In Response to "Notes on Isolation"

(This was originally supposed to be a comment, but it ended up getting a little long. I thought it'd be more readable in this form.)

Personally, I think it would be way more interesting if the Princesses passed the Bechdel test. I love character interactions, and I can imagine that there are quite a few girls out there who've basically said to hell with Disney's canon and made up their own stories using as many princesses as they had dolls.

"Notes on Isolation" reminded me of something most people versed in Disney lore probably don't know much about, a video game by the name of Kingdom Hearts. In it, a young boy travels across a universe of Disney worlds in order to stop the "Heartless," creatures of darkness encroaching on each world. Over the course of the game, the seven "Princesses of Heart" (Cinderella, Aurora, Snow White, Alice, Jasmine, Belle, and a new girl added by the game, the hero's own love interest, Kairi) are kidnapped from their realms and transported to one of the final levels, Hollow Bastion, where the boy eventually rescues them.

And somehow, despite the fact that all of the Princesses are obviously sharing the same space, standing right next to each other in an identifiable world, Disney manages to keep up the Disney ideal set forth by Mooney.

You can see, in this video (skip to 0:44, watch until 1:42), that the Princesses never look at each other.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc-ZgqL5q4U

Though they say "we," referring to the Princesses as a group, they never address one another, only Sora, the young hero. In the entirety of the game, I can't think of an instance where the Princesses chat amongst themselves. In many of Kingdom Hearts' levels, in fact, there is only one female to be found at all! If there are two, the second is usually a Disney villain. This may be due to the constraints of basing the levels around Disney films, but it's still a bit jarring.

In the one case that I can think of which may adhere to the Bechdel test, the female characters don't belong to Disney at all. They're taken from the Final Fantasy series. The two that spring to mind are Aerith Gainsborough and Yuffie Kisaragi, who, alongside Squall Leonhart, provide background support for Sora. They probably fail the test, anywho, because I'm almost certain that all of their conversations are about Sora and his quest.

It's also interesting to note that in every new land, Sora gets to team up with a Disney movie star. In the "Alice in Wonderland" level, rather than allow Sora to team up with Alice, the movie's heroine, he gets no one. Over the course of his journey, he meets Tarzan, combs the streets of Agrabah with Aladdin, traipses through Halloween Town with Jack Skellington, flies through London with Peter Pan, rescues Belle from a cursed castle with Beast, and defeats Ursula with Ariel.

Yep. Ariel. The only female character to earn a place in the party. And in the second game, Mulan is the standout female party member while Ariel has been relegated to a minigame.

I'll be the first to say that I love these games. They're a ton of fun, and as a "fangirl" of both Final Fantasy and Disney movies, I can't help but enjoy the relentless cameos. But I'd never thought about them with a feminist eye before. It's startling and disappointing, especially since this mingling of movies could have given us so much more than Disney's same old, same old.

Notes on Isolation

I was drinking out of my Princess mug (looks something like this) the other day after class... it was the day that Hannah had introduced us to the Bechdel Test, I believe. I realized: the Princess mug doesn't pass the Bechdel Test, either.

Peggy Orenstein, in her NYT article "What's wrong with Cinderella" (Dr G. passed it out at some point), touches on the non-interactivity of the way that the Princesses are marketed:

• "Mooney [Disney marketing executive] picked a mix of old and new heroines to wear the Pantone pink No. 241 corona: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan and Pocahontas. It was the first time Disney marketed characters separately from a film’s release, let alone lumped together those from different stories. To ensure the sanctity of what Mooney called their individual “mythologies,” the princesses never make eye contact when they’re grouped: each stares off in a slightly different direction as if unaware of the others’ presence" (Orenstein, fourth paragraph on page 2).

Here's a quick Google image search example.

However, Orenstein doesn't explore the implications of this isolation. What do you guys think? Should the princesses be kept separate to maintain the "individual 'mythologies'" or should they pass the Bechdel test?

Project Gutenberg is awesommmme. Check it out.

Project Gutenberg is...
"the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks" (from their website). Everything is free because their copyrights have expired; it's all in the public domain. Therefore, it's a fab place to find oooold texts that discussed gender and sexuality. One of my favorite ones is Henry Stanton's Sex: Avoided Subjects Discussed in Plain English (circa 1922).

Here are some other wonderful links to texts about sex...
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26117/26117-h/26117-h.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31352/31352-h/31352-h.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20830/20830-h/20830-h.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14969/14969-h/14969-h.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21840/21840-h/21840-h.htm


Aaand, there are some really awesome fairy tales available! MANY by the Grimm brothers, Frank L. Baum (and here and here), and many more - different cultures, time periods, languages are represented. Just type in "Fairy" in the second search box on the left column.

Kicking things off in the proper way

This is some really well-crafted comedy... we danced around a bit of this today in class (gay sex and representations of it in pop culture). It's short, hilarious, wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in9SiDtJLaU
(if you're really pressed for time, start at about :45)