Damsels In Discourse : Girls Consuming And Producing Identity Texts Through Disney Princess Play - Sociology Assignment Help,

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Damsels In Discourse 

Dawing upon theories that reconceptualize toys and artifacts as identity texts, this study employs mediated discourse  analysis to examine children’s videotaped writing and play interactions with princess dolls and stories in one kindergarten  classroom. The study reported here is part of a three-year ethnographic study of literacy play in U.S. early childhood  classrooms. The specific focus here is on young girls who are avid Disney Princess fans and how they address the gen dered identities and discourses attached to the popular films and franchised toys. The study employs an activity model  design that incorporates ethnographic microanalysis of social practices in the classroom, design conventions in toys and  drawings, negotiated meanings in play, and identities situated in discourses.

The commercially given gendered princess  identities of the dolls, consumer expectations about the dolls, the author identities in books and storyboards associated  with the dolls, and expectations related to writing production influenced how the girls upheld, challenged, or transformed  the meanings they negotiated for princess story lines and their gender expectations, which influenced who participated  in play scenarios and who assumed leadership roles in peer and classroom cultures. When the girls played with Disney  Princess dolls during writing workshop, they animated identities sedimented into toys and texts. Regular opportunities to  play with toys during writing workshop allowed children to improvise and revise character actions, layering new story  meanings and identities onto old. Dolls and storyboards facilitated chains of animating and authoring, linking meanings  from one event to the next as they played, wrote, replayed, and rewrote. The notion of productive consumption explains  how girls enthusiastically took up familiar media narratives, encountered social limitations in princess identities, impro vised character actions, and revised story lines to produce counternarratives of their own. 

Childhood cultures are made up of interwoven narratives  and commodities that cross TV, toys, fast-food packaging,  video games, T-shirts, shoes, bed linen, pencil cases, and  lunch boxes...teachers find their cultural and linguistic mes sages losing power and relevance as they compete with these  global narratives. Just how do we negotiate these invasive  global texts? (New London Group, 1996, p. 70)n a global array of children’s merchandise and play things, the Disney Princess franchise stands out.  The Disney Princess brand, “the most successful  property for Disney Toys” (Disney Consumer Products,  2007, paragraph 3), brings together eight heroines from  Walt Disney Pictures animated film classics: Snow  White, Jasmine from Aladdin, Belle from Beauty and  the Beast, Pocahontas, Mulan, Cinderella, Ariel from The  Little Mermaid, and Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. Young  girls, ages 3 to 5 years old, are the target market for  Disney Princess multimedia and an accompanying line  of licensed toys, collectibles, apparel, and household  goods featuring the film characters. The entire fran chise produced $4 billion in global retail sales for 2007,  offering a bedazzling collection of pastel products that  includes animated films, DVDs, toys, fast-food meals,  music CDs, books, interactive webpages, video games,  costumes, clothing, bed linens, school supplies, makeup  kits, and even Cinderella cleaning supplies (Iger, 2006;  Noon, 2005). 

Identity messages circulate through merchandise  that surrounds young consumers as they dress in,  sleep on, bathe in, eat from, and play with commer cial goods decorated with popular culture images,  print, and logos, immersing children in products that  invite identification with familiar media characters and  communicate gendered expectations about what chil dren should buy, how they should play, and who they  should be (New London Group, 1996). During play  with Disney Princess toys, children reenact film scripts  Reading Research Quarterand expectations for each princess character, quoting  memorized dialogue or singing songs from the films as  they talk in-character while playing with dolls or while  using princess accessories. The pervasive availability of  consumer products associated with the Disney Princess  films blurs the line between play and reality, allowing  children to live in-character: One can be Cinderella all  day long, sleeping in pink princess sheets, eating from  lavender Tupperware with Cinderella decals, and dress ing head to toe in licensed apparel, from plastic jewel encrusted tiara to fuzzy slipper-socks.

Fascination with Disney royalty also travels to  school, toted in pink backpacks and lunchboxes deco rated with large smiling princess heads. In some class rooms, popular culture media and toys are relegated to  the unofficial space of the playground, deemed inappro priate topics for the serious business of learning to read  and write. However, in classrooms with permeable cur ricula (Dyson, 1993), children selectively choose ma terial from their popular culture repertoire for literacy  play themes (Dyson, 1997, 2003). In the classroom case  in this article, a permeable curriculum incorporated  Disney Princess dolls and stories into writing workshop  activities, enabling children to replay and rewrite the  well-worn story lines and characters from Disney films  and to use princess themes to fuel their passions and  impress their peers. 

This article examines kindergartners’ play with  Disney Princess dolls and stories to discover how young  girls read and respond to constraining story lines at tached to their beloved media toys. (The focus of this  article is on the girls’ play and writing with Disney  princesses and associated discourses. A thorough dis cussion of the boys who also played, wrote, and clearly  loved these films is beyond the scope of this article and  is the focus of a separate article; Wohlwend, 2008a.) 

Do girls enthusiastically take up and replay stereo typical gendered narratives evoked by dolls, or do they  revise stories and characters to produce counternarra tives of their own? Analysis of excerpts from a three year ethnographic study of literacy play in kindergarten  classrooms shows that when girls played with Disney  Princess dolls and repeatedly enacted the associated  film texts, they rewrote plots they knew by heart and  subtly altered character roles to take up more empow ered identity positions in child-ruled imaginary spaces.  As they wrote plays and books about Disney Princess  characters, children drew upon their media knowledge  as well as valued school literacy practices (Street, 1995)  and available classroom identities as girls and boys, au thors and animators, and actors and directors. In this  article, I examine recursive processes of improvisation  and revision in children’s play and writings with Disney  Princess dolls to understand how toys act as durable  texts that concretize identities and discourses in media  

narratives as well as children’s counternarratives (my  use of the term discourse is consistent with Gee’s [1996]  use of the term as particular ways of talking, speak ing, dressing, playing, and so on, that index affiliation  with a larger group or set of beliefs. Because these ways  simultaneously index a group’s beliefs and tacit rules,  I also use discourse in a Foucauldian sense to indicate  how language circulates power in global and local ways.  When I refer to specific verbal interactions, I will use  such terms as talk or speech). More specifically: 

Q-How do young girls combine play and writing to  negotiate the tension between their desire to faithfully  reproduce story lines from favorite Disney films and  their desire to get past social limitations of performing  the predetermined gender expectations associated with  media toy marketing and princess play? 

Q-What happens when teacher acceptance of Disney Princess dolls as appropriate materials for writing .

Workshop juxtaposes character and consumer identities  in femininity discourseWith cultural artifacts, from children’s scribbled draw ings to manufacturers’ franchised toys, bear traces of  the social practices that produced them (Brougère,  2006). Rowsell and Pahl (2007) combined theories of  text with sociocultural theories of identity (Gee, 1996;  Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) to read  child-made artifacts as tangible links to children’s iden tities and histories of experiences. An artifact can be  read for its producer’s intended meaning and also for  its sedimented identities, layers that reflect a child’s deci sions about which modes and materials to use (Kress,  1997, 2003b), the identity performances made available  to children within prevailing discourses (Butler, 1993),  and the practices and dispositions, or habitus valued  by families, schools, or communities (Bourdieu, 1977).  This expanded definition of texts in context recognizes  drawings, crafts, and art projects as literacy artifacts,  fashioned from material objects with physical proper ties and design affordances that can be read as layered  assemblages of meanings, modes, practices, histories,  and discourses. 

The conflation and intersection of Discourses become  modalities in texts, which, alongside practices, provide a  formative picture of the meaning makers—not only their  pathway into literacy but also how they make meaning in 58 Reading Research Quarterly • 44(1) certain contexts and engage in practice. The theory provides  a lens on how producers sediment identities and what identi ties they sediment. (Rowsell & Pahl, 2007, p. 392, emphasis  in original) Through ethnographic analysis, Rowsell and Pahl un covered evidence that children’s artifacts hold traces  of literacy practices that tap into prior experiences and  sediment layers of identities, social practices, and dis positions learned at home and school. For one child,  making a bird from tissue paper layered his knowledge  of chickens on his family’s farm in rural Turkey, a pet  name that his mother had for him, a teachers’ reading  of The Ugly Duckling, and a prior bird-making craft ac tivity at school. His hand-made artifact concretized the  previous as well as the immediate social practices used  to create them. “The text, then, becomes an artifact of  identities as much informed by social practice, habi tus (Bourdieu, 1977), and context as it is by the mate rial choices made during its creation” (Rowsell & Pahl,  2007, p. 392). 

This article extends Rowsell and Pahl’s (2007) no tion of artifacts as sedimented identities in texts de posited by layered histories of multimodal literacy  practices. I suggest that commercially produced toys are  artifacts with anticipated identities: identities that have  been projected for consumers and that are sedimented  by manufacturers’ design practices and distribution  processes. Anticipated identities in toys and commercial  media that children consume interact more subtle narra tives about identity and status that relate to global mar kets and societal beliefs about gender and childhood. In this expanded definition, toys invite players to  read and perform particular identities through play.  Carrington (2003) analyzed Diva Starz dolls as texts  in the context of a “textual landscape” that merges  consumer expectations in global markets and gender  expectations in popular media. These talking dolls  communicate a “hip” quality through their materials as  well as their prerecorded one-liners. The dolls’ mate rial design updates the classic Barbie design by adding  Japanese anime facial features: nonexistent ears, tiny  nose and mouth, and enormous eyes that cover one  third of the face. The identity text “cool girl” is com municated through the doll’s anime features as well as  its hairstyle, makeup, and clothing. The doll’s snippets  of talk, “I’m bored—Let’s go shopping,” voice gendered  consumer identity messages for children in the target  demographic of 6- to 12-year-old girls. Carrington’s  analysis interrogates these popular dolls as complex  texts that require children as readers, players, and con sumers to coordinate messages about taste, cultural  capital, and social status (Bourdieu, 1986). 

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