Disney’s Queer Queen – Frozen’s Elsa and Queer Representation
Frozen’s (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013) protagonist, Elsa, is easily the most obviously queer-coded heroine in Disney’s princess films. Both academic analyses and media outlets, as well as a robust part of her fandom, have argued as much (see, for instance, Charania and Albertson 2018; Mason 2019; Rose 2020). Yet it is worth revisiting just how her queerness manifests in the animated films, especially in the songs in Frozen and its sequel, and the surrounding debate on representation that has flared up again since Frozen 2 (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2019) was released on Disney+ in 2020.
To recap: Elsa (Idina Menzel) is the queen of Arendelle, a Norwegian-inspired fictional kingdom loosely adapted from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. She is born with the power to magically conjure snow and ice. However, her powers cause trouble early in her childhood when she uses them to play with her younger sister, Anna, and she accidentally blasts Anna with a potentially lethal spray of ice. To save Anna, her memory of Elsa’s powers is wiped. Elsa’s parents lock her away until she can control her powers, and so she remains secluded, even when they die in a shipwreck and the girls are left alone with the servants in their castle.
Elsa’s powers are triggered by strong emotion, including anxiety and anger, which makes them hard to conceal, something she shares with the similarly queer-coded X-Men (VanDerWerff 2019). Elsa accidentally reveals her magic at her coronation reception when she becomes overwhelmed by Anna and her guests. She then flees Arendelle – which unbeknownst to her has succumbed to a magical winter – and for the first time in her life, is free from the constraints of her family and society..
Fig. 1 - Elsa coming into her own in “Let it Go” (from Frozen, 2013).
This moment is when Elsa verbalizes her feelings in the famous song, “Let It Go”, which has resonated with many queer people as a “queer anthem” (Fleeger 2014). A song of self-actualization, “Let It Go” plays on themes familiar to anyone who has come out. In the accompanying animated sequence, Elsa literally fashions her own identity and transforms into her signature look: an icy blue gown with her white hair braided loosely over her shoulder (Fig. 1). She also builds an ice castle around her according to her own wishes: even though the fortress means more solitude, it is at least of her own choosing (Whitfield 2017, 226). For the first time, “she is content with only having to satisfy her own desires” (Mollet 2020, 127). When Elsa finally returns to Arendelle, she does away with her parents’ rules completely and is “able to collapse the binaries that have regulated and haunted her life” (Matos 2014).
Disney animation has been chockful of such queer-coding which, in the past, has often had negative connotations, as with villains like Jafar and Scar (Griffin 2000). Yet, more importantly, animation is also an “inherently queer medium”, especially animation with fantastical elements such as the magic behind Elsa’s powers, as it allows us to play with, and thus, queer reality (Maier 2018). I argue queer-coding also runs through Disney’s animated work because many of the artists working on these films have been or are queer themselves. One key example is lyricist Howard Ashman, who in collaboration with Alan Menken, shaped The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989) and Beauty and the Beast (Bill Condon, 1991) into the successful musicals they are. Ashman, a gay man, died of AIDS before he could finalise his work on Aladdin (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1992), and there has been many queer readings of his work, such as “The Mob Song” from Beauty and the Beast as a metaphor for the ostracization of those living with HIV/AIDS and the moral panic surrounding them.
What has gotten less attention in this context is the queer-coding of Menken’s “I Want” songs, the songs in the first act where the protagonist expresses their motivation or longing. Little Mermaid’s “Part of Your World” and Beauty and the Beast’s “Belle’s Reprise” both let Ariel and Belle express their desire to escape the constraints of the societies they grew up in, as both are misunderstood outsiders. They long for a better future, where they can be who they really are. As José Munoz has argued, “queerness is essentially about a rejection of the here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world” (2009, 1). Charania and Albertson have also related this notion to Elsa and Disney’s animated films more generally, as they exist at a dialectical point of tension between an outside view of the company as conservative and the more progressive ideas of queerness inherent in their texts (Charania and Albertson 2018, 142).
Fig. 2 - Elsa bathed in “Bisexual Lighting” in the sequence to “Show Yourself” (from Frozen 2, 2019).
Ashman’s legacy lives in the current animated musicals, as composers Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez are inspired by the Ashman/Menken legacy (Hetrick 2014). This “ghosting” (Carlson 2003, 8) or what could perhaps also be called a “haunting” or “palimpsest” of his work is found the songs for Frozen and its sequel. In Frozen 2, Elsa’s quest to find, and ultimately, love herself is exemplified by two songs: her “I Want” song, “Into the Unknown”, and “Show Yourself”, which wraps up her arc. “Into the Unknown” is full of an Ashman-esque, queer longing that Elsa originally tries to disavow, but only when she follows it can she finally accept herself. In the scene accompanying “Show Yourself”, Elsa is fittingly bathed in so-called “bisexual lighting” (Fig. 2), as the ice around her reflects in pink, purple and blue tones: the colours of the bisexual pride flag.
Here, in dialogue with a magical reflection of her own dead mother, she realizes that the person she needed to learn to love is herself – something many queer people struggle with, especially after they have liberated themselves from a repressive upbringing like Elsa’s. Notably, Brendon Urie’s (Panic at the Disco’s queer lead) powerful pop-rock rendition of the song further seems to support this queer reading (see below).
Panic! At the Disco - Into the Unknown.
Importantly, Elsa’s narrative arc across both films solely focuses on her self-acceptance and assertion rather than any romantic fulfilment. This is a feminist project, as the films’ director, Jennifer Lee, as well as voice actress Idina Menzel have echoed in several promotional interviews: “In these films, the most powerful thing is that she's always trying to find and build the love inside for herself. She doesn’t need a man to complete her in any way, and that focus isn’t there” (Menzel qtd. in Stahler 2019). As it further removes Elsa from heteropatriarchal structures, it also queers her (Llompart and Brugué 2019,104-05).
Elsa’s lack of interest in romance (and presumably sex) has especially resonated with the asexual/aromantic community, and many fans see themselves reflected in her (Rose 2020). However, this interpretation ultimately clashes with many other queer fans who clamour for Elsa to be shown in a lesbian relationship. In 2016, the hashtag #GiveElsaAGirlfriend trended on Twitter. This demand once again gained traction ahead of the Frozen 2 premiere, especially as it was revealed that Evan Rachel Wood (an out bisexual woman) was cast. While Wood plays Elsa’s and Anna’s mother, Elsa is still shown laughing and bonding with a character called Honeymaren (Rachel Matthews), a young woman of the Northuldra people key to the plot of Frozen 2. Because of the apparent chemistry between the two women, viewers have read Honeymaren as a potential love interest for Elsa, should there be a Frozen 3 (Mason 2019).
More ungraciously, however, the brief scenes Elsa has with her have also been read as queerbaiting (Harbet 2019), implying that Disney is aware that fans are longing for such representation and want to keep them emotionally invested, but are not willing to fulfil these wishes. Explicit representation remains important for queer people (or any minority who do not usually finds themselves depicted): studies have shown that it improves mental health, and often also has political consequences. That the needs of allosexual and ace[1] queer people clash here is unfortunate, if not uncommon – such feuds over representation and the often-resulting exclusionary practices and discrimination within the LGBTQ+ community occur on the regular, especially as the ace/aro community has become more visible in recent years and rightly assert their own needs for pop cultural and other kinds of representation.
However, as Melanie E.S. Kohnen has argued, explicit representation is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of queerness in the media. More implicit coding is still relevant and does not have to be replaced by explicit acknowledgement of one fixed queer identity (Kohnen 2016, 12-37). As VanDerWerff notes: “Canonically, she’s [Elsa] nothing when it comes to her sexuality. Which also means she isn’t (yet) canonically straight” (VanDerWerff 2019). This in many ways then is also a chance, as queer-coding allows for a multiplicity of readings that would perhaps serve a broader spectrum of queer identities. Elsa can thus remain ambiguously queer, existing in a long line of queercoded, animated Disney characters – a legacy that Frozen 3, should it be made, will likely continue.
**Article published: February 5, 2021**
Notes
[1] Someone who is allosexual experiences sexual attraction compared to asexual (or “ace” for short) people who do not.
References
Carlson, Michael. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press.
Charania, Moon and Cory Albertson. 2018. “Single, White, Female: Feminist Trauma and Queer Melancholy in the New Disney.” In Youth Sexualities: Public Feelings and Contemporary Cultural Politics, Vol 1, edited by Susan Talburt, 129-151. Praeger: Santa Barbara, CA.
Fleeger, Jennfier. 2014. “Frozen and the Disney Princess Song”, OUP Blog, December 11, 2014. https://blog.oup.com/2014/12/frozen-disney-princess-song/
Griffin, Sean. 1999. Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out. New York: New York University Press.
Harbet, Xandra. 2020. “Is Elsa Gay? Why Frozen 2 Doesn’t Address the Topic.” ScreenRant, March 29, 2020. https://screenrant.com/frozen-2-elsa-gay-not-addressed-why/
Hetrick, Adam. 2014. “’The Cold Never Bothered Them Anyway’: Songwriters Robert and Kristen Anderson-Lopez Revamp the Fairytale with ‘Frozen’” Playbill, February 27, 2014. https://www.playbill.com/article/the-cold-never-bothered-them-anyway-songwriters-robert-and-kristen-anderson-lopez-revamp-the-fairytale-with-frozen-com-215470
Kohnen, Melanie E.S. 2016. Queer Representation, Visbility and Race in American Film and Television. Screening the Closet. London: Routledge.
Llompart, Auba and Lydia Brugué. 2019. “The Snow Queer? Female Characterization in Disney’s Frozen.” Adaptation 13, no.1: 98-112.
Maier, Kodi. 2018. “Louis Armstrong’s Flying Head, Clothing as Food, and Renegade Angels: Queering Animation through Fantasy” Fantasy/Animation, July 5, 2018. https://www.fantasy-animation.org/current-posts/2018/7/5/louis-armstrongs-flying-head-clothing-as-food-and-renegade-angels-queering-animation-through-fantasy?rq=Maier
Mason, Jennifer. 2019. “So, Did Disney Give Elsa A Girlfriend in Frozen II?” The Mary Sue, November 24, 2019. https://www.themarysue.com/so-did-disney-give-elsa-a-girlfriend-in-frozen-ii/
Matos, Angel Daniel. 2014. “Conceal, Don’t Feal: A Queer Reading of Disney’s Frozen.” angelmatos.net, January 19, 2014. https://angelmatos.net/2014/01/19/disneys-frozen-queer/
Mollet, Tracey. 2020. A Cultural History of the Disney Fairy Tale: Once Upon an American Dream. London: Palgrave McMillan.
Munoz, José. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.
Rose, Elle. 2020. “Elsa from Frozen is Aromantic and Asexual”. Medium, July 29, 2020, https://secretladyspider.medium.com/elsa-from-frozen-is-aromantic-and-asexual-b36483da9702
Stahler, Kelsea. 2019. “Frozen II’s Director Explains Why Elsa Doesn’t Have a Girlfriend (And This is the Key Word) Yet.” Refinery29, November 26, 2019, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/11/8849966/is-honeymaren-elsa-girlfriend-in-frozen-2-interview
VanderWerff, Emily. 2019. “Why Elsa from Frozen is a queer icon – and why Disney won’t embrace the idea.” Vox, November 22, 2019. https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/11/22/20975178/frozen-2-elsa-girlfriend-lesbian-queer-review
Whitfield, Sarah. 2017. “For the First Time in Forever. Locating Frozen as a Feminist Disney Musical.” In The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen, edited by George Rodosthenous, London: Bloomsbury.
Biography
Dr. Sabrina Mittermeier is an assistant professor of American cultural history at the University of Kassel, Germany. She is the author of A Cultural History of Disneyland Theme Parks – Middle-Class Kingdoms (Intellect/U of Chicago P 2021), the (co-)editor, among other volumes, of Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect/U of Chicago P 2022), The Routledge Handbook to Star Trek (2021), and Fighting for the Future: Essays on Star Trek: Discovery (Liverpool UP 2020). Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and many other edited collections and journals.