Sexuality and Gender in The Lion King

Knowing what I know now, I am going to take a deeper look into The Lion King and its statement on sexuality and gender through analysis of this article. http://www.academia.edu/4893757/The_Representations_of_Gender_Sexuality_and_Race_in_Disney_s_The_Lion_King

The article first starts off by addressing the role that a patriarchal society has on its members. It talks about how the lionesses are seen as inferior and secondary to the men. The men lead the pride and hold the important positions, while the females just hunt, gather, and care for the cubs. Further, once Scar become king of Pride Rock, there were many lionesses that could have easily defeated Scar and claimed back Pride Rock. The fact that the lionesses don’t rise up shows the weakness and passivity of the females. While this is all true within the movie, there is a very obvious reason: this is how nature works. This isn’t a westernized human civilization, it’s a pride of wild lions. In nearly all aspects of nature, the male tends to be the dominant figure. If the female lionesses had more power and authority, it would lead children to have a false perception of the reality of nature. The only way I could get behind these arguments would be if the characters from the movie were human, not animals.

The next point that this article makes is that Scar is a homosexual figure in the movie.

As a child, this would've been one of the last thoughts that went through my head. Scar defeats a king and takes over a pride of lions, which is usually indicative of very masculine figures. So what is it that makes Scar come off as a homosexual character? For starters, there are a few physical indications of Scar’s sexuality. Scar is significantly weaker than Mufasa, which proves to be the case with grownup Simba, as well. Next, Scar kind of struts across the screen in a relatively feminine way, flipping his head and looking all sassy. Scar’s unique walk can be seen during one of his songs, “Be Prepared.”

Outside of physical indicators, there are a few more ways that Disney portrays Scar as a homosexual character. In nature, the king or leader of a group will almost always try to have offspring so that one day they can pass the thrown down to their kin. However, Scar makes absolutely no effort to mate with any lionesses and reproduce. Virtually, the main reason why this would be the case is because Scar isn’t attracted to lionesses and therefore cannot reproduce with them. Moreover, he actually appears to detest heterosexual relationships. This can be seen when Scar is disgusted by Mufasa and Sarabi’s relationship and by their offspring Simba. The article actually says that one of the reasons that Scar didn’t show up to the presentation of Simba after his birth was because Scar is against heterosexual mating and the byproduct of it (offspring). While this last point may be a bit of a stretch, I do believe most of their reasoning behind Scar’s apparent sexuality.