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Paper short abstract

Racism, misogyny, and misogynoir operate through seemingly innocent debates about the nature of fairy tales and film; online discussions manifest as inhumane toxic speech. Our example is the backlash on YouTube against Rachel Zegler playing Snow White in Disney’s recent live action remake.

Paper long abstract

Feminist scholar Allison Craven recently coined the term “fairy-tale public sphere” to explore how characters, images, and concepts from traditional culture, popular children’s literature, and wonder narratives play roles in civil discourse as referent, sign, trope, and/or invocation. When such representations enter mediated discourse, the fairy-tale public sphere transforms into a location for debates around race, gender, ability, and other matters of serious import and acrimonious disagreement. It also becomes an arena where fairy-tale motifs and ideas form the grounds for types of speech that are damaging and harmful to minorities and to a democratic social fabric. In our case study, dealing with Disney’s recent live action adaptation, Snow White, online discussions manifest as toxic speech with serious consequences. We focus on YouTube discussions and comments on Snow White’s teaser trailer published in August 2024, with nearly one million dislikes but just over 82,000 likes within three weeks of its debut. We also look at the comments sections of two of the many YouTube videos about Snow White created to incite, channel, and mobilize hate against the film. We focus on two dominant discourses in this fairy-tale public sphere: one related to fairy tales, fairy-tale film, Snow White, and the roles of the Brothers Grimm and Disney, to disguise racist and misogynoir sentiments; the other linking to women, including princesses both fictional and factual, as misogynist, anti-feminist ways of attaching to Zegler the label of difficult woman, unfit to play the innocent, pure and sweet character of Snow White.