Disney
Introduction
In her analysis on how peo
This is an excerpt from the paper...
In her analysis on how people interact with Walt Disney World and how the theme park operates upon our personal and societal expectation, Jane Kuenz is particularly interested in the way the park functions in what she calls "a process of recognition and identification and how out of that identification or against it, Disney produces feelings we find pleasurable" (Kuenz 56). She concludes that the park allows us space only as consumers and offers a revamped American history intended to quiet any qualms our society may have about that history. It accomplishes this by tracing our history in various stories of our past and showing the obvious and inevitable correctness of that history (Kuenz 69). Susan Willis concurs in Kuenz's conclusion. She also concludes that Disney World's success of Disney World has largely to do with the way it uses a variety of programming methods to establish the economics of consumption as a value system (Willis 188).How People Interact with Disney Theme Parks Kuenz maintains that Disney succeeds at providing structures through which people establish and affirm their identity by locating themselves within already existing social structures and the power relations they express (55). She argues that people derive pleasure from seeing themselves as part of the big show produced at Disney World: the music, lights, atmosphere, and the normative sexuality these elements combine to signify. Thus, she argues, Disney World serv
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actually stood for would have mean allowing conflict to be much more central than desired (131). In addition, gender issues surface only in a such as way as to reinforce conservative notions of social role and family (Bryman 131). Kuenz finds it indubitable that Disney World participates in this process:
free floating between a nostalgic past and endless future of "progress"--though never quite touching base in the present--Walt Disney World confronts its visitors with a narrative of itself and invites us to see ourselves and our history in the workings of its own (Kuenz 58).
However, in this history, the problems caused by corporation are largely hidden from view. Bryman notes that ecological horrors, the role of corporations in producing the instruments of war, dehumanizing work, and the like are largely omitted from accounts of the past (129). Kuenz observes that at EPCOT, this history is an ongoing tale of social advancement in which technology and its corporate sponsors are both the agent and the product of the history it writes. The rest of us are encouraged to look on, consume it visually, and take it home as such (Kuenz 58). We are not, however, called upon to participate.
Susan Willis addresses the issues o
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Approximate Word count = 2879
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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