Nas--"Daughters"

An Unmagical World: Challenging the Princess Paradigm

An Unmagical World: Challenging the Princess Paradigm

by David Leonard | NewBlackMan

When my daughter was about 3-years old, while on a vacation, we ventured into a Disney store where we purchased a set of princess figurines (I still feel compromise about our collective relationship with the world of princesses some 4+ years later).  We quickly returned to my parents’ hotel so that she could play with them.  When it was time to leave and return to where we were staying, I noticed that three of the princesses were missing.  Pocahontas, Mulan, and Jasmine were all nowhere to be found while Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Belle, and Cinderella were in plain sight ready to go with us.  Determined, I searched high and low for her newly purchased toys.  After a few minutes, I realized that the three figurines of color were strategically placed under the bed.  It was not as if she was playing with them and accidentally placed them under the bed; they were far back, to the point that they were almost out of reach.  Not to worry, super-Dad rescued them, only to be told by my 3-year old that she didn’t want them.  The horror.  Overcoming my sense of failure and dismay, I asked her:

Why don’t you want them?

Her: I just don’t

Me: But why?

Her: Because they don’t have sparkly shoes

She was correct; whereas the 4 figurines of white characters had dresses and sparkly shoes (even though you couldn’t actually see the shoes on all of them), the 3 figurines of color lacked all of the traditional markers of princessdom. 

However, much more was at work because in this instance, the daily lessons she had learned about beauty, race, gender, and desirability came into clear view.  As a scholar of race, an anti-racist advocate, and someone committed to media literacy, I was immediately distraught, wondering how I had failed to convey these fallacies within contemporary culture.  As a parent of a mixed-race daughter (I am white and my wife is Chinese), this moment also concretized the powerful messages being delivered about beauty and racial identity.  Notwithstanding the immense problems with the princess trope (and happiness coming from being saved by a prince), it was clear that my daughter was learning the incompatibility of beautiful glamorous princesses and girls of color.  

“In American society, many women strive to attain mainstream, Western standards of beauty, which are derived from a predominantly Anglo-Saxon influence,” writes Peggy Chin Evans and Allen McConnell with “Do Racial Minorities Respond in the Same Way to Mainstream Beauty Standards? Social Comparison Processes in Asian, Black, and WhiteWomen.” “In fact, physical appearance seems to be the most important predictor of overall self-evaluation in female college and high school students.” Given the dominance of Disney within children’s lives, it is not surprising how much impact this “magical world” has on children telling them that without fair skin, blonde hair, a skinny physique, and a prince on their arm the world wouldn’t be as magical.  

“Most, if not all children, including children of color, see ‘white’ as good, living happily ever after and pretty,” notes Dorothy L. Hurley in “Seeing White: Children of Color and the Disney Fairy Tale Princess.” “The problem of pervasive, internalized privileging of Whiteness has been intensified by the Disney representation of fairy tale princesses which consistently reinforces an ideology of White supremacy.” By the age of 3 my daughter had already learned the lessons about whiteness and the difficult path for girls of color in securing the idealized dream of marrying a prince: living happily ever after.  As such, she wanted nothing to do with those OTHER princesses who could not live this fairy tale existence since without the right clothes and physical features they would surely never get the right prince.

At one level, I wanted to respond by telling her that Mulan and Pocahontas could be a princess just like Belle and Cinderella – their costumes and skin color did not preclude them from being princesses.  Yet, given the extremely problematic narratives, the focus on physical beauty, and the overall message associated with the princess trope, I didn’t want to elevate the princess as ideal and desirable.  This points to a quandary of wanting to challenge the white/western standards of beauty that emanate from Disney and other mainstream media sources while at the same time challenging the ways in which beauty, glamorous clothes, and other traditional markers are used to mark desirable femininity. 

Then and now I try to tell her that she (and girls of color) can be beautiful and desirable (princesses) yet there is no reason to need or want to garner acceptance through beauty/appealing to males. Maxine Leeds Craig, in “Race, beauty, and the tangled knot of a guilty,” describes the complexity and contradiction in the following way

The difficulty of theorizing beauty is that any body which might possibly be characterized as beautiful exists at a congested crossroads of forces. Bodies provide us with a principal means of expression, yet our bodies are read in ways that defy our intentions. We act on others through our bodies, but nonetheless our bodies are the sites of the embodiment of social controls (p. 160 ). . . . Beauty is a resource used by collectivities and individuals to claim worth, yet it is an unstable good, whose association with women and with sex, and its dependence upon ever-changing systems of representation, put its bearer at constant risk of seeing the value of her inherent beauty or beauty work evaporate. If beauty is ever capital, it is a somewhat stigmatized capital. It must appear unearned if it is to be authentic, as opposed to purchased, beauty. Nonetheless it is a suspect form of capital because it is unearned. It is bodily amid a culture that places the body below the mind (p. 174).

The complexity was further illustrated as I tried in that instant to celebrate Pocahontas, to challenge her white-definition of beauty and appeal, even in spite of the stereotypes and anti-indigenous narratives embodied by this character (for years thereafter she always reminded me that Pocahontas was my favorite a fact that always struck me given my critical discussion of the film in class).  The intervention is tough because I didn’t want to subscribe to the ideological underpinnings of sexism in debunking those associated with white supremacy. 

The impact of the media’s pedagogy of beauty is obvious from the various doll test studies (see Kiri Davis’ wonderful video – “A Girl like Me” on this subject) to skin lightening  & body alteration.  It is also evident in the idolization of whiteness (a particular construct of femininity).   To my daughter, those white princesses not only embodied beauty, glamour, grace, and desirability but were also the only true and authentic kinds of princesses.  Because those other princesses were faux-princesses she did not want them.   

My only hope is that our intervention against these messages about beauty, race, femininity, and materialism take hold because the power was evident when my three-year old daughter tossed away the three “princesses” that she concluded were not undesirable making me wonder if the larger consequence is that she is being told daily that she is just as undesirable. 

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.