34.1603, Review: Sociolinguistics: Fought, Eisenhauer (2022)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1603. Tue May 23 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1603, Review: Sociolinguistics: Fought, Eisenhauer (2022)

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar, Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Lauren Perkins
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Everett Green, Joshua Sims, Daniel Swanson, Matthew Fort, Maria Lucero Guillen Puon, Zackary Leech, Lynzie Coburn
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon <luceroguillen at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: 06-Mar-2023
From: Sophie Frankpitt [sophie.frankpitt at warwick.ac.uk]
Subject: Sociolinguistics: Fought, Eisenhauer (2022)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.2777

AUTHOR: Sophie Frankpitt
TITLE: Language and Gender in Children's Animated Films
SUBTITLE: Exploring Disney and Pixar
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Sophie Frankpitt

SUMMARY

“Language and Gender in Children’s Animated Films” presents a
comprehensive overview of research into gender ideologies,
representations, and stereotypes within Disney and Pixar films,
through analysis of language. The authors, Carmen Fought and Karen
Eisenhauer, demonstrate how language is used to construct gender, and
ideas about gender, within these Disney and Pixar films. Through
exploring questions like who speaks when, who speaks in certain ways,
and who says what, the authors examine which language acts are tied to
which identities, and the gendered ideologies that are perpetuated by
language.

The book is grounded in its acknowledgement of the power that the
media has in our lives, particularly for children. Disney, especially,
plays a significant role in shaping gender ideologies on screen - to
the extent that children who watched more Princess films were more
likely to pick up stereotypical gendered behaviour (p. 7; citing Coyne
et al., 2016). As Fought and Eisenhauer note, however, linguistics has
yet to offer significant contributions to understanding gender in
children’s media, despite the richness of the topic. This book,
alongside other previous works (such as Lippi-Green, 1997), certainly
seem to be paving the way.

Many people have spent their lives enculturated in the Disney and
Pixar worlds. “Language and Gender in Children’s Animated Films” is
therefore relevant not only in linguistics but across disciplines and
outside of academia. As such, this work is an engaging, critical, and
accessible piece that has the potential to attract the average Disney
fan as much as any long-term linguistics enthusiast.

The authors focus on 31 Disney and Pixar films from over the years.
Their analysis moves between the quantitative and the qualitative,
with the aim of providing a holistic and nuanced overview of language
use in its context. They compare the language of masculine-presenting
characters and feminine-presenting characters, given that Disney and
Pixar tend to write characters who fit into the gender binary. The
chapters each focus on a different part of language - such as the
talkativeness of characters, compliments, and directives - which, as a
book, works to form a bigger picture of gender ideology in children’s
media. It is worth understanding this bigger picture before delving
into each chapter.

Overall, the analysis shows that, throughout Disney and Pixar films,
there is a consistent gender ideology. This is that ‘men are from
Mars, and women are from Venus’ (p. 206). Disney and Pixar both have a
lack of representation of women on screen. Female characters tend to
speak less, but are often criticised for being too talkative. Through
language, femininity is ideologically connected to politeness, while
masculinity is ideologically connected to power and authority. These
gender discourses are consistently constructed through frames of
whiteness and heteronormativity. Amid these disheartening findings,
though, we are presented with some hope: over time, there has been an
increase in female representation and speaking time on screen. Not
many other linguistic patterns appear to have changed across the
lifespan of the Disney and Pixar films, but there is, as the authors
note, evidence of at least some change.

Each chapter deals with a different aspect of analysis. Chapter One
introduces the reader to the importance of children’s media on
society, previous work into gender ideology and Disney, and the way in
which language and gender interact. It foregrounds the book for those
familiar with language and gender theory, and provides an accessible
introduction for newcomers to linguistics.

Chapter Two focuses on situating the films and their representation of
gender in political and historical context. It mostly reflects on
Disney Princess films, describing how their depictions of femininity
over time move alongside shifts in popular culture. The films are
split into three eras: Classic (1937-1959), Renaissance (1989-1997),
and New Age (2009-2019). The princesses in older stories, for example,
modelled ideal femininity as domesticity, kindness, and gentleness,
while New Age princesses exhibit a much more varied image of
femininity, with some romance storylines, some adventure, some family,
and so on. The mention of Pixar, which is treated separately from
Disney, notes that it seems to have evaded more social commentary than
Disney - attributed to the fact that Pixar writes more about
masculinity than femininity. The rest of the book uses this background
to support language analysis in context.

In Chapter Three, the authors move to the analysis of representation,
how much male and female characters talk, who is dominant in
conversations, and how their talk is perceived. Female characters are
shown to be underrepresented in Disney and Pixar, as mentioned, and
the films reproduce the ideology that women should speak less than
men. While men tend to talk more than women in the films, the authors
demonstrate how women are portrayed as too talkative.

Chapters Four to Seven are examinations of how language is used in a
way to construct (im)politeness in relation to femininity and
masculinity, through evaluating compliments, directives, insults, and
apologies. The authors suggest that Disney and Pixar’s language use at
least partially fortifies the constructed relation between femininity
and nicety or politeness. In Chapter Four, analysis of positive
politeness through the lens of compliment giving, compliment topics,
and how their nature has changed over time, result in the argument
that complimenting - as a politeness strategy - is closely related to
femininity. Chapter Five, through analysis of directives, concludes
that authority and power are presented as natural only for male
characters, given the prevalence of unmarked directives among male
characters.

Chapter Six moves from exploring politeness to exploring impoliteness,
focusing on insults. Insults and masculinity are linked, with male
characters using more insults than female, and male use of insults,
generally unlike female, being interpreted as humorous and
rapport-building. Chapter Seven investigates apologies, which have a
less gendered nature than other features, but still presents
apologising, a form of protecting face, as tied to female characters.

The final chapter of linguistic analysis brings the heteronormativity
of Disney and Pixar into light. Whilst more queer characters have been
written into recent films, they are all written as villains (termed
‘quillan’ by McLeod, 2016). The authors even identify a ‘Quillan
Language Style’ on p. 186, identifying the linguistic construction of
queerness as largely the transgression of male and female language
norms. The conclusion, all in all, synthesises the findings, and
reiterates that Disney and Pixar use language to construct a binary,
largely heteronormative, white gender ideology.

EVALUATION

The book contributes significantly to a recently emerging area of
sociolinguistics. It is coherently laid out, accessibly written, and
provides various avenues for future research. When analysing features
such as directives and insults, the nature and functions of such
linguistic features are explained in a way that exemplifies the
relevance of the analysis to both linguists and non-linguists. This
makes for a remarkably engaging read. Moreover, the authors manage to
present the significant amount of findings in a way that constructs a
holistic image of gender ideology in Disney and Pixar.

The book brings up as many new, exciting questions as it answers, as
will become clear. But perhaps most excitingly, it demonstrates how
linguistics can be effectively applied to solve and understand
real-world issues. It will be interesting to see the success with
which this research is brought into the public eye, and the effect it
has on Disney and Pixar’s future endeavours. This could be a learning
curve for the socio- and applied linguistics disciplines into how
linguistic research can be used effectively to enact social change.

In a book dedicated to analysis of language, ideology, and gender in
American-produced media, there are arguably a few important aspects:
intersectionality, positionality, and decolonialism. Fought and
Eisenhauer do a highly respectable job of acknowledging their own
positionality - as women brought up in a Disney world - in a way that
contributes to the readability of the book as well as some
acknowledgement of bias. Also, they make an active effort to examine
masculinity as well as femininity which, given that unmarked
masculinity is often overlooked, is commendable. Nonetheless, there is
some room for improvement in their theoretical application of
intersectionality, and even more so, a decolonial lens.

The authors recognise that their intersectional approach is not
complete (p.17). The acknowledgement is helpful and demonstrates
awareness, but it does not solve the problem that the application of
an intersectional lens is inconsistent. This is problematic for a few
reasons: one of the book’s aims is to analyse ideologies about gender,
race, and other social categories; a major finding is Disney’s white
and heteronormative framing; and gender analysis is thought to be
partial when sidelining intersectionality (Hankivsky, 2014).

There are moments in the book that would benefit from a more
intersectional lens. On p. 93, for example, Excerpt 4D codes a
compliment towards Snow White, which is shortly followed by a
description of her red lips, black hair, and ‘skin white as snow’. An
intersectional framework would consider not only the fact that a woman
is receiving an appearance-based compliment, but that such a
compliment is founded upon white, Eurocentric beauty standards. This
is naturally tied to a decolonial lens too, because recent discourse
on Disney has criticised the appropriation of non-Western stories and
cultures (e.g., Domas, 2021). The authors do mention this at times
(e.g., p. 31), but it does not play a major role in their analysis.
Again, for consistency, consider appearance- and skill-based
compliments towards male characters in Disney films (p. 100). The four
films that have more appearance-based compliments are European-origin
tales with mostly white leads. Of the eight films with less
appearance-based compliments than skill-based, half are non-Western
tales with main characters of colour. Gender-based compliments and
gender ideology seem to be tied to racialisation and colonial thought
too.

The authors encourage further intersectional examination of Disney and
Pixar films, and this is helpfully signposted as an area needed for
future research. When they do take an intersectional approach - as in
Chapter Five’s examination of the intersection between gender and
institutional authority, Chapter Six’s analysis of the gender-race
intersection in insults, or the consistent exploration of masculinity
and heteronormativity - fascinating and nuanced results are produced.
Thus, while the book may occasionally lack in terms of
intersectionality, it does contribute considerably to the field of
sociolinguistics in a multitude of ways, and it further opens up the
somewhat limited discussion of language and gender in children’s
media.

On that note, it is worth highlighting one final, major contribution
that this book makes to sociolinguistics: its analysis of the way in
which dominant ideologies about gender and language are produced. Many
sociolinguistic studies examine the linguistic performance of gender
on an individual or community basis. Fewer seem to examine the
dominant gendered language norms from which we draw. But the way we
perform gender is related both to individual agency and the influence
of sociopolitical structure. Therefore, Fought and Eisenhauer’s focus
on examining dominant ideologies of gender and language has the
potential to explore beyond only individual gender performances,
starting to probe into the relationship between dominant, societal
ideologies about gender, and the way we individually perform it. There
is definitely more room for this implication of their work to be
discussed and analysed.

Overall, the accessible, engaging, and insightful nature of this book
is an incredibly exciting addition to the sociolinguistics literature.
It is one that has the potential to spark both public and academic
discussion, and to encourage the use of a feminist linguistic lens to
better understand our social world.

References

Coyne, S.M., Linder, J.R., Rasmussen, E.E., Nelson, D.A., & Birkbeck,
V. (2016). Pretty as a princess: Longitudinal effects on engagement
with Disney Princesses on gender stereotypes, body esteem, and
prosocial behaviour in children. Child Development, 87(6), 1909-1925.
https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12569

Domas, R. (2021). Unmasking the mouse: Cultural appropriation in
Disney films. [Honors Student Research, Kutztown University]. Research
Commons at Kutztown University. https://research.library.kutztown.edu/
cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=honorspapers

Lippi-Green, R. (1997). Teaching children how to discriminate: What we
learn from the Big Bad Wolf. In English with an accent: Language,
ideology, and discrimination in the United States. 79-103. Psychology
Press.

McLeod, D. (2016). Unmasking the quillain: Queerness and villainy in
animated Disney films. (Publication No. 4802) [Doctoral dissertation,
University of Wollongong]. Research Online.
https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4802

Hankivsky, O. (2014). Intersectionality 101. Institute for
Intersectionality Research and Policy.
https://resources.equityinitiative.org/handle/ei/433

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sophie Frankpitt is a Linguistics undergraduate at the University of
Warwick, currently studying her third year in Gender Studies and
Linguistics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research interests
include language, gender, and sexuality, language and identity, and
language and politics. She aims to study her PhD in Sociolinguistics
following the completion of her bachelor’s degree in 2024.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please consider donating to the Linguist List https://give.myiu.org/iu-bloomington/I320011968.html


LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

American Dialect Society/Duke University Press http://dukeupress.edu

Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group) http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Brill http://www.brill.com

Cambridge Scholars Publishing http://www.cambridgescholars.com/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Dictionary Society of North America http://dictionarysociety.com/

Edinburgh University Press www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

Equinox Publishing Ltd http://www.equinoxpub.com/

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

Georgetown University Press http://www.press.georgetown.edu

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Linguistic Association of Finland http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

SIL International Publications http://www.sil.org/resources/publications

Springer Nature http://www.springer.com

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1603
----------------------------------------------------------