Beyond Queering Elsa: The Erotics of Touch in Disney's Frozen Series

Abstract

N 2014, WHILE SPEAKING FOR AN INTERVIEW AFTER WINNING THE Oscar for Best Animated Feature with Frozen (2013), Jennifer Lee, the screenwriter and co-director of the film, briefly discusses the constant debates about the film's representations of its "queer" characters. When specifically asked if Oaken-the owner of Wandering Oaken's Trading Post and Sauna-is gay, Lee responds, "We know what we made," and immediately adds, "But at the same time I feel like once we hand the film over it belongs to the world, so I don't like to say anything, and let the fans talk. I think it's up to them" (Mackenzie). Then she continues, "Disney films were made in different eras, different times, and we celebrate them all for different reasons but this one was made in 2013 and it's going to have a 2013 point of view." Despite Lee's rather ambiguous remark, Sarah Whitfield highlights the scene in which Anna visits Oaken's shop as evidence that Frozen is "the first Disney film to openly present a gay family (albeit only for seconds)" (232). Oaken introduces his family to Anna, and in that fleeting moment, audience see an unknown blond man and four children smiling in the family photo. That scene aside, Whitfield asserts that "Frozen is progressive by the standards of its broader Hollywood context" for "[i]t features two sisters as reasonably complex protagonists, unlike many films featuring two women, which present a good-one and an evil-one" (221). 1 Regardless of an explicit "intent" of embodying queerness, the Frozen series, especially the first entry, has garnered substantial recognition in and beyond academia for intervening in the prescriptive grammars of gender roles and sexualities in Disney princess narratives.