Amanda Putnam Response

There has been much attention shown towards the way gender has been portrayed in most Disney movie since the creation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Many people, both writers and regular movie viewers, have noted how the villains in these movies possess more gender-bending qualities while the heroines and heroes remain the epitome of the classic girly-girl or tough guy, respectively, that has become ingrained in many of us. Amanda Putnam is one of these people who has noted this trend. In her essay "Mean Ladies: Transgendered Villains in Disney Films," she argues that through this juxtaposition of flamboyant villains with stereotypically proper protagonists, Disney films are encouraging us to look at transgendered people in a negative light.

Her overall structure and the way she accomplishes this represents one of the strengths of the piece. First she gives a thorough description of the gender-pushing characteristics amongst the female villains, then she explains the significance behind this, and finally she repeats a similar process for the feminine male villains in the films (even if the paper's title only mentions female characters.) This isn't to say there weren't flaws in the article.

To begin, I should note she focuses on a number of certain characters, such as Cinderella's stepsisters and Ursula on the girl's side and Scar and Jafar on the guy's side, to name a few. As a whole, I actually thought she did a better job detailing the transgendered aspects of the guys, such as when she describes Scar as having " a lack of physical prowess, his language choice, and the lack of female mate." These characteristics strongly speak the flamboyant nature of many of the male villains which I thought lacked in Putnam's description of the female villains. When discussing this, it seemed Putnam mentioned areas of ugliness, such as the stepsisters having big feet, rather than actually having transgender qualities. In this area, I thought the paper was lacking.

Additionally, the overall purpose of the paper, to describe how "when transgendered qualities are marked as only being apparent in evil characters, then a stigmatized standard of normative behavior is being created and promoted," was not entirely met. In this quote, it is easy to see that Putnam really means to draw attention to how this representation of flamboyant qualities affects the public. However, the majority of the paper is devoted to detailing the characteristics in Disney villains. I will state that Putnam is commendable for noting this point in her paper. She states that, while the juxtaposition of good vs evil isn't the strongest argument for proving this point, it's the best she can do. Although this was noble of her, by failing to fully connect everything to the original thesis, the whole paper missed the mark on what it promised, a cardinal sin for academic writing.