Despite having the reputation of a misogynist for most of the twentieth century, Samuel Johnson has gradually been recognized as perhaps one of the most progressive male writers on the topic of women’s education. What does this say about Johnson’s position on gender? A cross-genre analysis of Johnson’s writing – dictionary entries, periodical essays, the verse tragedy Irene, the philosophical oriental tale Rasselas, and the critical biography of John Milton in the Lives of the Poets – demonstrates that while Johnson was certainly situated within the heteronormative framework characteristic of eighteenth-century England, and while his Christian chauvinism made his defense of Christian women (and Christian men) not fully intersectional, his defense of women as moral agents was a resource and reinforcement for eighteenth-century women writers.

This chapter examines the commodification of people during the nineteenth century. The records available in the colonial archive expose the extent of people’s commodification. The brutality of property claims over human beings is unambiguous in inventories, registers, bills of sale, and waybills, paper documents created to deny humanity and protect the interest of owners. These documents continue to reproduce the violence and legal and extra-legal exclusion that enslaved individuals experienced in the past by limiting their historical existence to records that categorized them solely as commodities. The records were created to facilitate control of property, and their survival discloses the commitment to register people’s exclusion and dispossession.

Chapter 3 focuses on the strengthening of the bureaucracy and written culture that, by the early nineteenth century, created an ersatz historical proof and solidified territorial and political claims. After two centuries of conquest, by the turn of the nineteenth century, new forms of official records, such as land registries, deeds, and inventories, and the expansion of surveys and reports led to an association between individual ownership, written registration, and property recognition. As in other colonial experiences, paper records represented authenticity and legitimation in the eyes of colonizers and also brought changes in the perceptions of governance. Ndombe, Kilengues, Kakondas, and Bienos embraced written evidence and paper power as providing proof of ownership. The existence of the paper created a new reality, that is, the idea that occupation and possession could be proven, that an individual was a landowner, a farmer, and a respectable resident of the colonial town. The establishment of written records and venues for petition such as courts allowed colonial subjects to make use of the colonial law and bureaucracy to strategically survive the new legal order and claim rights.

Chapter 4 analyzes the psychological and physical effects of slavery. Here, it is argued that we continue to place trauma within existing psychological frameworks but fail to understand the effect of ownership and objectification, which presents unique challenges to survivors of slavery and has ramifications for the support structures that are put in place. The chapter argues that the need to bear witness, on both the part of the listener and the narrator, is crucial to meaningful growth in the light of current ill-suited support and allows an acknowledgment of the truth of survivors’ lives. This chapter in particular draws on autobiographies and my own interviews with survivors, mapping their journeys and experiences to the psychological literature on trauma, and exploring the need to bear witness as a powerful means of growth

In this concluding chapter, the analysis throughout this book reveals that both Disney and Pixar have a problem with their representation of women, primarily with underrepresentation of women both in speech and total number of characters. Other key points are that female characters are “disproportionately polite”: even though they speak less, they use more of the various markers that highlight a concern with maintaining the social fabric. This chapter also examines the “progress” that Disney and Pixar have made in terms of gender representation. The authors see some promising changes in representation and in talking time. The split between male and female speech in the New Age era is almost exactly 50-50% and some films even have female majority speech (Brave, Frozen II). Unfortunately, most of the other linguistic patterns tracked have not changed at all. Female characters continue to mitigate and apologize while male characters continue to insult and order people around, both in Disney and Pixar films. Finally, this chapter ends with where the authors hope both the future of Disney and Pixar will go, including: a wider range of characters (major and minor) who represent different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds, a wider range of gender identity, more diverse linguistic styles associated with masculinity, and other progressive movements.

This chapter focuses on the performance of impoliteness, through the lens of insults and other mocking language. Impoliteness has been documented as a tool men use to perform masculinity and bond with other men. Disney and Pixar films reflect this practice by portraying insults as associated naturally with masculinity, and often frame insults between men as silly and rapport-building. Female characters insulting others isn’t typically seen as “funny” in Disney, with some clear exceptions, including older characters (highlighting the “sassy old lady” trope). There is also some evidence that the more recent characters of color have more impolite utterances, suggesting that women of color are also an ideological exception to polite femininity. Discourses of masculinity in Disney and Pixar sanction insults as an expression of emotion, but portray more straightforward forms of affection as less common and/or less desirable. For femininity, the opposite discourse is upheld: polite forms are framed as natural, or desirable ways to express feeling, but insults have negative consequences.

Patrick Mullen returns to familiar textual moments to discover new forms of Joyce’s subversion of dominant discourses. He detects in moments in “The Dead” such as Lily’s exchange with Gabriel, Molly Ivors’ discussion with Gabriel, and Gabriel’s thoughts on Michael Furey a kind of queerness he associates with “heteronormative failure”: the refusal to marry, the rejection of conventional gender roles, and the experience of homoerotic desire. Adapting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of the sexual closet, he writes of the pantry as the emblem and at times the literal location in Joyce’s story of these alternative behaviors. He traces the subtle presence of these non-normative behaviors in the story’s free indirect discourse; in contrast to the unfettered access to an individual’s thoughts purportedly offered by the stream of consciousness, “The Dead” contains in its conventional third-person narrative voice marginalized perspectives that form unexpected alliances across the globe.

This section provides the main argument of the book, followed by historical background on the development of doctrine and devotion to the Virgin Mary up to the end of the fifth century and the flourishing of the cult from that period onward. This section is followed by one on literary genre, which attempts to justify the structure and argument of the book as a whole. A section on gender, which takes into account recent approaches to this subject in the Byzantine context, develops a methodology for studying the cult of the Virgin Mary. The Introduction finishes by outlining once again the goal of this study: it is to assess early and middle Byzantine texts on the Byzantine Virgin according to the diverse settings and audiences for which these were intended.

Conclusion: The final chapter sums up the findings of the book as a whole, assessing again whether its literary approach to the subject is productive. I also return to the question of gender, suggesting here that Mary embodies the characteristics (or virtues) of both genders to the extent that she becomes a paradoxical figure. I conclude that she appealed to both female and male devotees, since evidence of successful petitions from both genders survives. Finally, I point the way towards future studies that might follow the methodology that is employed in this book. Other literary genres that deal with the Virgin Mary require examination too; these include histories, chronicles, poetry, epistolography, polemical treatises and others.

This chapter presents an overview of the presence of male and female characters and speech, in each film and across the entire set of films, and discusses issues of representation, conversational dominance, and talkativeness. In the Disney Princess films, male characters and male speech are both overrepresented. While Disney’s branding talks a big game about progressive feminist values, the films still consistently under-represent female characters, and reinforces the expectation that women should speak less than men. While Pixar also overrepresents male characters, at times even more drastically than Disney does, analysis of male and female co-leads showed neither gender consistently talking over the other. This suggests that Pixar has an issue of attention: when Pixar focuses on writing women, the result is a diverse set of talkative, well-rounded female characters with varying levels of power and assertion within their relationships. However, the presentation of femininity outside these one or two characters in each film tends to be much lazier, or altogether missing in favor of a host of male background characters. In films from both studios, male characters consistently take up more space, both in aggregate and in individual conversations, but the framing and characterization of talkativeness suggests that it’s women who are emotional, gossipy, and overly talkative.

This chapter focuses on the discussion of queerness in Disney. Despite the overwhelming propagation of a heteronormative ideal in these films, queerness does exist, at a variety of levels. This chapter qualitatively examines the different ways that queerness is coded linguistically in Disney. This chapter identifies a source of queerness in Disney in many of its queer coded villians (quillians), linked by five key linguistic elements in their speech: playing with register or style, sarcasm and other humorous verbal aggression, wordplay or metalinguistic focus, invocation of femininity (pragmatic), and invocation of femininity (syntactic or lexical). The observed style bears a resemblance to styles documented among cis gay men and drag queens. The implications of the use of ‘Quillian Language Style’ to characterize both male and female quillains is explored, and broader implications are discussed.

This chapter presents a quantitative analysis of directives and the variation in their syntactic forms as related to gender and power. Directives are defined as speech acts in which a speaker attempts to get the recipient to carry out or refrain from action. This chapter focuses on who gives and receives directives, and more specifically on the function of linguistic mitigation strategies and how they correlate with the gender of the speaker and addressee in Disney and Pixar films. The issuing of directives is very common in Disney and Pixar films; because they are an essential plot element, their frequency is unrelated to gender. However, the use of mitigation as a politeness strategy is strongly correlated with gender in both Disney and Pixar, independent of other important contextual variables such as urgency and institutional power (p < .01 for both data sets). In the films, male authority is shown as hierarchical, direct, and aggressive; female authority is shown as subtle, and based on persuasion, suggestion, and collaboration — a pattern which echoes research findings on real-life behavior across a number of contexts.

The Walt Disney corporation and its affiliates wield a huge amount of power in our modern media landscape, especially in regards to children’s media. In turn, a selection of evidence presented in this chapter argues that the linguistic patterning in media has an effect on children, in particular on their ideas about the social world and gender. Thus, Disney is an important area of study for understanding the effect of media on children, specifically in terms of language and gender. This chapter restates the importance of conducting sociolinguistic research on scripted media, and defends this methodological practice. Further, it also explains the methodology of the book, which includes both quantitative and qualitative research in order to assess the role of media representations in the construction of gender and gendered discourses. Finally, this chapter outlines the book in full, which includes a historical context of Disney and Pixar, a quantitative examination of speech amounts broken down by gender, an examination of specific speech acts (compliments, directives, insults, and apologies), and an qualitative examination of queerness in Disney films.

This chapter covers a large literary category which I call ‘hagiographical’: it includes miracle stories that involve the Virgin Mary, full-length Lives of the Virgin (which began to be produced from the late eighth or early ninth century onward) and two Apocalypses. Many of the texts studied here are composed in a colloquial style that may have appealed to wider audiences in non-liturgical settings. This genre thus contrasts with the liturgical texts that are studied in the first four chapters: according to hagiography, Mary assumes power and agency that goes beyond her theological role in giving birth to Christ. Christians appeal to this female holy figure as one who is able to appeal to Christ and who is willing to help sinners or supplicants who despair of God’s direct favour. Christological teaching persists in these texts, but the emphasis has shifted to Mary’s intercessory role among Christians.