Performance, utopia, and the ideology of gender: A feminist rhetorical analysis of 'High School Musical' and 'Glee'.

摘要

As massively popular film musical artifacts, Disney's film High School Musical and Fox's television series Glee interpret several musical conventions for the modern spectator. Both texts centralize performance, achieving aesthetic rhetoric through the naturalized conventions of the show musical subgenre. The texts also include romance-based conflict, drawing narrative syntax from both genre and narrative cinema as a whole. Finally, both are rooted in musical utopia, a mechanism that allows them to draw from their unique cultural situations and to recirculate cultural ideology to spectators.;In analyzing High School Musical, I argue that Disney's film takes on oppressive generic conventions, namely heterosexual romance and male gaze, while disguising their ideological power with musical utopia. While the film attempts to present a post-racial environment, its progressive attempts are overshadowed by white, heterosexual, male dominance throughout the narrative. Furthermore, the narrative centrality of performance emphasizes the male gaze, modeling submissive demeanor as a desirable female trait.;Next an ideological analysis of Glee's first season presents the series as both transformative and popular. I further assert that the progressive rhetorical project of the series succeeds due to its renegotiation of genre conventions for a progressive intergenerational audience. Where the genre's narratives have historically situated performance within a social utopia of heterosexual romance, Glee reproduces utopia from musical performance itself. By grounding its utopia in music instead of gender hierarchies, the series can introduce progressive social rhetoric and begin reclaiming the male gaze for the female performer and spectator.;This study proposes a new perspective on the film musical's transformative potential. The case studies foreground the possibilities for growth even within one of Hollywood's oldest genres by arguing that High School Musical saturates the cultural market with generic conventions, which, in turn, makes Glee's popularity possible. Glee is thereby able to incite progressive cultural changes through authentic representations of teen issues. These texts' transformative potential extends beyond the screen to America's schools, emphasizing the importance of performing arts for teens in a manner that foregrounds acceptance, inclusiveness, and collaborative community, thus effecting positive change within the larger cultural situation of arts education and performance.