Tales for Fairies: Tracing Queer Fairy-Tale Retellings

Literature scholar Díaz-Faes debuts with an academic exploration of how authors and artists have reimagined classic fairy tales to include queer identities. She begins with collections published in the mid-1990s, when the subgenre began gaining traction, such as Fairy Tales: Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men by Peter Cashorali, where she finds references to gay subculture and themes of community formation. Cashorali’s version of “The Ugly Duckling,” for example, focuses on caregiving to AIDS patients, and his retelling of “Hansel and Gretel” features a drag queen witch. Shifting to the 2000s, when homosexuality and queer identities became more normalized, Díaz-Faes examines the ABC show Once Upon a Time, in which the Little Red Riding Hood character is a bisexual werewolf who falls in love with the character Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz; “as a queer monster, Red is never entirely ‘normal,’” the author writes, “but she ultimately settles exceptionally close to the heteronorm.” The final examples look at parody art of the 2010s that “contest the cisheteronormative, Disneyfied fairy tale,” like a piece from pop artist José Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros that shows Sleeping Beauty’s Prince Philip and The Little Mermaid’s Prince Eric being married by Pope Francis. While Díaz-Faes succeeds in drawing attention to an under-examined aspect of queer literature, the work is full of dense scholarly sentences. Still, it’s a significant contribution to the topic. (Jan.)