'Balancing family time with fighting villains': gender, agency and social action in the representation of Disney Heroes

Coffey-Glover, L. ORCID: 0000-0002-4432-8177 and Mackenzie, J., 2023. 'Balancing family time with fighting villains': gender, agency and social action in the representation of Disney Heroes. Gender and Language, 16 (4), pp. 359-381. ISSN 1747-6321

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Abstract

This study provides a feminist stylistic account of gendered agency in a set of 'Disney Heroes' collectible trading cards designed for young children to play with. Through a mixed-methods analysis of grammatical, semantic and social agency in the texts, we show how the representation of male and female characters in these cards reinforces limiting, and potentially damaging, gender norms around men being more socially agentive, having more impact on the world around them, and ultimately being more 'heroic', than women. There is some cause for optimism in terms of the improved representation of female characters over time, and the foregrounding of female heroes' agentive roles in their worlds, but ultimately the cards uphold the hegemonic status quo. The quantitative and qualitative dimensions of this analysis also revealed quite different insights, demonstrating the importance of analyses that account for the way linguistic strategies are deployed in context, and in combination with a range of other resources.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Gender and Language
Creators:	Coffey-Glover, L. and Mackenzie, J.
Publisher:	Equinox Publishing
Date:	23 January 2023
Volume:	16
Number:	4
ISSN:	1747-6321
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1558/genl.21436 DOI 1566505 Other
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	10 Aug 2022 08:58
Last Modified:	07 Mar 2023 10:48
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/46852

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