ABSTRACT
Gay subtexts within Disney’s animated films, whether explicit or implied, have received much attention and critical analysis over the past two decades (e.g., Griffin, 2000; Roth, 1996; Towbin, Haddock, Zimmerman, Lund, & Tanner, 2004). As Halperin (2012) insists, “[g]ay culture, after all, is not something you have to be gay to enjoy-or to comprehend” (p. 16). In this chapter I explore Halperin’s ideas “about the relation between sexuality, on the one hand, and cultural forms, styles of feeling, and genres of discourse, on the other” (p. 14) to see where they might productively lead us. I am interested in how Disney commodifies, caricatures, and capitalizes upon ‘camp’ sensibilities and enactments, seemingly as sources of humor, in order to entertain, and to educate. Unlike other aspects of Disney films, where [gay] audiences need to “queer heteronormative culture . . . to decode heterosexual cultural artifacts and recode them with gay meanings” (Halperin, 2012, p. 18) or where gay audiences “find the ‘hidden message’ aimed at the homosexual reader” (Griffin, 2010, p. 193) within Disney advertisements, this project starts with already-queer camp moments in these films. As I use it here, camp is “an in-group word which denote[s] specifically homosexual humor” (Newton, 1979, p. xx).
