Decoding Disney: Amelia Steinbach

My name is Amelia Steinbach and I am a first year student at Duke University. I have created this blog for my Writing 101 course, titled "Decoding Disney." I was inspired to take this Writing 101 class after completing an independent study my senior year of high school regarding the "Implications of Gender Inequality." During the first quarter of my independent study, I focused on the role of women within the entertainment industry, but primarily in Disney princess movies. While I had heard criticisms of Disney, specifically for its portrayal of race and gender, I had not revisited the movies for several years. As I began to watch the movies and listen to the songs again, I was often left speechless. Had my parents SEEN these? Why had I been allowed to watch them? And, mostly, why in the world was The Little Mermaid my favorite princess movie? I mean, the plot is literally a sixteen year-old giving up her voice and changing her body to be with a man who made zero sa

The general public rarely thinks critically about song lyrics, but most decent adults who read the lyrics to Ursula’s “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from The Little Mermaid would express alarm that their sons and daughters are exposed to those messages during such a formative age. Some of the most distressing lines include “it’s much preferred for ladies not to say a word” and “it’s she who holds her tongue who gets a man.”  While those specific lyrics are unique to one Disney princess movie, Disney as a franchise seems to have embraced the silencing of women (characters). Ironically, the three original Disney princess movies (Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) did not have as large of a problem with female dialogue as the movies which followed them. When The Little Mermaid was released after a several decade-long interval from the three classics, it was the first princess movie where a minority of the dialogue was spoken by wome