Who gets to rule the kingdom? Do you get to enter it as yourself?
A few weeks ago, a video of a ‘tween girl getting a makeover at the Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boutique on the Disney Wish went viral. “Mom, I really want to be a prince instead!” she said midway through a princess makeover on the new cruise ship last summer. The video shows her grinning broadly as she performs a courtly bow in the prince outfit.
Here, Disney— the company that gave us the early 2000s girlie-girl princess boom—is the site of a more fluid kind of gender play (the company has also been working on making the salon more inclusive in terms of race, ability, and the roles of people who work there).
This video spoke to me personally. One of my favorite things that has ever happened in my family was a moment in Disney World at Cinderella’s Royal Table restaurant. The hostess gave a toy sword to my husband and fairy wands to my daughter and me as she seated us. The Offspring is not a princess child. My husband gently corrected the situation. “Excuse me,” he said, “I think you are mistaken about who is the brave knight in our party,” as he traded the objects. Our child beamed.
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Simultaneously, the political culture wars over Disney continue.
Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis officially appointed his allies, including donors, to the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District (formerly the Reedy Creek Improvement District)— the entity that oversees things like building permits, roads, and sewage at Walt Disney World— a space roughly the size of the entire city of San Francisco in acreage. DeSantis, aided by the Florida legislature, took over this board (previously independent) in retaliation for the Walt Disney’s Company’s public statements against his education bill last spring.
One of those appointees is Ron Peri— CEO and chairman of The Gathering, a ministry that promotes Christian nationalism, with a focus on outreach to men that recalls the muscular Christianity of a century ago— with an extra-bigoted twist. Peri has speculated that there is a connection between estrogen in water and gay identity (among other things— he also posted the creepiest pseudo-philo-Semitic-but-actually-terrible-for-the-Jews slide deck I’ve ever seen, but I refuse to link out to it).
Though of course these two examples are conjoined, it is breathtaking to take them in together. A joyous young woman in a cape. Adult men who want to quash that joy.
Sometimes I have thought—or other people have intimated—that this book project is trivial. (Most of this is self-deprecatory, but…). Disney as diversion, escape, entertainment. But this is all serious, and it always has been. The films and parks are intertwined troubling racial and religious histories, while also providing the kind of emotional power that gets people through tough times, like Mickey Mouse capering across the Great Depression.
For DeSantis and Co., that circle of affective empowerment has gotten too wide. Disney today tells too many different people’s stories, they say. Disney in the 1950s is what they want. Or what they imagine Disney to have been then.
Only they want something even more exclusionary — because there is no church on Main Street. It Disney World was not built for one religion.
That doesn’t mean the 1950s Disney wasn’t still, implicitly, Christian. “I believe firmly in the efficacy of religion, in its powerful influence on a person’s whole life. It helps immeasurably to meet the storm and stress of life and to keep you attuned to the Divine inspiration. Without inspiration, we would perish,” Walt Disney wrote in a 1949 piece for Guideposts, promoting the film So Dear to My Heart. “All I ask of myself is to live a good Christian life and toward that objective I bend every effort in shaping my personal, domestic and professional activities and growth.” Disney the man professed a dedication to Christianity, but was less devout than his ardent congregationalist father. He dropped his daughters off at Sunday School every week but did typically attend services himself. Certainly, he ascribed to a vision of a Cold War America that was religious, unlike the so-called godless communists. Yet he still didn’t include a church in his vision of the perfect town.
There was plenty of gender policing in Disney policies of the 1950s. There was a lot of anti-communism in Wat Disney’s public statements. There was racism in the films. As a Jewish woman, I am frequently asked if Disney was an anti-Semite— which would be a very long post, it’s not a simple thing. (I CAN say that without some of the Jews who worked directly with him—including the Sherman brothers and Marty Sklar—some of Disney’s greatest classics would not exist).
But it also wasn’t the world DeSantis wants to build.
I’ve seen so many vile things said about Disney on certain parts of the internet this week— and it is tied up in a wave of cruelty and hatred in the United States as a whole. Hatred of transgender people, gays, lesbians, genderqueer people, black Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Jews, Muslims … and the list goes on.
On one level, this is a rerun— the Southern Baptists had a boycott of Disney over their LGBTQ acceptance in the 1990s. Disney has always meant much more than just a mouse.
What’s new in the 2023 reboot, and terrifying, is that this time, state power is so directly married to white male Christian hegemony.
Last week I wrote about Cinderella. This week, I am thinking of Prince Charming, and I am thinking of Moana.
Near the end of the opening day broadcast of Disneyland, we can watch as the castle’s drawbridge slowly lowers to a flourish of trumpets. A knight on a grand steed appears before the bridge. “Open the Fantasyland castle in the name of the children of the world!” he booms. Then they stream across the bridge, led by Mickey Mouse, joyous and playful— like the girl in the tik tok video.
Fast forward over sixty years, to 2016. I am in a movie theater in Pennsylvania with my daughter— five years old— and my husband. We are watching Moana. At the film’s climax, Moana holds up a brilliant green stone— the heart of the goddess Te Fiti— before a raging, volcanic being, Te Ka. She has figured out the truth. Te Ka— the “villain”—is in fact Te Fiti. When Maui stole her heart, she was no longer herself on the outside—she was imprisoned in fire.
Only Moana sees who is there under the fear, the victimization, the violence.
She steps forward.
“I have crossed the horizon to find you.
I know your name.
They have stolen the heart from inside you.
But this does not define you.
This is not who you are.
You know who you are,” she sings.*
“Who you truly are,” she whispers, pressing her forehead to Te Ka’s.
Te Fiti’s heart is restored, and she is transformed back into herself, glorious, green, joyous. It is not a transition in the ways we think about transgender life today, quite. She was a goddess—her heart was stolen— and she returns to a prior form, not showing it for the first time. But still. It resonates.
When I saw the film, I was facing a different kind of embodiment struggle— not a trans one, but one where I knew my inside self did not sit right my body. What is on the inside is not always what we get to show. I wept. I still weep, when I watch this film. Moana’s gift is one of sight and compassion. Those who victimize us do not get to define us.
May all the brave knights and brave young sea voyagers bring us out of America’s rocky, painful waters into something better.
“Know Who You Are,” Music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’i (2016).