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Volume 1, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 29767911
  • E-ISSN: 2976792X
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Abstract

From 2014 to 2023, The Walt Disney Company launched five princess live-action remakes and two adaptations to update its iconic female characters. In both media discussions and academic literature, these revamped princess productions have been celebrated for their embodiments of fourth-wave feminist qualities, such as confidence, independence and girl power. However, the exact process of framing women’s empowerment on-screen – translating abstract feminist ideologies into specific visualizations and bodily performances of Disney princesses – has been treated as a taken-for-granted phenomenon placed beyond interrogation. Through a thematic analysis of all released remakes, this article demonstrates how the live-action princesses are represented to reflect fourth-wave feminist notions and what gender messages are delivered by this renovated series. I identify two visual styles and three plot devices that are used repetitively across the remakes to endow the princess characters with a progressive persona. I further discover that, despite being empowered at first glance, the remakes’ engagements with fourth-wave feminism remain superficial and eventually channel the stories back to existing gender stereotypes and imbalanced structures. This conclusion contributes to the scholarship by ascertaining Disney’s strategic leverage of contemporary gender ideologies on-screen and revealing the problematic nature of such corporate-dominated, pro-feminist agendas.

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2024-11-30
2025-03-15
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/content/journals/10.1386/ijds_00003_1
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Re-imaging empowered princesshood against the rise of the fourth-wave feminism: A thematic study of Disney’s princess live-action remakes
International Journal of Disney Studies 1, 33 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1386/ijds_00003_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ijds_00003_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ijds_00003_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): Disney studies; film studies; fourth-wave feminism; gender representations; gender roles; neo-liberal feminist studies
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