This thesis investigates the discursive construction of gender in Disney’s animated fairy tale films as evidenced by their pragmatic content, with a specific focus on Disney’s princesses. The study aims to establish whether these films are static or if there is evidence of pragmatic diachronic evolution, and how this evolution contributes to characterisation and gender in Disney’s fairy tale oeuvre. The study has two research questions: 1. Who speaks most in these films, men or women? 2. What speech acts are performed by men and women in these films, and whom are they performed to? This study uses a mixed methodology consisting of a quantitative corpus analysis and a qualitative pragmatic analysis. For RQ1, a corpus of Disney’s eight fairy tale films was created consisting of every audible word and subsequently analysed using concordancing software. For RQ2, a qualitative pragmatic analysis of every utterance using Searle’s classification of speech acts was performed following parsing of each film’s pragmatic content into individual utterances. The key findings using relative values for both RQs are that in response to RQ1, women individually speak 193.56 tokens compared to the 121.55 tokens that each man individually speaks. For RQ2, women characters perform more speech acts than characters who are men, and do so performing 1.44003113 speech acts for every act a man character performs. Moreover, men receive 45.04 acts per character while women receive 44.22 acts per character, which amounts to men receiving 1.01874996 speech acts for every single speech act a woman character receives. The results have shown that these films are not sites of pragmatic diachronic evolution, lending credence to criticism towards women in these films. However, I would argue that this does not truly matter as women in these films are the more loquacious of the genders, the performers of more speech acts, and only receive marginally fewer speech acts than their men counterparts. Further, while women being more garrulous does not necessarily signify a film as being feminist or ushering in a move to a post-patriarchal society, the impact of a greater performance of speech acts, coupled with their higher token counts does place women as the doers of actions thereby firmly establishing that women in these films are not silent, passive, pale, marginalised or objectified, and that they are suitable role models for younger viewers.
| Date of Award | 5 Feb 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Tom Devlin (Main Supervisor) |
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