![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This article explores the melodramatic expression of lesbian girlhood and teen romance in Disney's Tangled (2010) and Disney Pixar's Brave (2012), as well as “Meripunzel” femslash, fan-authored romantic pairings of the animations' female protagonists. First, Anne Sexton's poem, “Rapunzel,” offers a literary precedent for exploring lesbian themes in the fairy tale. The next section shows how Tangled and Brave invoke the narrative conventions of the family melodrama. This generic association reveals the films' uses of rhetoric familiar to youth coming-out narratives, as well as other visual and aural coding suggestive of queer styles. The last section shows how Meripunzel femslash taps into the films' existing melodramatic narrative forms and visual aesthetics, rehearsing their coming-out rhetoric while addressing the pleasures of and problems facing lesbian teen romance. I conclude by problematizing the often conventional expressions of lesbian girlhood in femslash, ultimately arguing for their empowering potential, especially as they indicate revised definitions of “princess.”
CONTRIBUTOR
Katie Kapurch, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University. Her publications include chapters in the edited anthologies Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the Twilight Series (Ashgate, 2012) and Girls' Literacy Experiences In and Out of School: Learning and Composing Gendered Identities (Routledge, 2013). She has also published articles in the journals Children's Literature Association Quarterly and Neo-Victorian Studies. She is currently finishing a monograph, Victorian Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century: Jane Eyre, Twilight, and the Mode of Excess in Girl Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). Katie is also co-editing and contributing to the collection, New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles: Things We Said Today (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Notes
1In her study of slash and Harry Potter fandom, Catherine Tosenberger explains its associations with homoerotic romance. Tosenberger chooses “to concentrate … on male/male slash, as these pairings constitute the majority of Potter slash fanfiction, but” she points out, “female/female slash—often marked as ‘femslash,’ ‘femmeslash,’ or even ‘saffic’ (a portmanteau of ‘Sapphic fic’)—certainly exists and deserves critical attention; the most popular femslash pairing is Hermione/Ginny” (186).
2Pixar famously pioneered hair-animation with the characters' fur in Monsters Inc., and animating hair has been seen as a kind of tech prowess, so much so that Tangled's and Brave's animators even published studies explaining their innovations. Kelly Ward et al. explain the challenges of recreating realistic-looking hair in Tangled: “Controlling the hair while still allowing it to move naturally takes special consideration. We place loose springs between nearby curves to subtly influence the hair to hold its resting configuration, preventing it from falling everywhere, such as spilling over her shoulders, covering her face and body” (1). Likewise, Olivier Soares et al. explain hair as a special problem in Brave: “We were tasked with the challenge of creating hair that possesses its own dramatic and expressive personality, but still appears realistic and physically convincing. To accomplish this, we engineered a hair system that produces believable, natural movement while providing simulation artists with tools to direct the hair's motion as the story demanded.”
3“The poems in … Transformations … focus on the trials of young women entering (or refusing to enter) adult sexuality. … The experiences of physical maturation, new responsibility, or heterosexual desire has no rewards that outweigh its costs; the poems often permit feminist interpretations (in which the young women fight against or fall victim to patriarchal social structures) and Freudian ones (in which they illustrate new neuroses)” (Burt 136).
4Although it is sometimes confusing to discuss melodrama's modal nature and melodrama's generic categories in one breath, what is essential to remember is that in late-twentieth-century film criticism, scholars theorized particular “types” of melodramatic films. Film critics like Linda Williams later came around to Brooks's way of conceiving melodrama as a mode that transcends genres (“Melodrama”), but the cinematic generic categories are useful to a discussion of Tangled and Brave, just as is the reference to female point-of-view melodramatic film (often known as “the woman's film”) illustrated in the previous section.
5In spite of melodrama's ongoing ubiquity in popular culture, the mode's hyperbolic elevation of the mundane also make it a form of expression frequently disparaged by critics. Yet Brooks argues convincingly for its rhetorical vitality: “the melodramas that matter most convince us that the dramaturgy of excess and overstatement corresponds to and evokes confrontations and choices that are of heightened importance, because in them we put our lives—however trivial and constricted—on the line” (ix).
6Even though Tangled and Brave invoke two distinct generic categories, the family melodrama and the maternal melodrama, here I focus on the family melodrama as the broader genre under which mother–daughter conflicts reside. See my forthcoming study of Tangled's and Brave's adherence to the maternal melodrama, a generic form both films invoke to reflect and critique the pressures of postfeminist girlhood (Kapurch).
7Even though Tumblr uses the acronym “NSFW” (Not Safe for Work), a common Internet shorthand, to indicate explicit and sexual content, I am using Motion Picture Assocation of America (MPAA) ratings like “G” in order to show how fan art corresponds to the kind of representations (of intimacy, for example) presented in the G-rated Disney films themselves.
8“Love is a beautiful thing that comes in various ways and forms. My love came when I was still a child and the form it had taken was that of my best friend. From the start I somehow knew that it would never end well, but still I could not help myself. I loved her so much and I still do. I kept my feelings locked away, too afraid that I would lose someone so precious. With time, as we grew up, my feelings changed; they grew more intense and became harder to hide. When I came of age my mother let me know about my future role, that I would be introduced to many suitors. As if I was some sort of price [sic] to win. This idea, this tradition, I despise it like nothing else. In moments like these I always turned to my best friend and she stood by me in this like with so many other things. My best friend, my love, she confronted my mother, father and suitors about how love was not something you can force and that I should on my own find whom I want to marry. At this moment I had never loved her more. My mother was not amused by my love's interference, and both she and I were punished and confined to my room. I took this moment to speak with my best friend, my only love, about how I wish I was truly free to love whom ever I want. She never answered me, but I could sense her grief. All of this and up to now was what made me break my promise to never tell. I confessed my deepest feelings for my love, how I have always valued and treasured her like no other. My love, she, the expression that settled on her face was one I had never seen. It came down on me that it was one of aversion and in that instance I regretted ever falling in love. She, with harsh words, told me that my love was a betrayal towards her and our friendship. By loving her I had betrayed her and I did the only thing to mend what I had broken; I left to never return” (MeridaxRapunzel).
9Case in point: Neil Gaiman's new children's book, The Sleeper and the Spindle, a mash-up of “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.” According to a review in the Guardian, “the kiss that awakens the slumbering princess is not from a prince—princes remain firmly off stage, or dead in a thicket of roses—but from a young queen, who rises on her wedding day and dons chain mail to ride to the rescue. It's not a love story, but a tale of courage, determination and disconcerting tragedy and terror” (I. Williams). Gaiman, a mainstream and popular writer who is attuned to the kind of subcultural expression fan fiction permits, is invoking the same kind of melodramatic expression of protection and liberation of virtue that femslash authors depict—especially the sensual kiss between two princesses.