CONSTRUCTING AND CONTESTING GENDER: POWER DYNAMICS AND GENDER SOCIALIZATION IN DISNEY ANIMATED FILMS — A MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

Disney animated films are among the most globally influential cultural texts shaping how young audiences understand gender, authority, and social value. This study investigates how power dynamics and gender socialization are constructed, reinforced, and contested across four Disney animated films drawn from distinct historical moments: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950), Frozen (2013), and Encanto (2021). While contemporary Disney is widely assumed to have moved beyond the patriarchal stereotyping of its classical era, this paper argues that the shift is more representational than structural. Adopting a qualitative multimodal feminist design, the study integrates Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, and the theory of “doing gender” to analyze purposively selected scenes across visual, linguistic, and narrative semiotic modes. The analysis is organized through three interrelated dimensions: the multimodal construction of gendered identities, the discursive representation of power dynamics, and gender socialization and performance. The findings show that the classical films naturalize patriarchal ideology through tightly coordinated visual, verbal, and narrative systems that code femininity as passive, domestic, and romantically dependent and masculinity as active, institutional, and authoritative, whereas the contemporary films substantially revise these codes by granting female characters agency, emotional complexity, and narrative centrality and by reconstructing masculinity as emotionally available and relational. However, the contemporary films continue to anchor feminine worth in relational obligation and emotional labor and resolve through reconciliation with, rather than rejection of, the structures that regulate gender. The study concludes that the trajectory from Snow White to Encanto is simultaneously real and limited and the patriarchal ideology has not disappeared but has been repackaged into subtler, postfeminist, and more resilient forms.