Lacassagne 1 The Established and the Outsiders: A Relational Analysis of Political representations in the

The trilogy Shrek has been one the most successful animated movie in the box office in the history of cinema. DreamWorks, the production company, decided to make the Green ogre a worldwide cultural product, by designing hundreds of products relating to the monster. The profits of the franchise are estimated at 1.4 billion dollars (The Independent, 2007). Just the first movie Shrek, made a total box office of $ 479.2 million (Hopkins, 2004: 33). This fact could clearly lead to insights pertaining to the political economy of film. This paper, however, will focus on the narratives of the movies. We are interested in these narratives (in our case visual representations) and their interplay with power politics and especially race and gender conflicts. Insofar as movies constitute partly social reality, how can we interpret these visual texts? Our contention is that popular culture, among which children movies, constitutes and represents the social world. Therefore, proposing an interpretation of these texts, also offers an interpretation and a representation of the world. Children (and in our case also adults) are more than just socialized by movies, the films as texts affect directly their representation of the world and participate to the constitution of the social world. As the early writers like Hall (1997) on cultural studies showed, popular culture is a site of struggles between the hegemonic discourse an