Feeling Disney: Affective Pedagogies In Walt Disney’s World

Session Submission Type: Panel

Proposal Description

The Walt Disney Company generates over fifty-two billion dollars per year (Iger, 2015) and continues to expand markets within and beyond the United States through theme parks, television and radio stations, publishing, licensed merchandise, educational materials, sports, music, urban development, and a gated resort community. These seemingly ubiquitous products and experiences operate as pedagogical processes, as Disney is, as Giroux and Pollock (2010) contend, a “teaching machine” that “exerts influence over consumers but also wages an aggressive campaign to peddle its political and cultural influence” (xiv). Through its goods, services, and experiences, Disney is a major cultural force shaping conceptions of family values, gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, “Americanness,” childhood, pleasure, entertainment, education, and community, and profoundly affects how we think, learn, and live. Disney thus operates as pedagogy that teaches us into particular ways of understanding the world, ourselves, and others. Since the 1980s Disney Studies scholars have produced a vast quantity of work constituting what Budd (2005) terms “Contemporary Disney Studies.” Scholars taking up this work within curriculum and cultural studies have helped us understand how The Walt Disney Company “represents the new face of neoliberal power, capable of not merely providing entertainment but also shaping the identities, desires, and subjectivities of millions of people across the globe” (Giroux & Pollock, 2010, p. xv). Scholarly analyses of these identities, desires, and subjectivities have explored how individuals learn from Disney, as it operates as a cultural curriculum that teaches us into particular ways of feeling, being, and buying (Author, in press).

More recently, Disney scholars within cultural curriculum studies have followed the “affective turn” (Clough, 2007) in the social sciences and humanities, which has sought to understand how human emotions are shaped by physiological and material elements as well as the dynamics of our social interactions. Smith (2011) explains that, “this understanding of affect suggests that what we imagine to be individual and specific—impulses, attitudes, emotions, and feelings—in fact have a social, historical, and therefore shared dimension” (p. 5). Using this framing, Disney Scholars have explored the important role affect plays in the pedagogies of The Walt Disney Company, as it relies to a large extent on creating and marketing emotions such as happiness, pleasure, excitement, adventure, and escape. Because emotions are socially created, scholars have posited that our emotional responses to Disney thus have social and historical dimensions, and constitute ways of knowing of and about ourselves and others that are intertwined with our ideas about our place within the social world. Within cultural curriculum studies, scholars have begun exploring Disney as an affective economy, whose corporate strategy relies on the production, packaging, and selling of ‘‘experiences and memories as commodities’’ (Fjellman, 1992, p. 11). Budd (2005) has suggested that Disney views the emotional desires of its audiences “not as demands to be supplied, or human aspirations to be respected and articulated, but as raw materials to be extracted and reconstructed, with the most profitable selected, hyperinflated, packaged, and sold back to the customers in an incomplete but adequately efficient process” (pp. 10-11). Jenkins (2006) explains that an affective economy is a system in which emotions act as a driving force for marketing products and experiences and consumer purchasing decisions.

Moreover, Disney’s creation and selling of affect is one way it participates in processes of social formation, including perpetuating social inequalities. That is, the emergence of affective economies has changed how control works within late capitalism, as direct ideological manipulation has been replaced by “the modulation of affect’’ (Andrejevic, 2011, p. 610). In affective economies, social control has shifted from being enacted via socialization and discipline to affect. Massumi (2002) thus posits, ‘‘affect is a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory’’ (p. 45). In this context, affect is produced, circulated, commodified, and consumed within complex networks of goods and services. Thus affect helps ‘‘to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective’’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 119). Affect is marshaled via Disney to teach us how to be particular kinds of Disney subjects with particular views of ourselves and the world around us—Disney, for example, uses affects of pleasure to offer a way for consumers to disavow the racism and white supremacy that characterize Western humanist and colonialist projects (Sandlin & Maudlin, 2015). In this paper panel, scholars take up these lines of questioning as they explore how Disney marshals pedagogies of affect and investigate our emotional investments in Disney, through examining a variety of products, processes, and experiences through which consumers engage with the affective pedagogies of The Walt Disney Company. Panelists will discuss the shared social and cultural dimensions of Disney’s fantasies of desire—and the fears contained within and repressed or denied by such fantasies—as they are expressed through various Disney texts. Participants will also examine how our emotional investments in Disney’s sanitized and idealized affective discourses can be counterproductive to critical engagements with The Walt Disney Company.

Sub Unit

• Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice

Individual Presentations

• Caged Pedagogies: Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Affect, and Colonial Experience - Jason Lukasik, Augsburg College; Jennifer April Sandlin, Arizona State University

• I Dream of a Disney World: Exploring Curriculum and Pedagogy in Brazil’s Middle-Class Playground - Sandro R. Barros, Michigan State University

• “I Put a Spell on You”: Weakness and the Pedagogical Art of Seduction in Disney’s Diva Villains - Mark Helmsing, University of Wyoming

• Practical Pigs and Other Instrumental Animals: Public Pedagogies of Laborious Pleasure in Disney Productions - Jake Burdick, Purdue University

• “It’s Called a Hustle, Sweetheart”: #BlackLivesMatter, the Police State, and the Politics of Colonizing Anger in Zootopia - Jennifer April Sandlin, Arizona State University; Nathan Snaza, University of Richmond

Session Organizers

• Jennifer April Sandlin, Arizona State University

• Jason Lukasik, Augsburg College