'Pixie Dust': Gender, Embodiment and Consumer Identities in disney.go.com/fairies and Pixie Hollow MMOG

Article sample:

This article will explore the Disney Fairies website and the Pixie Hollow game in terms of gender and representation. There is much more to explore in these texts, for example, the structuring of game play and the ways in which the site engages with space, but in this article the focus will be on the representational elements of the site. My interest here is in the ways in which the website interpolates its young users as gendered and raced bodies, and uses visual and aural strategies to encourage embodied, and whole-bodied, performances of gender. Using an Althusserian framework, this article will analyse the ways in which user interaction on the site and within the game are structured to illicit these identifications and embodied responses. Users of the website and the game are encouraged to engage in a fantasy in which they embody the style, behaviour, and look of a Disney Fairy. They also present the user with images of idealised feminine bodies which model this fantasy.

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Senses of Cinema is an online journal devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema. We believe cinema is an art that can take many forms, from the industrially-produced blockbuster to the hand-crafted experimental work; we also aim to encourage awareness of the histories of such diverse forms. As an Australian-based journal, we have a special commitment to the regular, wide-ranging analysis and critique of Australian cinema, past and present. Senses of Cinema is primarily concerned with ideas about particular films or bodies of work, but also with the regimes (ideological, economic and so forth) under which films are produced and viewed, and with the more abstract theoretical and philosophical issues raised by film study.