Is ferdinand the bull gay

We created a scene in which Luna teaches Lolo how to dance flamenco, through demonstrating wrists and arm movements, clapping, and footwork. If we consider Ferdinand within this corpus, Leaf’s work, beyond the essential education of children, could be reflective of a wider need to conform within the ideological machinery that would implement itself in America shortly after Ferdinand’s publication, and that was fuelled by events in modern American history:  post-Depression capitalism, World War Two, the fear of communism or civil rights movements.

Halberstam characterises the relationship between queerness and the wild as the following:

 

The gender-queer subject represents an unscripted, declassified relation to being- s/he is wild because unnamable, beyond order because unexplained; s/he…[is] part of nature, but unexplained (23). Although my interpretation is in itself binarized, and assumes that all queer subjects have two parents, this paradigm of acceptance and facilitation versus opposition and discipline is one that many of us queer folx have experienced, regardless of what parent or carer performs either role, and therefore the text in this sense is representative of queer experience.

After multiple sessions discussing the text, we identified several elements that offered creative challenges when adapting, and which would best portray the concepts of nonnormative gender identities. The Story of Ferdinand.

The text has experienced two popular adaptations: Disney’s 1938 cartoon, Ferdinand the Bull, and Carlos Saldanha’s 2017 animated movie, Ferdinand. Even in the book, Ferdinand is certainly weird, if not, well, queer. Illustrated by Robert Lawson, Faber and Faber, 2017.

 The story’s main adult characters also lend themselves to queer analysis.

By contrast, when Ferdinand is taken to Madrid, the majority of illustrations are longshots. The higher registers of exaggeration became very interesting, not just because of the visual demands of street performance, but also because its campness “could easily be interpreted as the symbolic realization of an extroverted strategy of resistance” (Gere 356).

This sequence of events queers Ferdinand. What child and adult audiences highlighted were the relatable struggle between desire and social imposition and the empowerment of self-construction.

Other interpretations, Steig further contributes, criticise Ferdinand’s mother, the cow, for “suffocatingly trying to keep [Ferdinand] in childhood forever” (119)  and avoiding his male, aggressive responsibilities; the absence of a father figure has been duly noted as a cause for Ferdinand’s feminization (119); and in his sit-down strike at the bullring, Ferdinand has been considered a symbol of  civil rights and Apartheid movements (Martínez 28), as well as a parody of the sixties’ “flower children” (29).

According to Sean Griffin, author of a book about The Walt Disney Company, “The bull is drawn with long lashes and a lot of feminine characteristics...

Martínez, Mateo. That a little bull causes so many contrasting interpretations posits Ferdinand as a queer figure: his mere existence and way of being escaping normative classification and inciting such vehement criticism is, I believe, something very relatable to young queer people. 

My queer analysis of the text was a dialogic process between the text, queer theory and in-studio analysis with the performers.

 When investigating how Lolo/Lola moved I realized how much gender is policed through movement from a young age, as David Gere explores in his study on effeminacy.

The Story of Ferdinand has a contested history of criticism that made it an exciting text to work with. Instead, this gentle beast with his long feminine eyelashes and swishy demeanour prefers to smell the flowers and disassociates himself from the masculine antics of his counterparts.  This behavior is something he never outgrows, as the cartoon skips a few years and we find him exactly the same – a nice acute commentary on the ideology that this is something children will not “grow out of”.

The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf, is one of the all-time popular children’s books.