Ventriloqueer: Finding Voice in the Strange Boyhoods of Disney Princesses

Abstract

This thesis considers two samples from the Disney Princess film canon as texts that can speak to, and be reclaimed in the name of, queer experience. Ron Clements and John Musker’s The Little Mermaid (1989), and Nathan Greno and Byron Howard’s Tangled (2011) are the texts examined to propose such a notion. Conceived within the qualitative methodological tradition of autoethnography, the autobiographical genre of writing where personal lived experiences are related back to the cultural, this thesis utilises the autoethnographic mode as both text and method to interpret Tangled and The Little Mermaid. Comparative to other qualitative methods, autoethnography enables this project’s exploration of the different ways in which one can receive, interpret, reclaim, and experiment with the type of texts one can produce when playing with voice. Operating on a less obvious level, this thesis critiques language as a symbolic order of gender binarism and heterosexuality through unconventional writing practices. By narrating my coming out story through Tangled as a creative vessel, Chapter Two mobilises Ken Plummer’s notion of the coming-out post-narrative. Chapter Three examines a queer relation to temporality through The Little Mermaid that draws on Josè Esteban Muñoz’s theory of futurity to offer, in the lexicon of Eve Sedgwick, a reparative model for thinking about queer ontology.