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Paper short abstract

The paper analyses ecological tropes in 21st-century vampire narratives and Disney fairy tales from Disney Princess franchise. While both started as modern narratives of man’s conquest of the “nature”, they evolved to produce stories of Hero-Monsters and Eco-Warrior Princesses.

Paper long abstract

Modern, and specifically post-enlightenment Western civilisation, relied on the division: body—mind, nature—culture(civilisation), definitely valuing the latter over the first. The so called civilisation was assigned to the white middle-upper-class Western men, and the “nature” as wilderness was assigned — to a different degree and in different ways — to the non-white, the non-Western, the low-class, the women. This worldview found its embodiment in the emerging popular culture, including the seemingly diametrically different narratives: horror stories and fairy tales. They all represented a brave hero’s conquest and/or submission of the wild “nature” embodied by a Monster that usually “threatened” a woman.

This paper analyses vampire narratives and best-known modern fairy tales, i.e. Disney animated movies, specifically the Disney Princess franchise. While both started as modern narratives of conquest, they both evolved in line with the changes occurring in the Western (global) culture: feminist, decolonial, ecological movements. The paper specifically focuses on the 21st-century narratives that seem to embrace ecological stances and construct new types of protagonists: posthuman(ist) Hero-Monsters, eco-vampires, and eco-feminist Princesses. The analysis points out at the problematic white male ecology [Sandilands 2005] of Good Eco-Vampires, but also examines the eco-decolonial and posthumanist potentials of the narratives such as Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer: A Gothic Native Novel (2007) and Netflix Hemlock Grove series (2013-15), comparing them with Decolonial Eco-Warrior Disney Princesses in the John Musker and Roy Clements’ Moana (2016), and Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada’s Raya and the Last Dragon (2021).