Damsels in discourse: Girls consuming and producing identity texts through Disney Princess play
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International Reading Association
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Abstract
Drawing upon theories that reconceptualize toys and artifacts as identity texts, this study employs mediated discourseanalysis to examine children’s videotaped writing and play interactions with princess dolls and stories in one kindergartenclassroom. The study reported here is part of a three-year ethnographic study of literacy play in U.S. early childhoodclassrooms. The specific focus here is on young girls who are avid Disney Princess fans and how they address the genderedidentities and discourses attached to the popular films and franchised toys. The study employs an activity modeldesign that incorporates ethnographic microanalysis of social practices in the classroom, design conventions in toys anddrawings, negotiated meanings in play, and identities situated in discourses. The commercially given gendered princessidentities of the dolls, consumer expectations about the dolls, the author identities in books and storyboards associatedwith the dolls, and expectations related to writing production influenced how the girls upheld, challenged, or transformedthe meanings they negotiated for princess story lines and their gender expectations, which influenced who participatedin play scenarios and who assumed leadership roles in peer and classroom cultures. When the girls played with DisneyPrincess dolls during writing workshop, they animated identities sedimented into toys and texts. Regular opportunities toplay with toys during writing workshop allowed children to improvise and revise character actions, layering new storymeanings and identities onto old. Dolls and storyboards facilitated chains of animating and authoring, linking meaningsfrom one event to the next as they played, wrote, replayed, and rewrote. The notion of productive consumption explainshow girls enthusiastically took up familiar media narratives, encountered social limitations in princess identities, improvisedcharacter actions, and revised story lines to produce counternarratives of their own.
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This is the postprint, author's accepted manuscript version of this article after peer review.
Keywords
literacy play,identity texts,gender,media toys,mediated discourse analysis
Citation
Wohlwend, K. E. (2009). Damsels in discourse: Girls consuming and producing gendered identity texts through Disney Princess Play. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(1), 57-83.