A Rhetorical Analysis Of Walt Disney's I Am A Princess

In 2012 the Walt Disney Company released a commercial entitled “I am a Princess” that shows a diverse array of young girls doing many different activities while inspirational music plays in the background and the voice of a young girl proclaims what qualities make up a princess. When this video is viewed through the lens of the construction of gender, the audience can see that the video has a rhetorical purpose. The “I am a Princess” commercial makes the argument that the ideal feminine figure is a princess, but that a princess is more than just a beautiful girl. The “I am a Princess” video begins with the line “I am a princess. I am brave sometimes. I am scared sometimes. I am brave even when I am scared” spoken while six different girls are shown doing different activities such as playing dress up, shooting archery, surfing, and doing gymnastics (artifact). Throughout the rest of the one minute and forty-four second long video the voiceover continues to describe what it means to be a princess while actual young girls are shown along with the Disney princesses. The qualities of a princess listed in the video are a mix of traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine traits, although there are more feminine traits present than there are masculine ones. Some of the masculine characteristics mentioned in the video …show more content…
In her novel, Enlightened Sexism, Susan J. Douglas argues that women like Cher from the 1995 film Clueless shaped the gender construction of an entire generation of young women. Douglas dubs this particular construction of femininity as the “new girliness – girl power in a mini-skirt and pink boa” (102). This “new girliness” was all about “buying the right things and using the right products to look irresistibly attractive, and it led to the rise of boy bands, “girl power,” and the television show Ally McBeal