Post-Princess Models Of Gender: The New Man In Disney

Rhetorical Analysis

Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and many other Disney movies all have one thing in common, they feature a female lead who need a male figure to save them. However, things started to change after the release of Mulan 1988. It changed from only having those female leads who always needed to rely on someone, to females who were able to show off their more masculine side. In the article “Post-Princess Models of Gender: The New Man in Pixar/Disney,” Ken Gillam and Shannon R. Wooden explored the idea that Pixar movies were starting to show male characters who weren 't afraid to show their emotions and feminine attributes, to promote the “New Man” model. The picture depicted above is another example of characters in Mulan who have these characteristics. Gillam and Wooden effectively convey their argument through the use of compare and contrast, examples of homosociality, and their own personal experience/ ideas.

Gillam and Wooden compare and contrast many male characters from Pixar movies, who are striving to be the alpha-male in their own way. “The phrase “alpha male” may stand for all things stereotypically patriarchal: unquestioned authority, physical power and social dominance, competitiveness for positions of status and leadership, lack of visible or shared emotion, social isolation” (Gillam and Wooden 472). Knowing how the authors describe the phrase alpha-male is important to understand why they think certain characters strive to be this more