Contribution short abstract:

Fairy tales are often perceived as heteronormative, reflecting and asserting gender and sexual norms. Yet, queer fairy tale fans are unwriting the fairy tale, viewing these traditional stories as remnants of a forgotten queer past, offering new understandings of queer folklore and the fairy tale.

Contribution long abstract:

Fairy tales are ubiquitous in society. From advertisements to video games, there are few storytelling mediums that the fairy tale does not permeate. As folkloric, originating as oral folktales or transforming from literary to oral storytelling modes, fairy tales reflect the world we live in, saying something about the conditions of life within a fantastical, utopic frame. Often, these tales express the realities of courtship and marriage, ending with a heterosexual “happily-ever-after” marriage union. Recently, scholars have begun to question the representation of sexual and gender norms in the fairy tales, examining the ways by which these tales queer understandings of gender and sexual identities and experiences through moments of rupture where our expectations of gender and sexual norms do not coincide with what the text presents.

My research seeks to understand how fairy tales are unwritten and “made strange” by queer audiences. How do queer fairy tale fans see themselves in tales that are supposedly heteronormative and patriarchal? For this presentation, I argue that fairy tales are used to think through temporality and history, where traditional stories are viewed as a means of disseminating a lost and forgotten queer past that is accessible underneath normative assumptions about these cultural narratives. In doing so, queer fairy tale audiences dismantle the heteropatriarchy of the fairy tale, revealing the ways in which these tales are full of queer voices and stories, offering new understandings of both queer folklore and the fairy tale.