Deconstructing Disney's Divas: a Critique of the Singing Princess As Filmic Trope
48 Liske Potgieter Deconstructing Ms Liske Potgieter, Music Department, Disney’s divas: a South Campus, PO Box 77000, NMM 6031; critique of the singing E-mail: liskepotgieter@ gmail.com princess as filmic trope Zelda Potgieter First submission: 2 June 2016 Prof Zelda Potgieter, Acceptance: 8 December 2016 Music Department, South Campus, PO Box This article contributes to the discourse of the body 77000, NMM 6031; and the voice in feminist psychoanalytic film theory Email: zelda.potgieter@ by exploring the currently under-theorised notion nmmu.ac.za of the singing body in particular, as this notion finds DOI: http://dx.doi. manifestation in Disney’s Singing Princess as filmic org/10.18820/24150479/ trope. Analyses of vocal musical coding follow her aa48i2.2 trajectory across 13 Disney princess films to reveal ISSN: ISSN 0587-2405 deeper insight into what she sings, how she sings, and e-ISSN: 2415-0479 why she sings. In this manner, it is argued, the Singing Acta Academica • 2016 48(2): Princess gradually emerges from her genealogical roots 48-75 as innamorata, a position of vocal corporealisation © UV/UFS and diegetic confinement, to one wherein her voice assumes a position of authority over the narrative, and from one of absolute submissiveness and naïve obedience to a greatly enriched experience of her own subjectivity. 1. Introduction Tropes are rhetorical devices that consist in senses other than their literal ones. While they are useful in rendering the unfamiliar more familiar, and while understanding figurative language is part of what it means to be a member of the culture in which such language is employed, tropes easily retreat to an Potgieter & Potgieter / deconstructing disney’s divas 49 undetected state — they are “not something we are normally aware of” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 3) — from which enigmatic position they are able to anchor us in dominant assumptions within our society, sustaining our tacit complicity almost beyond our volition.
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