He, on the other hand, acknowledges the fact that Mulan is not one of the society’s identical girls, but rather a powerful, well-thought, brave girl, so he awards her the seal to reaffirm her family’s honor.
To an extent, such statement can be seen as true, but it is easily deconstructed by the end when the emperor chooses not to chastise Mulan for breaking all the norms – stealing her father's armor, running away from home, impersonating a soldier, deceiving her commanding officer, dishonoring the Chinese army, and destroying the palace. It can certainly be argued that Mulan ‘‘perpetuates male dominance in gender binaries despite its (unsaid) promise that identity does in fact move beyond gender’’ (Mumtaz) and that ‘‘males are still held in a superior position in respect to females’’ (Mumtaz). As such, Li Shang does not necessarily paint the men in the society as weak, meek or submissive, but rather accentuates the strength and direct savvy Mulan is endowed with, traditionally only thought to be ascribed to men.
Interculturality and the concept of family also play a rather major role, and all the listed concepts will serve as fundamental constituents of this paper which aims to explicate the given by focusing on an isolated case in the Princess Line, the 1998 action-comedy-drama film, Mulan, and its subsequent characters, storylines, tracks, portrayals and interpretations.Īs the story follows, Mulan enters a military camp and goes through a rigorous training in order to protect her father and she eventually becomes the heroine by rescuing not only the Chinese emperor as the leader, but also by helping a young captain, Li Shang, and rescuing him twice. Consequently, the studio’s most prolific franchise, the Disney Princess franchise or simply the Princess Line, has been interweaved with several topics the studies of language and gender call upon, primarily the preset stereotypes of what it means to be masculine or feminine, how the given is portrayed in the then society and the society nowadays, and how it is influenced and constructed by the exact same society.
Numerous products borne out by Walt Disney Animation Studios, namely animated motion sequences associated with the studio’s most famous stock characters, Disney princesses, have been a subject of a plethora of research conducted as a part of a study referring to the interrelation of language and gender.
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