A Beauty But A Funny Girl: A Queer Investigation of the "Broadwayfication of Disney"

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Abstract

The term “Disneyfication” is traditionally a way of implying that substance and depth have been removed and replaced by simplistic, conservative values, at best, and dangerously fascist encoded messages, at worst.  To refer to the opening of Beauty and the Beast on Broadway as the beginning of the “Disneyfication of Broadway” is to imply, therefore, a corporate invasion of a theatre culture which has been portrayed through various historiographies as a leftist refuge for the outsiders of American culture, particularly the LGBT community.  However, I would argue that before Disney's occupation of Times Square, the culture of the Walt Disney Company had been breached by two Broadway veterans, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, who incorporated the book musical structure, musical theatre styles, conventions, and progressive themes into Disney's animated films in a period which I shall refer to as the “Broadwayfication of Disney.”  Because one of the major deterrents of a queer reading of Disney musicals, and the subsequent exclusion of them from queer histories of Broadway, is the “Disney” brand name, this paper will examine, through textual analysis of the film and stage versions of Beauty and the Beast, informed by the writings of Eve Sedgewick, Judith Butler, and Mikhail Bakhtin, the ways in which the creators of Beauty and the Beast utilized traditional musical theatre styles and conventions to present the mainstream public with an anti-essentialist treatment of gender and sexuality in American culture.

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Emerging Scholars