Male and Female Workers. Gender Treatment Through Pixar's Films

Abstract

The concept of 'work' encompasses knowledge, representations, activities and social relations that organize and hierarchize society through roles and norms. During more than fifty years, Disney represented women as the angel from the home and men as brave and very hard workers. The distribution of tasks has been progressively modified in our Western society, in animated films as well. In 1989 a new era started in animation films: Disney changed some characteristics in male and female characters, but the representation of female workers did not appear until 2009 with The Princess and the Frog. Tiana is the first worker princess; she is a waitress that wants to run her own restaurant and she gets it at the end of the film. But, in 2009, Pixar had released ten films and its first worker princess was the main character of Bug’s life (John Lasseter, 1998). At first sight, this seems as a very high evolution, but this work wants to discover how Pixar has represented the world of work: as a way of dividing characters depending on its gender or as a way of developing and showing equality to the youngest spectators?