Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From Mouse to Mermaid , an interdisciplinary collection of original essays, is the first comprehensive, critical treatment of Disney cinema. Addressing children's classics as well as the Disney affiliates' more recent attempts to capture adult audiences, the contributors respond to the Disney film legacy from feminist, marxist, poststructuralist, and cultural studies perspectives. The volume contemplates Disney's duality as an American icon and as an industry of cultural production, created in and through fifty years of filmmaking. The contributors treat a range of topics at issue in contemporary cultural studies: the performance of gender, race, and class; the engendered images of science, nature, technology, family, and business. The compilation of voices in From Mouse to Mermaid creates a persuasive cultural critique of Disney's ideology.

The contributors are Bryan Attebery, Elizabeth Bell, Claudia Card, Chris Cuomo, Ramona Fernandez, Henry A. Giroux, Robert Haas, Lynda Haas, Susan Jeffords, N. Soyini Madison, Susan Miller, Patrick Murphy, David Payne, Greg Rode, Laura Sells, and Jack Zipes.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Walt's in the Movies
• Section I Sanitizations/Disney Film as Cultural Pedagogy
• Breaking the Disney Spell
• Memory and Pedagogy in the "Wonderful World of Disney": Beyond the Politics of Innocence
• Pinocchio
• Disney Does Dutch: Billy Bathgate and the Disneyficationof the Gangster Genre
• The Movie You See, The Movie Don't: How Disney Do's That Old Time Derision
• Section II Contestations/Disney Film as Gender Construction
• Somatexts at the Disney Shop: Constructing the Pentimentos of Women's Animated Bodies
• "The Whole Wide World was Scribbed Clean": The Androcentric Animation of Denatured Disney
• Bambi
• Beyond Captain Nemo: Disney's Science Fiction
• The Curse of Masculinity: Disney's Beauty and the Beast
• Section III Erasures/Disney Film as Identity Politics
• "Where Do The Mermaids Stand?"Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid
• "Eighty-Six the Mother": Murder, Matricide, and Good Mothers
• Spinsters in Sensible Shoes: Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks
• Pretty Woman Through the Triple Lens of Black Feminist Spectatorship
• Pachuco Mickey
• Contributors
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Battling the seemingly impregnable fortress of the Disney world, the editors of this volume drafted an army of cultural critics to undo Disney's dominant influence on shaping history, pedagogy, and ideology. The book's daunting and commendable task was to storm the walls of the Magic Kingdom and liberate the meanings peddled by the Disney empire. Unfortunately, however, this scholarly compilation suffers from the battle fatigue of deconstructive language, of probing the sanitations, contestations, and erasures of Disney films. The hip pedantry of these cultural criticisms--involving oppositional readings and ecofeminist paradigms--gives the reader the sense of being stuck on an ideological tar baby: one longs to be thrown back into a briar patch of critical thought that aspires to clarity, objectivity, and cogency. Still, many essays are revelatory and worthwhile; contributors who avoid the Procrustean bed of postmodern interpretation provide provocative and fascinating insights (see especially Jack Zipes's "Breaking the Disney Spell," which persuasively argues Disney's revolutionary institutionalizing of fairytales). To paraphrase Max Beerbohm, for people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like. Recommended for graduate students plied with coffee, who may take these essays into the wee hours of daydreaming and debating. T. Lindvall Regent University