Disney Prince

They're beautiful, aren't they, the Conways? Their youth, their two little children. The country is falling in love with them. They won't fall in love with us like that, but we have something they don't. We are willing to go one step farther than everyone else.

—Claire Underwood, in House of Cards, "Chapter 46"

The quotation I have chosen to introduce this editorial comes from an episode in the fourth season of House of Cards, in which the Underwoods' claim on political power is challenged by Governor Will Conway (played by Joel Kinnaman) and his wife Hannah (Dominique McElligott). What the Conways have and the Underwoods do not is a claim on the child, achieved through their possession of youth and actual children: the Conways are roughly twenty years younger than the Underwoods and have two young children. In the context of the show—and indeed, outside of it, in American culture—the figure of the child functions as signifier of purity, goodness, and futurity, not to mention conformity to heteronorms. In such a culture, the childless and middle-aged Francis and Claire Underwood (Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright) appear cold and calculating when set beside the Conways.¹ While the assumption that childless couples are cold and calculating would typically be an example of spurious stereotyping, the Underwoods do embody these qualities in their demeanour and politics: they are so cold and calculating that Season 4 ends with the two of them looking on unblinkingly as the US hostage they have refused to save in the interest of not wanting to be seen negotiating with terrorists is beheaded.² The only time the cold and calculating image of the Underwoods appears to be a front is when the Conways visit the White House with their two children, an event that seems to provoke feelings of envy in Claire for one fleeting moment. As she watches Hannah dealing with her children, it appears as though she could be imagining what it might feel like to be Hannah or, for that matter, Will and Hannah Conway—that is, the enviable and easy-to-love couple that the US public would likely elect. Many might assume that such a couple would do a good job governing the republic, in part because it embodies the very values the public champions. The child—or, in this case, the children—function here to separate the wholesome presidential couple from the unwholesome one. The Conways' children and the Underwoods' lack of children, as well as both couples' attitudes toward children and the parents of children—the beheaded American has a daughter—immediately cast them on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

A similar distinction has been emerging in press coverage of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie, on the one hand, and newly elected US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania, on the other, despite the fact that both couples have children. Just as Will and Hannah's carefully cultivated image of warmth and spontaneity contrasts Francis and Claire Underwood's killer detachment, Trudeau and Sophie often function as a convenient foil for Trump and Melania. Notwithstanding the fresh-faced adorability³ of eleven-year-old Barron—the youngest of Trump's children and the only one he had with Melania—the Trumps are being painted as the kind of family that fails to live up to US values and sensibilities, akin perhaps not so much in appearance with but certainly in the spirit of the Underwoods.⁴ What we might call the "Disney code" separates politicians such as Trudeau and Conway from the Trumps and the Underwoods, investing them with the kind of childishness that "good"—as opposed to "bad"—kings are made of.

Indeed, I focused my last editorial on the election of Trump, using Steven Almond's characterization of the new US president as a "child king" to remark on how the figure of the child fuelled US political discourse in the months leading up to and immediately following the election. The focus seemed fitting given how difficult it was at the time to ignore the fear and...