Upcoming book analyzes masculinity in Pixar films
“What does Sid do? He hangs out in his playroom by himself with no parental supervision and no friends at all, taking apart toys and building robots. He might be seen as this misunderstood genius kid. He can’t possibly know the toys he breaks are alive, and once he does, he is horrified and scared. … Are we telling our kids that to break their toys is akin to sociopathology?!”
Wooden, husband collaborated on book
Wooden isn’t just taking an interest in “Toy Story” because she has two sons, Oscar, 9, and Archie, 5, who have watched it, in her estimation, about 1,000 times.
She and her husband, Dr. Ken Gillam, an assistant professor in MSU’s English department, have finished a book expected to be out in April 2014 about the images of boys in Pixar films such as “A Bug’s Life,” “Cars” and “The Incredibles.”
“My husband and I were on a road trip and our sons were watching a DVD, and we started chatting about the ways masculinity seems to be represented. I pulled out my laptop and started taking notes.”
They wrote an article for The Journal of Popular Film and Television and presented their findings at conferences, where discussions were lively.
“At first, we argued that Pixar films seem to present a kinder, gentler model of masculinity … They are showing men with the values that have been historically coded as feminine: community-orientation, nurturing children. That can offer boys a healthy model of being a man, but at the same time it can limit what boys are told to view as success. It’s interesting, for instance, that none of the little boys get to win. Lightning in ‘Cars’ purposely loses, and Dash in ‘The Incredibles’ also has to come in second.”
They also examined bullying and the stereotype that smart, skinny or small boys such as Mike Wazowski, Flik or Buddy Pine (aka Syndrome) must always be nerds or villains.
Alumna teaching at alma mater
Wooden and her students often analyze messages in advertising, movies, television shows and music.
She became interested in gender and culture studies during bachelor’s and master’s studies in English at Missouri State. She lived around the U.S. during her PhD studies and first faculty positions, and returned in 2009 to teach.
“I always loved it here! … When the opportunity arose to teach here, we grabbed it. And now I live a mile from my grandmother; my kids live within a couple of hours of many of their grandparents and aunts and uncles.”
Wooden’s next research project isn’t likely to involve Woody or Nemo. She likes to dive into ethical dilemmas of all kinds, and her graduate studies centered on Victorian literature, evolution and 19th-century ideas of race. Recently, she’s been teaching about how health, medicine and illness are represented in classic and contemporary texts.
“Our attitudes toward the physical body affect not only the way we construct our society and relationships, but also the way we perceive our own identities. I look at someone else’s body and see what I expect to see, which means I already limit what that person can become. … Literary analysis can expose the way we take narratives and silently, invisibly apply them to the world. We filter the world through these constructs that we may not even be conscious of. Becoming conscious of the way we build stories and hear stories can really help us to manipulate and change the stories that are present and prevalent in our culture.”
Wooden’s book recommendations
Classic
- “Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Brontë
- “The Mill on the Floss,” George Eliot
- “Mrs. Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf
- Any Charles Dickens
Contemporary
- “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Mark Haddon
- “The Illumination,” Kevin Brockmeier, ’95 MSU alumnus
- “Room,” Emma Donoghue
- “Tenth of December,” George Saunders
Leave a Reply