This expanded and revised edition explores and updates the cultural
politics of the Walt Disney Company and how its ever-expanding list of
products, services, and media function as teaching machines that shape
children's culture into a largely commercial endeavor. The Disney
conglomerate remains an important case study for understanding both the
widening influence of free-market fundamentalism in the new millennium
and the ways in which messages of powerful corporations have been
appropriated and increasingly resisted in global contexts. New in this
edition is a discussion of Disney's shift in its marketing strategies
towards targeting tweens and teens, as Disney promises to provide (via
participation in consumer culture) the tools through which young people
construct and support their identities, values, and knowledge of the
world. The updated chapters from the highly acclaimed first edition are
complimented with two new chapters, "Globalizing the Disney Empire" and
"Disney, Militarization, and the National Security State After 9/11,"
which extend the analysis of Disney's effects on young people to a
consideration of the political and economic dimensions of Disney as a
U.S.-based megacorporation, linking the importance of critical reception
on an individual scale to a broader conception of democratic global
community.