Para Leer a la Pata Daisy/How to Read Daisy Duck

• In Event: (Re)visions of American Selves: U.S. Mass Culture and its Exclusions

Abstract

In their seminal 1971 text, Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart asked readers to confront Disney’s enormously successful efforts to pass off US imperialist culture as the “common cultural heritage of contemporary man.” A crucial part of these efforts, they argued, was the construction of childhood as an “autonomous and asocial sphere,” a kind of paradise defined by purity and innocence that falsely promises future redemption for the real world ravaged by adults and thereby encourages total complacency in the present. Thus, Dorfman and Mattelart argue, grown-ups that buy into this idealized image of the child achieve the “self-colonization of [their] own imagination.” This paper revisits Dorfman and Mattelart’s argument more than fifty years later by putting it in conversation with close readings of Disney’s enormously successful Inside Out franchise, as well as related performances of writer-director-comedian Julio Torres. I argue that the Inside Out movies help us see another way Disney has been inviting us to self-colonize our minds–these movies give us an individualistic, highly rationalistic picture of what emotional literacy looks like for children and adults, one with little use for imagination. Fortunately, Julio Torres’ idiosyncratic work in the comedy special My Favorite Shapes prompts us to take a reparative approach to the DIsney empire. Through close reading, I show that this reparative approach must be built around a different conception of emotional literacy, one that empowers adults to use all the resources of children’s media to imagine new, and better worlds.

Author

• Carmen M Merport Quiñones, Oberlin College