scholarly journals Challenging Hegemonic Gender Norms in Emma Donoghue’s “The Tale of the Rose” and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast

2021 ◽  
Vol 84 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Priyanka Banerjee ◽  
◽  
Rajni Singh ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
First Century ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
Beauty And The Beast ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Rose

While heteronormativity remained at the core of the classic fairy tale, a queer subtext existed in the form of subtle symbolic codes. By reflecting the changing socio- cultural discourses about sexuality and gender in time, the representation of queer sexuality in fairy tales has also developed. This paper attempts a queer reading of the revisioning of Madame Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” in Emma Donoghue’s “The Tale of the Rose” and the 2017 Disney version. This paper demonstrates how Emma Donoghue’s adaptation deconstructs the heteronormativity of Beaumont’s tale by dismantling the binaries of Beauty/Beast and man/woman and represents queer sexuality and desire through multi-layered language. This paper also examines how in the Disney version the story takes a new dimension in close proximity to twenty-first century media culture and lends itself to queer interpretation.

Is the Twilight Saga a Modern-Time Fairy Tale? A Study of Stephenie Meyer’s Source Material from Folklore and Canonical Narratives

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-110
Author(s):  
Shiri Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Stereotypes ◽  
Narrative Functions ◽  
Characteristic Sequences ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Stock Character

The article presents an analysis of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels as modern literary fairy-tales. To this end, the discussion will refer to structuralist critics, and identify “narrative functions” from folktales (stock images and episodes, stock character functions, characteristic sequences of episodes), used by Meyer in her vampire novels. As it turns out, Meyer modified folklore material to sustain a long and variously themed narrative: by embedding numerous subplots, by rearranging functions between characters, and creating composite and collective characters that combine contradictory functions. The author transformed several folktales into a series of four novels about coming of age in the twenty-first-century United States. A detailed analysis of Meyer’s modifications of the folktale partially corroborates the feminist critique of Meyer’s representation of the protagonists as reinforced versions of cultural stereotypes and gender roles. However, some transformations, especially Meyer’s assignment of the hero-function to the female protagonist Bella, seem to suggest just the opposite, thus leading to the conclusion that the Twilight novels reflect the confusion caused by contradictory role-models and aspirations, the confusion that seems to be inherent in a coming-of-age novel.

Research on Diversity in Sexual Identities

2019 ◽  
pp. 380-396
Author(s):  
Pawan Singh
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Behavior ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Alternative Sexualities ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Global Diffusion ◽  
And Gender

If the elaboration of LGB identities is predicated on the development of binary sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries around normal and abnormal, heterosexual and homosexual, or Western and non-Western, research at the dawn of the twenty-first century has turned decidedly to the fluidity of sexuality and the various ways that sexual behavior is situated in social relationships and as social identities. This chapter turns to the persistence of alternative sexualities outside of or beyond the construction LGB, interrogating the links between sexuality and gender, the various reactions to the global diffusion of homosexuality (and homophobia) as cultural forms predicated on Western binaries, and the possibilities inherent in a world of diversely constituted sexualities.

scholarly journals ‘Strangely Like a Person’: Cole and the Queering of Asexuality in Dragon Age: Inquisition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Shani Brown ◽  
Nichola Lucy Partridge
Keyword(s):  
Media Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
And Gender

AbstractIn this article we consider the representation of the character Cole in Bioware’s Dragon Age: Inquisition (Electronic Arts, San Mateo, 2014), focusing upon how his asexuality is treated by other characters and its significance within his narrative arc. As well as contributing to the discussion of the representation of sexualities and gender within games, we seek to add to the ‘representational archive of asexuality’ (Cerankowski and Milks, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, Routledge, Abingdon, p 40, 2014), including games as media depicting and defining asexuality through fictional characterisation. We argue that it is particularly through humour that Cole is marked as being ambiguously set apart from the other characters in the game, and is infantilized as a ‘boy’ rather than a young man. Within a party of diverse genders, sexualities and indeed species, Cole’s absent interest in sex is treated as though it were something strange and in need of being overcome for Cole to become fully ‘human’. Beyond the scope of this game, this raises further questions for the representation of asexuality within media culture, and broader cultural discourses concerning whether asexuality is conceived of as being within the bounds of both masculinity and human normality.

scholarly journals Intensely Original

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
LAURA DAVIS
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Parent Material ◽  
Beauty And The Beast ◽  
Original Parent ◽  
Essay Tests ◽  
Horizon Of Expectations

  The story of Beauty and her beast is truly a tale as old as time: a beautiful girl falls in love with a beast and her love transforms him into a prince. This project is framed by Joosen’s (2011) argument regarding fairy tale retellings disrupting Jauss and Benzinger’s (1970) claim that fairy tales and retellings align with the horizon of expectations. Using Kemmerer’s A Curse so Dark and Lonely (2019), a “Beauty and the Beast” retelling, this essay tests Joosen’s (2011) theory to determine if the retelling remains true to or diverges from the original parent material. 

Charlotte Brontë

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
First Century ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Literary Tourism ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Web

Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and afterlives examines the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work in the context of the bicentenary of her birth. The essays in this volume cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explaining why the author has been at the forefront of literary cultures. The contributors engage with topics including: the author cult which emerged shortly after her death; literary tourism in Haworth and Brussels; stage adaptations of her life and novels; her poetic legacy; the afterlives of her plots and characters in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the theatre and on the web. This book brings the story of Brontë’s legacy up-to-date, analysing texts such as obituaries, literary re-workings, adaptations for screen, vlogs, and erotic makeovers. The contributors take a fresh look at over 150 years of engagement with Brontë, considering genre, narrative style, the representation of national and regional identities, sexuality and gender identity, literary tourism, adaptation theories, cultural studies, postcolonial and transnational readings.

scholarly journals But There Is Magic, Too: Confronting Adolescents’ Realities in Francesca Lia Block’s Fairy-Tale Rewritings

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Marie Emilie Walz
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Rose

Many rewritings of fairy tales use this genre to address the darkest, most violent, most unjust, and most painful aspects of human experiences, as well as to provide hope that it is possible to overcome or at least come to terms with such experiences. Francesca Lia Block’s The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold (pub. 2000) is an example of such a use of fairy-tale material. Block’s stories transform traditional fairy tales to narrate the painful realities adolescents can be faced with in modern-day American society. In doing so, Block’s stories draw attention to the violence, both literal and ideological, inherent in well-known versions of fairy tales, as well as to the difficulty of confronting painful realities. Yet, as they depict young heroines (not) facing all kinds of ordeals, the stories also use the figure of the helper to restore hope to the protagonists and lead them to a new, often re-enchanted, life. Employing fairy-tale elements to both address suffering and provide hope, The Rose and the Beast thus offers complex and liminal narratives, or ‘anti-tales’, which deeply resonate with their intended adolescent audience’s in-between stage of life.

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