Dance, Girl, Dance!: Performance & Class Mobility in Disney’s Shake It Up

Curator's Note

In the first few minutes of the pilot for Disney Channel sitcom Shake It Up, lead characters, Rocky Blue (played by Zendaya Coleman) and Cece Jones (Bella Thorne), entertain a smattering of “L” passengers with a dance routine. Their performances, their thrift-store fashions, and the location all help introduce their humor, their talent, and, perhaps most importantly, the working-class, ethnically and racially diverse urban milieu of the series. Here, the girls’ desire for cell phones—and their lack of funds—leads them to dance for money, forging a shared pathway of upward social mobility.

The pilot revolves around the girls’ auditions for a television dance program called Shake It Up Chicago, the host of which positions the girls as potential stars, saying: “Young, funky, great look—you’re perfect!” and “You two got that whole 'it' factor. I think our audience is gonna eat you up!” Rocky and Cece hang on his approval, desperate for recognition and desperate for the independence and social status signaled, in part, by affording cell phones, but also by performing their dances on television. Here, professional dancing is part of an updated “American dream” scenario in which visibility and someone else’s recognition of “that “it” factor" are increasingly significant. Rocky and Cece, like others on Disney Channel, are intrinsically motivated to get noticed and to entertain. Their willingness to make themselves publically visible through performance is symptomatic of neoliberal ideals that beget a certain postfeminist expectation of subjectification on the part of girls and women.

Busquing on the “L” platform doesn’t pay off, but it establishes their drive to overcome age-based and economic barriers, their Disneyfied version of streetwise urban-ness, and their need for some (adult) authority to recognize, celebrate, and compensate them for their talents. Rocky and Cece receive their first paychecks in the final scene of the pilot—$40 apiece. But, after the costs of incidentals, transportation, and dance costumes, they find themselves broke again . . . until next time (when they will actually roll around in a shower of their hard-earned dollar bills). The pilot's foregrounding of working-class status is meant to distinguish this show from other Disney sitcoms, but cues to middle-class status abound also, and the girls' desires to perform for an audience overwhelm the external, economic motivations set up early on.


My very immediate question is if the series does anything to complicate these tendencies you mention. That brief glimpse into their apartment (Who is paying for it and how?) at the end of the clip seems spacious (admittedly, we're dealing with a multi-cam set-up, so the space is necessarily larger) but also relatively well-furnished and color-coordinated, and seems like a quick sign that their "working-class status" is a little too Disney Channel-ified to be effected (as you note at the very end). (I haven't seen the show, so I'm curious.)

And a quick reading of show summaries and the like points to two foreign exchange students who are also on the show? How do they get incorporated into this narrative?

Great post Morgan. One thing that you mentioned that isn't necessarily the drive of your piece, but really interested me: So many of Disney (and Nick's, I think) characters in these sitcoms are gridin' to be noticed, to be stars, etc. From an industrial and production perspective, I see why that is: Disney can sell music singles, albums, whatever else that comes with the typical multi-hyphenate performer. 

However, I'm really curious about how these shows reflect a generational desire to BE NOTICED or become famous for something and how that ties into the audience for the shows, etc. Obviously, that would take major ethnographic work or whatnot, but that one little point made something obvious more clear to me, so I appreciate it.

Thanks, Cory.

This is an important point to bring up, and I do think this is something that has increased within the past few decades.  Changes in media industry practices and technologies, and neoliberalism have helped expand celebrity culture. And Disney is at the forefront, nurturing young stars.

I can think of a few ethnographic studies with girls that focus on their fan practices around pop stars that begin to address your question about youth and performance. In particular, Vares and Jackson's work on girls' attitudes about Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus, Sarah Baker's studies of girls' use of dance and pop fandom. And Lisa Lewis and Douglas Kellner each discuss girls' fandom in relation to Madonna in the 1980s and the efforts to capitalize on her fashion sense. There are others who have theorized contemporary girlhood in relation to discourses of fame, celebrity, and/or performance too...thinking here of Angela McRobbie, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Kim Allen, and Sarah Projansky.




Well, Rocky's parents are rarely present in the show, but Cece's mom is introduced in the pilot as a hard-working, single "superhero" mom. She is a (widowed, I believe) police officer, and is actually absent from most episodes.

But it's true that the working-class set-up is weakened to a large degree in the episodes that follow by the decor of the Jones' apartment (including that colorful glass tile in the kitchen and other clearly new and perhaps expensive features), the girls' collections of clothes and accessories, thier abundant, highlighted hair, and the presence of ipods and macbooks (perhaps shared by friends/neighbors, but often put to use in the apartment). Cece's mom may, in some sense, be the primary marker of working-class status, but she symbolizes that by being absent as I mentioned. And in Disney sitcoms, absent parents can also easily signify wealth and privilege.

It could be argued that ethnic diversity in the cast and characters might be meant to stand in for clear class distinctions.

As for the foreign exchange students, they are exaggerated German stereotypes--two blond primadonnas who act as harmless nemeses for Cece and Rocky. They are totally uncool, but totally spoiled. They also provide absurd comic relief--in part due, perhaps, to their performances of whiteness to an extreme and the ways in which they are made strange in comparison to the protagonists.


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