Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Royal Resistance: The Hegemony Of Disney Princess Culture And The Agency Of Language, Rachel Leonard

Culminating Projects in English

The Disney Princess franchise has been commercially successful and culturally influential. While popular culture idealizes the Princess products, this thesis uses a feminist perspective to argue that the brand promotes an ideology of essentialized, traditional femininity that inhibits the ability of preschool girls to create complex identities. This problematic ideology is exacerbated by a transformation of the brand into a type of cultural hegemony that makes it seemingly impossible to resist the troubling influence of Disney's Princess.

Yet, in order to counteract a sense of determinism, there must be a way for individuals, especially parents and daughters, to exercise agency …