"This Is No Ordinary Apple": Learning to Fail Spectacularly From the Queer Pedagogy of Disney's Diva Villains

• In Event: 16.045 - Feeling Disney: Pedagogies of Affect

Abstract

The distinctive pedagogical encounters I had with women in my childhood can be classified into two orders: the middle-aged female teachers in my rural elementary school and the middle-aged female teachers in numerous Disney animated films I concurrently watched in (and out of) elementary school. In this essay I do not attempt to trace the women of “Disney’s divas of darkness” onto the bodies of my own elementary school teachers (despite some uncanny resemblances in more than one instance). What I do attempt to do in this essay is outline a “polymorphous perverse curriculum” of queerness I associate with a kind of learning Britzman (1995) describes as “conspicuously contested, masked…disavowed, and made synonymous with one’s identity” (p. 1). The curriculum of the Disney villains I confirm (and affirm) is expressed in Disney’s films through the diva villains’ own queer pedagogy. I aim to show how the Disney diva villains teach queerly to “make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled” (Sedgwick, 1993, p.3). As a good queer kid, I learned to invest my own fasciation and dutiful learning in these teachers who performed model lessons in what Halberstam (2012) identifies as “the queer art of failure”, lessons teaching me how not to fear failure and how not to relinquish the abjection (of my being queer, frail, and weird) that was seemingly keeping me from succeeding. To arrive at these understandings I use in this essay methodological and theoretical insight from autobiography (Pinar, 1994), desire/pedagogy (Britzman, 2000; Duncum, 2009; Finke, 1997), and queer theories of learning and childhood (Colebrook, 2011: Snediker, 2009; Stockton, 2009). These readerly moves position my analysis both within and beyond recent critical cultural studies of gender and sexuality in Disney animated films (Cokely, 2005; Davis, 2006, 2013; Putnam, 2013). By thinking queerly about the pedagogy of certain Disney diva villains I cathect my own learning to fail at being “good” (straight, normal) to the spectacular failure of the Disney villains who I found as a student in the estranging, disenchanting, harrowing forms of my childhood queered by innocence traditionally valorized in/with Disney. Following Stockton (2009), I focus on the “unfathomable, hazy motives” found in the motions of children visible in “sex, seduction, and delinquency” that also appear in the Disney diva villains to be far from evil (a word Walt Disney reportedly neither liked nor allowed to be used in his studios). Revolting against the commonplace, I read Lady Tremain’s lessons on self-control in Cinderella, Ursula’s lesson on confidence in The Little Mermaid (“never underestimate the importance of body language!”), and Maleficient’s lesson on the pangs of love in Sleeping Beauty (instructing Prince Charming that “a hundred years to a steadfast heart are but a day”) are forms of a queer pedagogy instructing me in how to question the normalizing, legitimating assumptions and virtues of the fixed, unchanging (and uninteresting) essence of Disney’s heroes.

Author

• Mark Helmsing, George Mason University