Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, “Belle,” from the series “Satanic Panic,” 2020

One doesn’t need to show Snow White getting fisted to participate in an erotic détournement of Disney. The possibilities of making our most well-known animated friends do new things are, formally speaking, endless. It’s unsurprising, well-trod ground. Even our more inattentive acts – image searching, screen refreshing, feed checking – surface a barrage of flotsam: sentimental images of once-heterosexual princes getting gay-married rub up against drawings of Mickey Mouse with a hardon fit for a satyr. What an artist like Paul McCarthy has spent decades doing to Snow White – showing us in detail what one suspected she’d been up to with those seven guys – is only a recent example in a long tradition of pornographic transmutation of animation made for children. In 1967, the year after Walt Disney’s death, the counterculture magazine The Realist printed comic artist Wally Wood’s poster “Disneyland Memorial Orgy,” depicting Tinkerbell flashing her breasts, Goofy pissing on Mickey Mouse’s face, and Prince Charming fingering Cinderella instead of gallantly fitting a glass slipper on her foot. We could go on. And, rumors abound about the pornographic animation cels made by Disney’s in-house animators for their own delectations.

For “Satanic Panic,” their exhibition at New York’s Bureau for General Services – Queer Division, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz have produced several collages along with a large-scale mural that cut, rearrange, and fuse together the relations between iconic Disney forms to highlight their already present – and already not so far from the surface – resonances. Appropriating illustrations from children’s books produced by the Disney corporation in the 1990s, Schliebener Muñoz layers paper cutouts of familiar characters and props body parts over and under one another, so that Pinocchio’s pink, tumescent nose, not yet fully engorged, quivers as a découpé-d pigtail that emerges from his own open mouth; Belle from Beauty and the Beast gasps, eyes wide and hands thrown open in surprise, as a carefully glued-in-place green feather tickles her lips. (The material construction is also worth noting here: even though the paper layers sit close against a single plane, there is a degree of three-dimensionality, and indeed something visceral, in their touch that might easily be lost in using Photoshop.)

The conceit runs through a quartet of three-dimensional collages hanging at eye level, in which a crowd of miniature images entirely fills the square frames, playing with symmetry and repetition to seem psychedelic, drug-induced, kaleidoscopic. Across the room, two larger-scale collages on display appear to be spare. Compact, knotted masses of tiny cutout bodies are set in the center of square frames’ expansive pale backgrounds, which turn out, on a closer look, to be broken up by pale pink paper – whose color matches the space’s already pink walls – cut into long tendrils that recall tubes, veins, tentacles. Clearly body parts, but not identifiable as any one organ in particular. In both sets of collages, the scale is kept small; one has to come in close and look with some attention to see what is going on. The degree to which these collages are erotic is, then, to an extent, left ambiguous, leaving me to ask what it says about myself that the pairing of some open cartoon mouths with sinuous tendrils and wide-open saucer eyes provokes the reaction that it does.

At the other end of the room, a vinyl mural eschews color for thick black lines against the pink walls. Specific characters are not to be found, in favor of an arrangement of clothes and body parts – human and not – that compose a symmetrical mass that is simultaneously Rorschach blot test, genitals, and a monster.

Schliebener Muñoz takes their exhibition title from the widespread moral panic of the 1980s, when a wave of allegations made on the basis of “recovered” memories contended that family members, teachers, and childcare workers across the United States had engaged in “Satanic ritual abuse” of the children under their watch. There is a clear enough line from that decade to the present moral panic around “LGBT grooming,” passing through QAnon – which contends that a cabal of media and political elites is abducting, abusing, and perhaps even eating children (as in: ­Hillary Clinton is running a pedophilic sex dungeon out of a Washington, DC, pizza parlor). But it is not always a comfortable line to trace for those who would like to think of themselves as sexual liberals, progressive, and unlikely to be swayed by histrionic calls to think of the children. Over 10,000 allegations were made during the 1980s not just of physical abuse but of literal magic, including flying teachers and knives that left no scars. These were reported on seriously by mainstream media networks and prosecuted by liberal Democrats like Janet Reno, then the Miami district attorney, who went on to serve as Bill Clinton’s attorney general. One can’t help but suspect that many people who are, at present, ready and eager to dismiss stories of a cabal of elites out to trans the children at drag brunch as paranoid fantasies might have taken stories of a coven of kindergarten teachers one town over performing black masses during naptime quite seriously. Sex panics tend not to follow party lines.

“Catalina Schliebener Muñoz: Satanic Panic,” Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, New York, 2022/23, installation view

In the current panic, Disney stands accused of abandoning its commitment to family values in favor of the creeping LGBT agenda. (For liberals, meanwhile, the studio itself, as well as the Disney corporation’s ever-expanding list of subsidiaries, is growing to be more inclusive and accepting of a new, more diverse America or perhaps has even always been on the forefront of progress, even if Walt, himself, was not.) Exactly a century since its founding, Disney bears the cultural hegemon’s burden of being universally beloved and, therefore, vulnerable from all sides. If everyone is a customer, then everyone is a potentially dissatisfied one. The stakes are all the higher when what the customer has bought – or more accurately, has had bought for them – is their childhood.

The American Right’s fixation on Disney as a principal bad object in the current anti-gay, anti-trans panic is not simply explicable by the company’s public criticism of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” laws nor by the appearance of openly queer characters in its recent productions. For them, it is bad enough that the current corporate media elites appear to be conspiring to groom the nation’s children, but it is quite something else when the corporation to which they have entrusted the imaginations of their children has broken a sacred corporate trust. Disney’s embrace of the LGBT agenda is, for some, betrayal in a fundamental sense. If even Disney cannot be trusted, then who can? How deep, how high up, how far back does the conspiracy to groom American children go? Did Walt Disney – who did for American children what Henry Ford did for American cars and who helped rid Hollywood of its communist infiltrators – know what was to come?

Knowing how to respond to such paranoid fantasies is not easy. Several further layers of complication are added when Disney becomes a principal target. There is, of course, the general distaste among more progressive quarters of seeming to rush to the defense of a corporate monopolist. But there is also a subtler dilemma. On the one hand, one might insist on the chaste innocence of one’s childhood cartoon friends, denying any kernel of truth to the paranoid fantasy of subliminal sexual messaging. On the other, there is a certain bad faith in not recognizing the undeniable weirdness – queerness, even – of so many of these images. Perhaps they are even something to revel in: the disagreement with the conspiracists then ceases to be about whether there is sex in the cartoons and becomes about whether this is a bad thing.

Are we really supposed to pretend that Ursula, dressed in her tentacular flesh-gown in The Little Mermaid (1989) – who features repeatedly in a number of the collages in “Satanic Panic” – doesn’t bear a striking resemblance and, indeed, wasn’t indebted to Divine in John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972)? Or that there’s no element of erotic fantasy that accompanies Pinocchio’s tumescent and reddish-pink nose? What about the fetishistic focus on Cinderella’s slender feet? Go back further: within 30 seconds of his first on-screen appearance in 1928’s Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse’s perfectly spherical orb of guts gets rearranged into a sinuous noodle of flesh that doubles up on itself, so that his tummy suddenly suggests an obscenely oversized tongue. (Perhaps, then, both the unofficial pornographic spin-offs and the genre of videos purporting to find “hidden meanings” in classic Disney cartoons were on to something …)

Art that takes up these themes, including Schliebener Muñoz’s, usually and maybe unavoidably gets read as setting up acts of disclosure. It tells us something we didn’t know, makes us see a “childhood icon” or “familiar face” or “beloved character” in a new and, preferably, “uncanny” or “unsettling” or “disturbing” or “darker” or “queer” light. If we are meant to play the innocent and surprised audience, the originals are meant to be reluctant to own up to dimensions of which they may or may not be aware. Or, alternatively, the artist plays the role not of the forceful unveiler of secrets but of liberator, allowing a menagerie of cartoon children and animals to escape from the compulsory heterosexuality set by the studio executives and be seen as the polymorphously perverse, interspecies, queer freaks they were all along, and their audience, now grown up, will love them more for it.

Amid Schliebener Muños’s rearranged cartoon characters are cutouts of photographs, taken from educational books, of clean-cut children reading or playing games, their faces largely turned away from the camera. The human (read: non-Disney) children are, on the whole, engrossed in whatever activity they are engaged in and pay no attention to the tangle of limbs that writhe around them. None of the sexual suggestion in the images, it would seem, is big enough a draw for them to divert their prepubescent attention. Even as Schliebener Muños go in for exploring the perverse, nonhuman side of the cartoons, the collages are simultaneously deflationary, countering the accusation of corrupting the youth with a well-calibrated shrug. Not by insisting on the sexlessness of Pinocchio’s nose or by celebrating its obscenity, but by taking a more ambivalent, less didactic position and seeming to say both “yes” and “who cares?”

In addition to showing parts of the “Satanic Panic” series in a bookstore housed in the West Village’s venerable LGBT Community Center, the site of the first ACT UP meeting, Schliebener Muñoz, who themselves also work in early childhood education, has presented related work in the art gallery of an East Coast private prep school (I was initially surprised to be reminded that schools have in-house art galleries, then wondered how I could have forgot; if elite schools are grooming children, the aim is likely less to make them into queers as to make them into future art collectors). That is to say, shown in two not-quite-public spaces where art is not the main agenda item and where, other than for viewers who seek it out, engagement is likely to take the form of a glance while walking into a poetry reading or a moment’s attention while waiting for the cashier. Just as they do when printed on lunch boxes, T-shirts, scarves, and the sides of buses, Disney characters belong not to a kingdom of animated magic to which one might wish to escape but to the mundane fabric of life.

“Catalina Schliebener Muñoz: Satanic Panic,” Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, New York, September 22, 2022–February 5, 2023.

Elena Comay del Junco is a writer and philosophy professor in New York and Connecticut.

Image credit: Courtesy of the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, photos Curtis Wallen