Frozen, Homosexuality and Masochism

Abstract

Disney’s animated phenomenon Frozen (2013) has been criticized by America’s religious right for its homosexual subtext which allegedly advocates non-Christian values to impressionable audiences. This essay does not dispute the presence of such a subtext, but argues that that the film’s gay codings, rather than celebrating and encouraging homosexuality, invoke bigoted stereotypes, negative psychoanalytic categories and masochistic cinematic conventions. The film represents homosexuality in an ostensibly non-discriminatory manner, but undermines this potential through a range of cultural prejudices and conventionalized conservative cinematic techniques. The last of these elements entails the film’s most sinister approach to homosexuality, reflexively linking a masochistic representation of its gay-coded characters with the ideological passivity of cinematic spectatorship.