna walk like you
Talk like you, too
You'll see it's true
An ape like me
Can learn to be human too

Perhaps few animated animal features appropriate and colonize the bodies human-animals as much as those about insects. Bees and ants are fertile sources to impose cultural representations on (human) nature, by building gender and class relations off of misrepresented social structures. One need only look at Bee Movie. Gwen writes:

how animals are anthropomorphized tells us a lot about our social assumptions and what we’re comfortable with. There’s no reason the worker bees’ sex has to be changed, except that it makes more “sense” to us that the hard-working providers would be male. The choices to make the males the center of the story, to make them bigger than the females, and to portray female bees as fawning groupies desperate for male attention tells us an awful lot about the gender stories we tell ourselves about humans, and that they’re important enough to us that even children’s movies have to recreate those stories, no matter how much fiddling with reality it takes.

Previously, I've looked into similar anthropomorphisms related to Gotmilk.com and the film Barnyard, which features a steer with utters. It's all bull (pun intended).

GenderQueer

In class last week, our class discussed queer and transgendered issues in the media. I particularly found this class the most informative yet as I am much more familiar with representations of race and cisgender in the media. Up until recently, the mid-1990s it seems, "deviant" sexualities and genders have been symbolically annihilated (Tuchner 1978) through their lack of representation in the media. Although homosexuality has become more predominant in popular films and literature, while it is not cast into the negative stereotypes as it once was, still requires the annihilation of the queer, which recognizes its own un-articulability (Warner 1993), through assimilation to hegemonic (Gramsci) construction of "the family", or what they call in media theory, mainstreaming (). Certainly mainstreaming has the benefit of what Bandura calls "social learning, in which one learns certain behaviors through watching media. For instance, I have little doubt that the mainstreaming of homosexuality has contributed to the linear growth in acceptance to gay and lesbian marriages, especially as youth come into contact with such acceptable and "acceptable" characters who are "like us", verses "the other." On the other hand, many queers have fought against such a mainstreaming and assimilation of queer identities into hegemonic social good, a good which is never questioned (Edelman 2004).

In particular, genderqueers and transgendered and transexuals have yet to be accepted societally. Still, there are no federal hate crime laws protecting them (although, hate crime laws are another contested issue in the queer community--it is argued they support a racist, classist, unjust prison system at the expense of offering restorative and transformative justice). Nip/Tuck was mentioned in the documentary, in particular, how it offered a positive, non-stereotyped role. Yet, this was only in the first season. By the second season, trans women were being used as props for plot twists and by the third they were victims of transphoic violence. By the fifth season, lesbians became the target of homophobic humor. This is an instance whereby the phenonmenon of mainstreaming may also produce media backlash as a show rises in popularity and thus emblemises what is called "gratification theory," that people watch media in part to validate their own values and experiences.

In class before the video, we looked at a news article about a transgender student who wanted to be homecoming queen, however, the school board decided that since her birth certificate said she was a boy that she could only run for homecoming king, a position that insists upon biological reductionism and essentialism and also what Julia Serano (2007) calls "oppositional sexism" (in which there no continuity and transition between "opposite" poles is accepted). It was noted that the journalism made the decision to identify her as a "her" and not a "him." This brings up the inevitable political consequences and construction that discourse is, that any journalist can never escape the categorizing of language. However, just the other day I also encountered a story on feministing about a story that deliberately used the pronoun "he" instead of "her" for the story and another in which there was a very objectifying description of a trans woman:

One of those men, who asked not to be identified, said “Stacey” was beautiful and could pass for a woman.

“She was pretty, but if you didn’t know what time it was, you wouldn’t know what she was,” he said. “She was built . . . and she drew attention from men just walking down the street.”

This does to show how just as there is a male gaze (), a particular hegemonic perspective in which to perceive women, so is there perhaps a cissexual gaze through which we see transexuals. This also relates to what Serano calls "transmisogyny," a particular form of transphobia directed at trans women in a culture that knocks on females and feminity, and especially those male bodies that privilege the feminine over the hegemonic norms of masculinity performance.

Mascots: Representation and the Trivialization of Violence

In Thinking Animals, human ecologist, Paul Shepard, argues that animals are core compenents of human cognitive development following Claude Levi-Strauss's famous words, "animals are good to think." Shepard points to the affluence of animal symbology throughout cultures, even within those societies, such as the United States, which is often said to be alienated from nature. While many people find the use of such symbols romantic, spiritual, empowering, closer to nature, etc. often these symbols occlude the historical and representational violence done to particular animals belonging to such categories such as "bear," "bull," "tiger," etc.

To understand this, let's first take a look at how sports mascots appropriate other people's cultures and trivialize the genocide of those people. There has been much controversy over the use of Amerindian mascots, particularly the "Fighting Illini," "The Fighting Sioux," "the Seminoles," the "Cleveland Indians," the "Boston Redskins," etc.

Representation, Appropriation, & The Logic of Genocide
Caricatures can sometimes be very fun and even have a prodound truth to their simplicity--as is evident in the best politicla cartoons--, however they can also trivialize and occlude actual violence. According to Wikipedia, a caricature "exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness." In other words, caricatures are representations that signify a "truth" that is truer than truth (the presence of the actual person/group being depicted) itself through distortion. However, these caricatures of Amerindians do not only function as stereotypes, they also appropriate and signify the logic of genocide. In "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy," Andrea Smith argues that the

[logic of genocide] holds that indigenous people must dissapear...non-native people then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous--land resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture... why would non-Native people need to play Indian--which often includes acts of spiritual appropriation and land theft--if they thought Indians were alive and still capable of being Indian themselves.

Likewise, Brenda Farnell notes that the passionate supporters of such mascots "defend a "White public space" in which any contemporary NativeAmerican presence is positioned as disorderly." Of course, such a White public space can only exist by exlcuding Amerindians, who are majorly opposed to such symbols, from the public shere. As Charles Springwood explains, White people claim "Indianness" "not to realign themselves psychically or sympathetically withNative Americans but rather to obscure, if not dissolve, Native voices." "Demolishing the mascot slot," argues Pauline Strong, "is a prerequisite for full cultural recognition and participatory citizenship for Native Americans."

Because the appropriation and genocide of Amerindians in American culture is a historical "tradition," it is oftena ccepted as "natural" and or valuable as such colonialism is itself proudly part of the American narrative/identity. However, when European people who survived genocide are used as sports mascots, the perversity of such exploitation/appropriation becomes all the more apparent. Take for example the Dutch soccer team the Ajax Juden, or Jews. Lisa @ Sociological Images notes

This brings up some interesting issues about the appropriation of cultural symbols...Critics of American Indian mascots often ask questions along the lines of “What would happen if a team called itself the Fighting Jews?”... but it’s always presented as an unimaginable, completely hypothetical situation. And yet it turns out not to be so hypothetical after all

Just as it is difficult for many Americans to give up their supposed-entitlement to their tradition of characterizing Amerindians so it is the same for Ajax fans. According to a New York Times article "forcing the fans to change their behavior was a daunting task... because it has become part of their identity."

Ajax fans are proud of their "Jewish Club," eventhough they themselves know or care little about Jewish affairs and culture. They adorn themselves with Star of David tatoos and wave Israeli flags (which is itself unessential to Judaism). Meanwhile, their opponents will adorn themselves with swastikas, calling themselves the SS and shout anti-semitic rhetoric such as "we're hunting Jews," "death to the Jews," "Ajax to the gas chamber."

during a game against a German team late last year, a group of Ajax supporters displayed a banner that read “Jews take revenge for ‘40-’45,”

Ssssssssssssssssssssssssss… (the hissing sound of gas)
We’re hunting the Jews!
There is the Ajax train to Auschwitz!
Sieg! Sieg! Sieg! (German for ‘victory’, yelled while performing the Hitler’s Salute)

While such rhetoric may seem more obscene to Americans than rhetoric surrounding Amerindian mascots--painting them as savages--, it is not so different from the "cowboy and indian" games/themes affluent today. In both cases, the "logic of genocide" is in action in which both groups "must always be dissapearing;" both are treated as history despite the oppression of both groups today; both trivialize the very real violence; both stereotype and reduce.

Animal Symbols: Anthropocentrism and the Rhetoric of Genocide
There seems to be a formula for going about token-fying an entire group of individuals as a symbol. First, one must recognise that group as an Other--without doing so, one cannot objectify. If one did belong to that group, the mascot would not be so much a symbol as a marker of one's own identiy, one would be the subject of one's own discourse, thus subjectivity would be rretained. This requires then, secondly, that the Other must be made into an object through the denial/ignorance of their subjectivity--they have no right to signify themselves. Third, the Other preferaly ought to dissapear so that one has the absolute authority to objectify them, as their would be no other subjectivity to challenge such a representation. Further, through their dissapearance, the symbol takes on more truth as it is "alive," the last survivor of the group.

Finally, the objectified, extinguished Other is celebrated. We celebrate everything it stands for not it in and of itself; we hold romanticized views of it an mourn the past, a presense in which we terminated. We love these mascots/symbols because they fit within a romantic narrative about our past orpossibilities that could have been; we relive the past (or rather, a truncated history) by cheerishing these icons and "eat the other" as bell hooks would say. We appropriate that otherness and assimilate it into our own self-project with little if any recognition of the full otherness of those beings. The same process occurs within the ecocide of developers, when, once the habitat is cleared, the developers name the property after the community hthey wiped out: Park Ridge, Redwood falls, etc.

This brings us back to the question of animal representation and symbology. Animals in art and stories tend to be treated as props and symbols rather than characters themselves (for instance, in a creative writing seminar I was told that choosing the right prop for a story is essential and that if a cat doesn't work out, substitute n a dog). In another post at Sociological Images, Lisa explains how, like animals, women are often always representing something for men as allegorical figures:

Male figures appear in these paintings too, but almost always as gods or Biblical figures, people with names. Men are characters, women are symbols...Is it any surprise that women’s bodies are treated as a public concern? The entire culture is accustomed to seeing them used as metonymies for our highest (and lowest) values. The long historical pedigree of anti-woman sentiment means that the fact that women’s bodies contain women’s minds has always been elided, in favor of metaphorical elevation or degradation. We always have to stand for something, and what we stand for is everyone’s business... This is why objectification isn’t just the province of misogynists, by the way. Often you’ll hear Nice Guys protest that they don’t objectify women — no, they worship them! So instead of just being sexual receptacles, women stand for all that is good and beautiful in the world. (my emphasis)

Though animal others are in a sense subjects, they (mostly) are not capable of self-representation through language–at least not to humans. As such, they have often been de-particularized and objectified into tokens for human virtues and vices (much like women’s bodies have). I’ve been wondering whether the Bears and the Bulls (among other animal-named sports teams) are similarly "wrong" as the Red Skins, eventhough they may not offend "animals" themselves. Both de-subjectify and stereotype the category of beings represented.

Such de-subjectification, I think, rationalizes their literal and figural disappearance as equals (whether through genocide, eviction, or cultural marginalization). And of course, Amerindians, women, and animal others don’t produce and distribute these images–they are not in control of their own signification. Rather, the privileged construct and consume these images in a dominating way as discussed by bell hooks in “Eating the Other.”

One objection may be that "animals" are more biologically determined, so they do not vary as much as humans, and thus that such stereotpes about species is justified. I would argue, however, that is stipulated in always already thinking about animals as categories rather than singularities. similarly, just because "animals" may not themselves be subjects the tokenfying gaze's presupossition tiself may be violent, though it does not de-subjectify. For instance, say Amerinidians of jews were no longer in existence; would these macots be honoring them in any true way, or ought we still be disturbed by their token-fied representations of those people, a trace of colonial genocide? I'd say the latter.

Thoughts?

The Power of Meat, a Matter of Taste

Is the value of power just a matter of taste?

Last year, China Daily reported on an article publshed in the Journal of Consumer Research titled "The Interactive Effect of Cultural Symbols and Human Values on Taste Evaluation."

While a big, juicy steak may indeed be culinary nirvana for many, your taste for beef could be based in part on expectation rather than reality...

On the assumption that meat is associated with social power in some peoples' minds, researchers rated study participants on what they call a Social Power Value Endorsement measure, to determine their preferences for meat and their cultural perceptions of it. Participants were then told they would taste either a beef sausage roll or a vegetarian roll...

"Participants who ate the vegetarian alternative did not rate the taste and aroma less favorably than those who ate the beef product...what influenced taste evaluation was what they thought they had eaten and whether that food symbolized values that they personally supported."

The authors conclude that taste is neither purely objective nor radically subjective, but culturally constituted.

This research should not be surprising to any vegan who has experienced first hand the cynisism of certain omnivorous humans when invited to try vegetarian food as well as the "I can't believe it's vegan" rsponses after they unknowingly consume something made with vegan intent.

As French Sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, writes in his groundbreaking work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste," taste is reproduced and policed through consumption used to mark distinctions in social statusin order to protect andmaintain boundaries of identity. "Meat" is sometimes argued to be universally preferenced over plant-based foods, and while their may be some evolutionary/nutritional truth to such claims, scholars have noted that such a prefernce is far from "natural" (i.e. objective and inevitable).

Though Bourdieu does not discuss food preferences in much legnth, his thesis about taste and consumption reflecting social values and identities, often centering around the tastes of the "higher" classes, is very relevant to understanding "meat." For instance, Carol Adams (1990) in The Sexual Politics of Meat discusses how meat signifies male privilege as meat is almost always disproportionately distributed to men cross-culturally. Similarly, Nick Fiddes (1991) in Meat: A Natural Symbol are es that meat within the modern Western tradition has symbolized the domination and/or control over "nature," Man's superiority to all others. prior to the present study, Julia Twigg (1983) in "Vegetarianism and the Meaning of Meat" had all ready studied the associations between meat and power held by both those who preffered and abstained from consuming animal flesh.

The power of meat as a symbol of class and gender prestige has even been demonstrated in the Chilean food riot just over a century ago: Banjamin Orlove argues in "Meat and Stregnth: The Moral Economy of the Chilean Food Riot" that unlike previous food riots, this one wasnot a matter of lack of "food," but lack of red meat which was a food consumed to distinguish the nomadic peasants from secure blue collar working men. Finally, meat can be seen as a symbol of national and cultural superiority and a rationalization and means of colonization and imperilaism. As food historian Rachel Laudan argues in her conference paper "Power Cuisines, Dietary Determinism and Nutritional Crisis: The Origins of the Globalization of the Western Diet," meat is the pinnacle of a "power cuisine" in modern times, which has been globalized through trade and conquest.

Of course, much of our taste for power comes neither from innate taste nor from symbolic culture, but from the political economy/ecology of our society. Thus, we can partially explain how American taste's have "evolved" from pork to beef to chicken. Though that's not to deny the nutritionism of the time does not also dictate preference (take a look at the doubleling of chciekn consumption from the 1970s to the 1990s based on the recommendations to eat "lean meat").