Easy credit? University of Colorado Boulder offers Disney film-based feminist course

The University of Colorado Boulder is offering a course in the spring 2025 semester on the relationship between feminism and Disney films.

Entitled “Disney’s Women and Girls,” the course “examines the construction of gender, race, class, sexual orientation and disability in a selection of Disney's animated films,” according to a description.

The three-credit course has been offered since at least 2019, according to CU Boulder’s class search.

The course description states that the class “analyzes the political economy of the Disney phenomenon through a feminist lens.”

The course also says it “cultivates skills of media literacy, exploring how mass media acts to enforce and maintain conventional gendered understandings of power, privilege and difference.”

“Disney’s Women and Girls” is offered through CU Boulder’s Women and Gender Studies department and is taught by lecturer Shannon Leone.

Leone did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Leone has a BA in political science from Miami University and a PhD in English Literature from CU Boulder, where she specialized in “Gothic maternal imagery and identity in literary modernism,” according to her school bio.

Leone’s teaching and research interests, according to the bio, include “feminism, intersectionality, pedagogy, modernity and postmodernity, and representations in popular culture.”

Leone said in a November interview concerning Disney princesses that she believes “recent female protagonists” are “more empowered and express desires outside of romance,” versus their royal predecessors who celebrate traditional femininity.

Leone notes that modern Disney princesses do not wish for the love of a man. For instance, the movie Frozen is focused on sisterly love between princesses Anna and Elsa and not the love between a man and woman, while the movie Moana has no romantic plotline at all.

Leone also notes that portrayal of female characters overall have changed in modern Disney movies, with an example being that the princess Elsa “was supposed to be a villain” in Frozen.

Leone believes that having “traces” of an antagonist in a female character such as Elsa “produces more of a multifaceted human being,” which she thinks “young viewers responded to.”

CU Boulder’s Women and Gender Studies department teaches about “gender and sexuality in a range of cultural and historical contexts.”

The Women and Gender Studies department also hosts the Gender Justice League, which exists to help students put social justice into practice, according to its webpage, and has resources on abortion, pleasure and consent, and fetishization.

The University of Colorado Boulder is a public research institution, as stated on its website.

The Center Square reached out to CU Boulder media relations, spokeswoman Stacy Wagner and media relations associate and data analyst Ally Dever. None responded but Wagner, who forwarded TCS’s request for comment to CU Boulder media relations.