When dreaming is fashionable – the nostalgia of the feminine in the consumption culture

Abstract

The material and visual repertoires of the aristocracy of the eighteenth century were appropriated by modern Western society to create cleavages between masculine and feminine genders. But such social strategies were not just of differentiation. In the distinction and hierarchy of genders, new territories were also created for the cultivation of sexualized subjectivities. In this article the phenomenon is limited to the production of Walt Disney princess films, especially Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Cinderella (1950). I intend to demonstrate how the practice of romantic reverie, as characterized by Colin Campbell, found fertile grounds in the aristocratic past of the settecento, nostalgically restated as a model of beauty and femininity in the cinematographic production in question.