Deconstructing Disney

This is a deconstruction of the political culture – and the cultural politics – of a Disney canon in the years since the emergence of the so-called New World Order. McQuillan and Byrne offer a critical encounter with Disney which alternates between readings of individual texts and wider thematic concerns such as race, gender and sexuality, the broader context of contemporary culture in the United States, and the global ambitions and insularity of the last great superpower. Disney films have long been synonymous with a certain conservative, patriarchal, heterosexual ideology, occupying a position centre-stage at the heart of the evil empire; demonising Disney is nothing new. What this book sets out to do, however, is to take issue with knee-jerk polarities, overturning classical oppositions and recognising that, just as the Disney “text” has changed, so too must the terms of critical engagement alter. If we are interested in the political circumstances which oppress us, the authors argue, then we can never know too much about Disney.

Author Biography

Eleanor Byrne is a Lecturer in post-Colonial Literature at University College Worcester and writes on aspects of culture and postcoloniality.

Martin McQuillan is Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London, where he is also Co-Director of The London Graduate School He is the author, along with Eleanor Byrne, of Deconstructing Disney (Pluto, 1999), Paul de Man (Routledge, 2000) and editor of The Narrative Reader (Routledge, 2000), Theorising Muriel Spark (AIAA, 2002) and The Politics of Deconstruction (Pluto, 2007).