The continuing television series Once upon a time (2011 – present) proposes unconventional politics of ‘becoming’ and engages in a discussion on the limits of body and soul, and those of females and animals in particular. The fairy-tale drama pushes fixed definitions of body and presents narratives of continuously inter-transforming characters. In the traditional telling of the story, through the act of cutting her way out of the wolf’s stomach, we see resistance in the character of Red Riding Hood. Once upon a time takes this resistance a step further by putting the wolf inside the girl. This brings out a question which serves as the focus of this chapter: What happens when the wolf is inside the girl? And, additionally: What kind of affects are born from this particular serial and televisual version of Red Riding Hood? Using Deleuze and Guattari’s notions ‘becoming-animal’ and ‘becoming-woman’, the analysis covers the story of mental transformation and corporeal mutation as developed in the episode, Red Handed in order to understand its political and ethical potential as well as its limits in relation to the twenty-first century mental, cultural and socio-political transformation.
