Melting Disney's 'Frozen' View Of Gender Roles

As one pursuing a career in the media, I have always been interested in the ways which the media can enforce the status quo but also disrupt it. Gender stereotypes, representing the most widely accepted social division, are especially prevalent in everything from hip-hop music to the news media. Movies, which are by far the most popular way of telling stories today, are consistently filled with characters which rely heavily on widely held gender stereotypes to allow the audience to easily connect with them. The Disney princess movies are probably the most often accused of perpetuating conventional gender roles, as a quick search for “disney gender stereotypes” highlights, pulling up close to 200,000 results on Google. This is likely because these movies are based on classic fairy tales, written during a time when people were less aware of gender roles. Still, the continual release of movie after movie filled with gender stereotypes makes me wonder if we can relate to stories which don't include gender stereotypes?

Amanda de Cadenet, who describes herself as someone who “continually [tries] to make media that challenges perceptions of women”, is a major critic of the most recent Disney princess movie Frozen. In her YouTube video Frozen Freaked me Out ! - Gender Stereotypes in Kids Movies she voices her opposition to the way the film “embodies the majority of gender stereotyping for boys and girls”. Before watching her video, I hadn't really thought whether or not the film perpetuated or disrupted conventional gender roles, but if you had asked me I would have likely said that I thought that it was slightly disruptive because of how Elsa’s love was able to save her sister. Now granted, since it is a Disney princess movie I knew that there was the underlying ‘male hero rescuing the helpless female’ theme, but because Elsa was a strong, independent, man-less woman, I categorized the film as having more of a progressive take on gender roles.

After watching her video, I very much understood why Cadenet feels that every major character in the film is based around some gender stereotype. On the guy’s side there’s the pervy old man (the Duke of Weselton), the handsome seemingly-caring young man who turns out to be deceitful (Hans), and the very attractive hero-type whose job it is to save the princess (Kristoff). For major female characters there’s Elsa who “spends 99% of the movie saying how she needs to be by herself, that she can’t express herself, [and] that no one can know her feelings”,  isolates herself in an ice castle, and “is a horrible b-i-t-c-h to her sister” setting up meanness and hostility between sisters. Anna, her sister, has a very bad self-esteem and is constantly comparing herself to Elsa. When Elsa freezes Anna’s heart, Anna must then spend the rest of the movie searching for a man to “to kiss her, to love her, to bring her back to life again”.

Even though Cadenet convincingly shows that all of the characters in Frozen are either are based on traditional gender roles or have unhealthy relationships with other characters (Elsa’s meanness to her sister or Anna’s dependency on a man), I couldn't help but feel that she was missing a bigger point. Gender stereotypes exist because we put people into boxes, so a lot of me wondered how much of the blame is on the audience and how much is on the creator in a case like this. Artists often base characters off of stereotypes because they are a widely held belief, allowing the audience to instantly understand a character’s motive and put their actions into context. So at the root of it the artists or creators are to blame for taking the easy way out and making a character connectable through the use of stereotypes. However, I often wonder whether or not they even have control over whether or not the audience sees stereotypes in their characters or if they will just naturally put every character into their own box despite how disruptive to traditional stereotypes they may be. If, for example, we were to try switching the Anna and Elsa’s gender’s to male, people’s first assumptions would likely be that the film was about male bonding and the mending of the relationship between brothers rather than homosexuality since the latter is a less often told story in our media (though it is slowly becoming more common).

Ultimately I think both the creators and the audience are to blame for the perpertuation of stereotypes. Even if the creators are trying to tell a story which is disruptive towards traditional stereotypes, they often must rely on the very stereotypes which they are trying to disrupt in order to form a foundation for their characters which the audience can understand. As such, they are forced to walk a tight line between referencing to a stereotype to perpetuate it and referencing a stereotype to change it. Audience members, on the other hand, have to be aware of how and when the media makes use of stereotypes, and like Cadenet make their voice heard when they feel that the motivation for their use has tipped toward perpetuation. But, audience members must also be aware of how their personal backgrounds — experience, culture, religion — might be affecting their view of the characters in a story.