The boys who would be princesses: playing with gender identity intertexts in Disney Princess transmedia

Abstract

Using data from a 3-year ethnographic study in US early childhood classrooms, I examine two kindergarten boys’ classroom play with their favourite Disney Princess transmedia to see how they negotiated gender identity layers clustered in the franchise's commercially given storylines and consumer expectations. This analysis contributes necessarily syncretic methods of analysis that enable critical examination of the complexity in children's play interactions with popular media artefacts as collaborative and heteroglossic negotiations of gender. Mediated discourse analysis of action and multimodality in boys’ Snow White princess play makes visible how children pivoted and anchored their performances as they negotiated, played, and blurred boundaries among gender identity intertexts.

Keywords:

• boys
• identities
• popular culture
• ethnography
• literacy

Notes

At the time of the classroom study, the films The Princess and the Frog and Tangled were not released yet. Tiana was added to the Disney Princess brand in March 2010 and Rapunzel was added in October 2011.

The focus here is primarily on gender identity texts, suggested by Disney Princess girls-only marketing and children's reactions to boys playing with toys perceived as girls’ toys.

All names for the children and the teacher are pseudonyms.

Jewitt (2006) drew a distinction between a social semiotic approach to multimodality (Kress 2009) that examines textual representations for modes as semiotic resources governed by cultural grammars and an interactional approach to multimodality (Scollon and Scollon 2004) that examines activity in context for modes as sensory aspects of the environment that interact in ways that foreground certain modes and background others in ways that shape the situated meaning of the event.

Anthony and Daniel's practice of assigning a female identity to a male doll or their portrayal of female roles prompted frequent out-of-play-frame negotiations with similar questions ‘Are you guys girls?’ and assertions ‘I call it a boy’ (see also Wohlwend 2012).