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.

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 begins the sociolinguistic journey of the book, focusing on quantitative analysis of compliments alongside more detail-oriented qualitative analysis. Compliments, as a speech act, work to attribute ‘goods’ to others and thus naturally carries larger value judgments about what a society views as ‘good.’ Compliments in childrens’ movies likewise act as a lens to reveal what the filmmakers consider worthy of praise in their characters — and importantly, whether that varies by gender. In Disney and Pixar films, compliment giving is not presented as particularly gendered but receiving compliments skews towards female recipients. Qualitatively, female characters on-screen together are portrayed as using compliments as a routine politeness strategy and female villains use the guise of this practice to hide more nefarious purposes. This chapter also finds some tentative initial evidence linking femininity and politeness. While compliments are used by both male and female characters, the female characters use compliments as a routine politeness or rapport-building strategy, whereas male characters complimenting another outside task-based settings is less routine, and at times even framed as a climatically “big deal.” This suggests that although characters of either gender can compliment, compliments as a routine politeness strategy is still associated more closely with femininity.

This chapter focuses on apologies, another active, face-saving politeness strategy. Apologies are a way of conducting politeness and preserving interpersonal relationships. There is a clear perception that women apologize more, or apologize unnecessarily, and this chapter examines if that is reflected in Disney and Pixar films. Quantitatively, both male and female characters apologize in these films, and in a certain proportion of the cases the authors suspect this is determined more by the specifics of the plot than by gender or any other characteristic of the speaker. At the same time, the authors find some patterning at the extremes that seems more clearly linked to gender. While apologizing may not be marked as specifically associated with femininity, non-apology strategies do seem to be mostly used by the male characters. One explanation for this is that women have been held more responsible for maintaining social relations and catering to the face needs of others. Femininity may be tied to a focus on making sure the social harm is repaired, while masculinity involves more of an emphasis on producing the speech act of the apology while (if possible) hedging against the inherent face threat it involves.

This chapter provides a historical context for Disney and Pixar, and delineates how the two studios have evolved to respond in different ways when it comes to the politics of media representation. The Classic Era of Disney (1937-1959) features a conservative vision of the ideal female character, princesses who are polite, kind, white, and traditionally beautiful. The Renaissance Era of Disney(1989-1997) buoyed by the second and third waves of feminism began to present more “empowered” heroines, who aimed to embody (or at least acknowledge) the values of feminism, and some diversity in terms of look, even if the actors and speech remain primarily white. The New Age Era of Disney (2009-2019) is ongoing, and features more diverse princesses both in terms of look and in terms of subverting more traditional princess tropes (Frozen) or doing away with romance altogether (Brave and Moana). Pixar does not have eras in the same way as the Disney films, because it is less less focused on female leads and thus less influenced by feminist discourse . However, Pixar is important in terms of examining masculinity in children’s films, and how language and gender compares to the Disney canon.