The Scholarly Pursuit of Shrek: 20 Years of Ogres and Irony

"Gibson is a strong advocate for the franchise for subverting the standard othering of the disabled, praising the stereotyped and feared ogre for not only surviving the judgement of the society he lives in, but finding love, personal satisfaction and being centered as the morally upright protagonist. She contrasts this with how disability has been represented in animation in the recent past, othered characters who are turned into ‘beasts’ as punishment, then either killed or ‘cured’ by the love of a ‘normal’ person. .. Holliday’s presentation, “Man, This Would Be So Much Easier If I Wasn’t Colorblind: Shrek and the ‘Digital Postracial,’” comes in hot by illustrating the ‘colorblindness’ of the Shrek voice cast as an extension of the post-racial ethos of the Obama administration in the U.S."

"The Sick Woman is an identity and body that can belong to anyone denied the privileged existence—or the cruelly optimistic promise of such an existence—of the white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle-class, cis and able-bodied man .. The theory goes much further, connecting to how chronic illness, including mental illness, affects the politics of the body and ability to move through the world. “How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” she asks. How do you throw a plate of ogre slop at a donkey if you can’t leave your swamp? .. Zhonga proceeds to make the argument that while Shrek is a white-coded, cis and straight fictional ogre, he embodies many of the qualities of the sick woman—he is not wealthy, we are to assume he can’t just go to a dentist, the inciting incident of the first movie seeks to displace Shrek and his community from their homes (insecure housing), and he has little to no influence on the society he lives in whatsoever."

"[Lagunas] says that [Fiona's] femininity is empowering and disempowering, with the acceptance of her ogre body leading to little more than motherhood and being Shrek’s waifu in the same way that Shrek’s acceptance of himself still hits the same Big Lesson that the movies the franchise claims to be parodying does.
He asks questions that pop feminism of the 2000s did not—can a woman change the world while still held in the trappings of domesticity (yes), can motherhood be considered an adventure (yes), does Shrek 4 comment on the traditionally feminine plotlines that Fiona was subjected to after her liberation from the tower by letting her dissident body out into the world to experience “the revelation of desire?” Yes!"