I Dream of a Disney World: Exploring Curriculum and Pedagogy in Brazil’s Middle-Class Playground

• In Event: Feeling Disney: Affective Pedagogies In Walt Disney’s World

Proposal Description

In this paper, I introduce the audience to an international perspective on the Disney curriculum as it relates to its effects on the collective psyche of the Brazilian middle-class. Through a critical discourse analysis approach, this paper examines the representation of the viagem a Disney [the Disney trip] articulated in posts of two Brazilian Disney bloggers. As a powerful social narrative, the viagem a Disney has become instituted in public discourse as a middle-class rite of passage. In the blogosphere, particularly, individuals continually reassert notions of class and identity that are intrinsically tied to the need to express affection for Disney as a type of worldly citizenship performance. As this paper argues, the ways in which the Disney trip is discussed in public fora reveals how the market forces that underwrite neoliberal ideology operate through the emotional labor that consumers perform on behalf of The Walt Disney Company to rearticulate the company’s products as more than mere things to possess. Instead, Brazilian consumers link their personal experiences of Disney to states of being and becoming “world” citizens that ultimately frame citizenship as a consumable item. Concurrently, bloggers narrativize the abstract ideals that are attached to Disney’s products as a synecdoche of the United States. Through this conflation of nation and corporation, bloggers—whether consciously or not—work to signify the Disney trip as the affordance of a cosmopolitan identity that is problematically viewed as global citizenship.

Author

• Sandro R. Barros, Michigan State University