Gender Mental Frames in Sleeping Beauty, Mulan and Brave: A Cognitive- Semantics Study

Abstract

The present frame semantic study aims to reveal how Disney princess movies, exemplified by the three movies Sleeping Beauty (1959), Mulan (1998) and Brave (2012), are part of power endeavors to manipulate the construction of feminist ideologies over some social universal assumptions. It particularly addresses the gender representation in these movies as one of these assumptions aimed to be directed at to maintain the patriarchal order which is an essential aspect of social orders. This is meant to unify the universal female image that needs to be controlled to result in the intended ideology over the gender beliefs. The study targets the lexical and syntactic space of these three movies, mainly verbs, to imply how words can be interpreted and constructed variously to reflect different mental assumptions. The three Disney princess movies under investigation are particularly analyzed, using the FrameNet lexical syntactic software (1997) initiated by Fillmore as well, to inspect the evoked frames. The definitions of these evoked frames perfectly demonstrate the different gender roles performed by the three princesses over time, referred to as core frame elements on FrameNet, which reflects how ideologies are well directed towards the “appropriate” universal gender roles. 0.2. Statement of the Argument The core of the argument is cognitive semantic as it addresses some aspects of the semantic and syntactic spaces of the scripts of the three selected Disney princess movies which are well designed to result in specific mental frames over some concepts. It primarily tackles the gender representation within the movie as one example of the attempts of power institutions to construct and reproduce ideologies about universal gender roles. As media can be a very powerful tool, they are manipulated to form and direct some of these ideologies. The gender representation can be addressed from different angles such as the plots formed, the themes directed and the models