Girlhood on Disney Channel

Branding, Celebrity, and Femininity

Morgan Genevieve Blue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317365051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the early 2000s, Disney Channel has been dominated by original live-action programming popular among tween girls. The shows' successes rely not only on their popularity among girl audiences, but also on the development of star personae by girl performers, such as Raven-Symoné, Miley Cyrus, and Selena Gomez. In addition, these programs and their performers have spawned lucrative media and merchandising franchises for the Walt Disney Company. This book includes analyses of this Disney Channel programming, as well as Disney corporate reports and executive statements, together with Disney Channel stars' performances, promotional appearances, media production, philanthropic efforts, and entrepreneurism. Analyzing these texts, performances, activities, and personae, it considers the ways in which they reproduce celebrity, visibility, and feminine performativity as central to successful twenty-first century girlhood.

1 Tweening Disney Channel via the Franchisable Girl

Introduction

Disney Channel’s young female stars and viewers must be understood as laborers in the production of the network’s girl-focused transmedia franchises. Although the Disney name and all it connotes may not immediately call to mind the cultural visibility of girl performers or the market force of girl audiences, Disney owes much to the many girls who create, consume, and critique its media and licensed merchandise. Girls’ contributions to Disney Channel franchises can influence how we, as a society, understand girlhood. Because television programs such as That’s So Raven, Hannah Montana, and Wizards of Waverly Place, to name only a few, have found great commercial success as a result of their diversification across platforms and through a variety of paratexts featuring and targeting girls, they also can alter how we think about media franchises. This chapter maps the relationship between Disney Channel, tween audiences, and girl performers in order to illustrate how the conglomerate has developed young female performers as the franchisable elements in some of its most popular and lucrative properties in the early years of the twenty-first century.

As Derek Johnson writes, the media franchise should be considered “less in terms of unified brands and singular corporate interests, but instead as contested grounds of collaborative creativity where networked stakeholders have negotiated the ongoing generation, exchange, and use of shared cultural resources” (7). Certainly, we can easily understand the stars discussed throughout this book as creative producers in relation to their respective Disney Channel franchises. They have contractual obligations to The Walt Disney Company and are the “talent” in their “talent-driven” series. Yet, to fully understand how girl performers contribute to franchised media, it is necessary also to explore how those franchises imagine and interpellate girl audiences. After all, girl viewers and consumers help to perpetuate the media franchise matrix. The significance of girls and the discursive construction of girlhood within Disney Channel franchises is woefully underresearched and demands scholarly attention. In this chapter, I explore how The Walt Disney Company, as a networked corporate entity, understands and envisions contemporary U.S.girls and girlhood discourse, as conveyed in corporate reports, executive speaking engagements, and popular journalism. I aim to elucidate some of the logics of the transmedia franchises discussed throughout this book. Ultimately, I argue that The Walt Disney Company’s development of franchisable girl star personae, via Disney Channel and affiliated Disney divisions, both reflects and perpetuates a neoliberal turn in the United States, which privileges a performative and celebrity-oriented form of girlhood as the contemporary ideal.

Breaking Down the Disney Beast

Before discussing Disney’s history of television production and its mediated appeals to tween girlhood, it is necessary to clarify why this book relies on the notion of The Walt Disney Company as a seemingly singular entity that operates in particular ways to make meanings through girl-driven franchises (among its many other revenue streams). I do not wish to construct The Walt Disney Company as a unified or monolithic transmedia auteur or industrial identity. Nor do I wish to reduce the collaborative efforts of the many skilled creative and executive individuals and groups who labor within its divisions. In the pages that follow, for instance, I explore how some of the various divisions of the conglomerate, including Disney Music Group, Disney Channel, and Disney Consumer Products, have worked together to create the texts and personae that constitute my case studies. Indeed, it is by virtue of the collaborations of those individuals and groups and the rights granted to the company’s shareholders that the corporation can be afforded certain legal rights and protections, similar to those granted to individual citizens.¹ Several individuals, in a variety of capacities within the Disney conglomerate, are quoted throughout this book, but their work and their statements must be understood within the context of the corporation. They represent one or more particular cultures of production and the values—however contradictory they may be—imposed by The Walt Disney Company.

Inasmuch as corporations have been recognized as rights-holding citizens, and inasmuch as they attempt to actively circulate and reproduce unified branded industrial identities, they may be construed as “imagining,” “envisioning,” or “constructing” themselves, their subsidiaries and cultural laborers, and their target markets in particular ways. For example, the Project on Disney, a research group studying Disney’s employment practices at theme parks, reveals that

Disney’s conceit of theater marshals the creative and emotional energies of its workers and creates a situation in which they are always performing for the company. … It is also, however, the vehicle for whatever departures they make from it—the determinate structure that brings forth in spite of itself the indeterminate practices for which it nevertheless finds uses.

(Klugman et al. 113)

This deliberate effort to create and constrain a particular production culture is also evident at Disney Studios, down to the architectural design of its buildings. John Thornton Caldwell argues, regarding Disney’s and other studios’ uses of architecture to generate particular production cultures, that “as corporate replicas, the resulting production spaces also publicly express and articulate to workers and visitors the central themes, individual strengths, and identity of each production enterprise” (77). And Alan Bryman, Sean Griffin, and the members of the Project on Disney each describe ways in which the Disney Company structures and operationalizes language, in particular, to make workers’ labors invisible in the service of theatricality and discourses of magic (Bryman The Disneyization; Griffin; Klugman et al.). While the experience of a highly paid and publicly recognized Disney executive, such as recent Disney Channel president Anne Sweeney, differs greatly from that of a theme park employee or a young star on a popular television series, the executive may be doubly suited to represent the culture of the company since she reproduces Disney values as well as being in a position to determine or regulate how others do so. Although a complex network of individuals and groups generates the visual and rhetorical manifestations of the “corporate imagination,” then, conglomerates such as The Walt Disney Company clearly foster particular working cultures and discourses that can constrain how and what meanings are made within and related to the organization. As such, Disney Channel can be said to construct girlhood in particular ways through its narrative representations of girls, its appeals to girl consumers, its girl-driven corporate citizenship campaigns, and its promotion of girl celebrities.

The Walt Disney Company and Television

As televisions appeared in more U.S. homes in the 1950s, The Walt Disney Company found ways to finance and promote its new Disneyland theme park while generating consumer audiences for Disney texts and products old and new. Disney was one of the established film studios that, along with some independent producers, took the opportunity to produce series for television early on, influencing the structure of television production and reception. According to Chris Anderson, “Disney provided the impulse for the major studios to enter television and a blueprint for the future development of the media industries” (Hollywood 31). Its original series for ABC, Disneyland (which aired on ABC, NBC, CBS, and The Disney Channel, respectively, in various forms and under various titles from 1954 to 2008), worked as a vehicle for promotion of the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California. It simultaneously perpetuated the mythology of the “American Dream” by promoting the park as “Walt’s Dream” and by relating the dream to the family-focused educational and moral values that would continue to permeate Disney’s kid-friendly films and television programs for decades. For J. P. Telotte, Disney’s early series “helped pave the way for an even bolder, more ambitious development—the company’s move into cable television, first with the Disney Channel and later with TOON Disney, ESPN, and other channels” (82). After decades of providing major networks with original programming and films, the Disney Company launched its own subscription-based premium cable network, The Disney Channel, in 1983.

In her overview of the company’s shifting priorities and intense diversification and expansion throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century, Janet Wasko (2001) details the level of power and control held by the company’s shareholders and board members. Changes in ownership and management at The Walt Disney Company in the early 1980s had reinvigorated the company and precipitated significantly increasing revenues, assets, and stock prices. The successes of “Team Disney,” led by new CEO Michael Eisner, would compel the company to dub the following decade (the 1990s), “The Disney Decade.” With an emphasis on forming corporate partnerships, diversifying expansion, limiting their exposure, and generating corporate synergy, among other strategies,² Team Disney’s primary objective was “to create shareholder value” (Wasko 37). Throughout the 1980s, The Disney Channel offered a shifting array of programming for children and family audiences, but never in the ad-supported format used by other networks. In 1991, cable providers began to offer The Disney Channel as part of their expanded basic cable packages, though the transition would take years, with some providers in certain markets requiring premium subscriptions until as recently as 2004.

Technological, regulatory, and economic changes throughout the 1980s and 1990s allowed media corporations to expand through vertical and horizontal integration across national borders, such that a few major global conglomerates now dominate (Schaap 151). As early as 1986, home video and subscription-based cable television markets began to provide greater revenues for media companies than they could expect from their films’ theatrical releases (Schatz “The New” 196). As new modes of exhibition and distribution emerged and synergistic franchising strategies extended the lives of media texts to multiple iterations across media platforms, six massive conglomerates³ came to control the markets for commercial television and film production, distribution, and licensing. The Walt Disney Company remains near the top of the list of highest grossing media conglomerates in the world.

Among its many ventures during the 1980s, Team Disney aggressively developed markets for its home video products and non-Disney-branded films; reinvigorated its animated features business with merchandise and Broadway productions; intensified licensing of Disney characters and the manufacture of branded consumer products; and branched out further into television, radio, and music publishing. Disney also ventured to air some original family programming in 1989, but those efforts were only minimally successful. The network lacked contemporary relevance and was seen by 8- to 10-year-old focus groups as too childish for them (Wasko). After the losses and brand confusion of the early1990s, the company took over Capital Cities/ABC in 1995 and became the world’s largest media company. In 1996, Eisner hired Anne Sweeney, who had worked at Nick Jr. (Nickelodeon’s programming block for 2- to 6-year-olds), to oversee Disney’s television ventures as president of The Disney Channel Worldwide and ABC Cable Networks Group. Her goal was to make Disney Channel a stronger brand in relation to other Disney holdings as well as to its children’s television competitors, Nickelodeon and The Cartoon Network (Boorstin “Disney’s ‘Tween Machine’”). To that end, Sweeney focused on offering programming that would attract the “tween” audience that Disney had yet to successfully address and that had become a coveted target demographic since its emergence in the late-1980s’ marketing discourse (Boorstin “Disney’s ‘Tween Machine’”).

During the late 1990s, Disney Channel made several changes, dropping “The” from its title, adopting an updated logo, and adding programming breaks for promotional spots—though not sponsored advertisements—between shows. In addition, the schedule was split into three blocks of programming: Zoog Disney in the afternoons and evenings, devoted to programming for teens and tweens; Vault Disney, broadcasting classic Disney series; and Playhouse Disney, for preschool audiences. It was then, as part of the Zoog Disney block, that Disney Channel began to offer its first original live-action series specifically for teens with Flash Forward (1996–1997) and The Famous Jett Jackson (1998–2001), and for tweens with Even Stevens (2000–2003) and Lizzie McGuire (2001–2004), along with an array of music videos and pop concert performance broadcasts.

As Disney’s original programming drew a larger tween and teen audience, the music videos were replaced by tween-oriented ones that featured the casts of popular Disney Channel series performing as the Disney Channel Circle of Stars, singing well-known songs from Disney’s Cinderella (1950, song: “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes”) and The Lion King (1994, song: “The Circle of Life”), among other films. Concert broadcasts were limited to those by artists such as Britney Spears, whose romance-themed songs were oriented more toward teen audiences, Hilary Duff, whose music had launched Hollywood Records’ success by appealing to tweens, and other performers who had appeared on Disney Channel, signed recording contracts with Disney Music Group (Hollywood Records, Walt Disney Records), or were featured on Radio Disney, which launched in 1996. As Mike Budd comments, “Every Disney product is both a commodity and an ad for every other Disney commodity” (1; Giroux and Pollock 84). The popularity and promotional nature of music videos at the time made them a perfectly appropriate strategy for a network aiming to further advertise its own brand, its programming, and its stars. Many of the above programming strategies are apparent on Disney Channel today.

From Teens to Tweens: Popular TV and New Demographics

While Disney Channel programming initially aimed to appeal to both boys and girls, its prime-time schedule at the turn of the millennium focused more on representations of girlhood and on tween girl audiences. While Disney executives did not make this shift to gendered programming explicit at the time, we can read the 2009 launch of the Disney XD network, described by the company as more “gender neutral,” as reflecting a new gendered divide (Rose “Disney Goes”). Disney XD provided the company with a traditional commercial children’s television network whereas Disney Channel had built its reputation on not airing commercial spots. Disney XD reintroduced old assumptions about young viewers: that boys will only watch specifically boy-oriented programming and that boy audiences are the lucrative toy-buying audiences (Seiter and Mayer). The eventual gendering of the term “tween” as feminine and the emergence of tween as both a target market and an apparently “new” life stage for preteen youth both call to mind the popularization of the teen market several decades prior.

Teenagers have been seen as a lucrative niche audience for U.S. television since the 1950s, when one of the smaller broadcast networks, ABC, risked alienating wider audiences in order to focus on youth. ABC created a niche with programs such as A Date with Judy (1952–1953), American Bandstand (1952–1989), Junior Press Conference (1953–1954), Disneyland (1954–2008), and, later, The Jetsons (1962–1963), The Patty Duke Show (1963–1966), Shindig (1964–1965), and Gidget (1965–1966). This strategy differed significantly from that of the other networks, which focused on attracting as wide an audience as possible. As Kearney asserts, family series on each of the major networks during television’s first decade often included teen characters that became central to storylines over the course of the 1950s (“Teenagers and Television”). In her exploration of the multiple re/iterations of two girl-focused texts across media platforms via “transmedia exploitation” from the 1940s through the mid-1950s, Kearney points to “the original teen-girl production trend,” which included the television series A Date with Judy and Meet Corliss Archer (CBS 1954) (“Recycling Judy” 265). Citing a “torrent of ‘teen girl’ shows produced during the 1950s and 1960s,” Bill Osgerby maintains that the development of media texts for teen girls during those years was “part of a wider business machine geared to reaping profit from a new, lucrative consumer market,” (Osgerby 75).

Osgerby’s argument is useful also when thinking through recent efforts to profit from tween audiences. Analyzing ABC’s approach to teen girls in the 1960s, Moya Luckett argues that media producers challenged themselves to represent “the ‘unrepresentable’—a teenager and teenage life” via The Patty Duke Show and Gidget (“Girl Watchers” 99). “[T]hese girls were a source of media fascination due to their unprecedented spending power and their new role as trendsetters” (Luckett “Girl Watchers” 100). Similar commentary abounds regarding the contemporary tween girl demographic as trendsetters and dictators of family spending. For Luckett,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Disney Girls, Producing Girlhood Discourse
• 1 Tweening Disney Channel via the Franchisable Girl
• 2 Luminous Girlhood: Visibility, Femininity, and Performance
• 3 “True Colors”: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in That’s So Raven, Hannah Montana, and Wizards of Waverly Place
• 4 D-Signed for Diversification: Disney Channel and Lifestyle Branding
• 5 Citizen Girl: “Do-Good” Disney TV and Girls’ Citizenship
• 6 The Girl Mogul: Entrepreneurism and the New Girl Subject
• 7 Outgrowing Disney Channel: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Girlhood
• Conclusion: Performing Girl / Performing Luminosity
• Bibliography
• Index