Disney or Fantasy Manufacture? A Psycho-sexual Approach to Perversion and Sexual Errancy in Four Disney Animations

Proceedings of The 4th International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences

Year: 2021

DOI:

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Disney or Fantasy Manufacture? A Psycho-sexual Approach to Perversion and Sexual Errancy in Four Disney Animations

Danial Saleh Nourani, Mahdi Safari

 

ABSTRACT: 

The mid-nineteenth century experienced a sexological boom in the study of aberrant sexual behaviors known as Perversion. Relying on the literary as well as medical evidence, many experts of the field drew on a wide range of industrial, cultural, hereditary and psychological variants in the formation of the unnatural sexual appetite and it was believed that the pervert is no longer a sinner but a patient whose actions are driven by an involuntary quest for a lost cause. This paper, by taking advantage of the key thinkers like Freud, Samuel Tissot and Thomas Laqueur aims to study four animated Disney adaptations, namely Cinderella, Snow-white, Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty along with their original fairy-tales to address the implicit references that in each production stand for one trope of perverse inclination. Finally, the study conducts a new close reading of these tales in the light of sexology to demonstrate how such against-the-grain connotations of sexual deviation successfully destabilize and refresh our intact understanding regarding the classic reception of the marked narratives.

keywords: Animation; Krafft-Ebing; Sexual Deviance; Psychology; Unnatural Sex.