Fairy Lgbtales
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Fairy LGBTales Mapping Queer Fairy-Tale Retellings from the 1990s to the 2010s Alba Morollón Díaz-Faes PhD Thesis Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages Faculty of Humanities UNIVERSITY OF OSLO 2019 Fairy LGBTales Mapping Queer Fairy-Tale Retellings from the 1990s to the 2010s II © Alba Morollón Díaz-Faes 2019 Fairy LGBTales Mapping Queer Fairy-Tale Retellings from the 1990s to the 2010s Alba Morollón Díaz-Faes Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo III Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the help of many fairy godmothers and godfathers. First of all, I must sincerely thank my main supervisor, Rebecca Scherr, for her flexible supervision style, which allowed me to find my own way, but also for her insightful directions in the most critical moments of the writing process, which have had an enormous impact on the final form of the thesis. Infinite thanks go to Anne Duggan, my co- supervisor, whose lucid guidance has been essential, whose enthusiasm has kept me going when I was feeling discouraged, and who has enormously impacted not only my impressions of my own project, but also of the fairy-tale genre as a whole. I am also greatly indebted to my midway evaluator, Vanessa Joosen, whose intelligent feedback at a crucial juncture challenged me to turn this project into something worth reading (and writing). I am forever grateful to Tina Skouen and Bruce Barnhart, project leaders of Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities, for allowing me to carry out this study, for believing in me and my vision, and for their unwavering support in the last three years. Thanks to the generous funding from the Faculty of Humanities and the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, I was allowed to attend numerous conferences and summer schools, and especially to do invaluable research stays at Brown University and Wayne State University. I would like to extend my profound gratitude to Lewis Seifert (Brown University), for his early guidance and thought-provoking conversations, and to the fairy-tale working group at Wayne State University: Anne Duggan, Donald Haase, Janet Langlois, Julie Koehler, Adrion Dula and Lacey Skorepa—your ideas, expansive knowledge, and keen interest lay at the foundations of this study. If we talk about foundations, however, I must always mention the person who, once upon a time, revealed the wonder of fairy tales to me, and so my heartfelt thanks go to Carolina Fernández Rodíguez. I would also like to thank my PhD colleagues at the department, for the lunches, the coffees, the occasional feedback and all the late-night good times. Particularly, I would like to thank my watery friends Mexitli Nayeli López Ríos and Tom Zachary Bradstreet, and my very best partner in crime, Belinda Molteberg Steen, without whom this experience would have been lonely and (worst of all) quite boring. Finally, thanks to my friends, too many to name, who have always put up with my increasingly weird interests, and to my family, who has never doubted me. Special thanks go to my parents, for their steadfast encouragement, their understanding and their patience for the past twenty-nine years. And last, but most definitely not least, my deepest gratitude goes to Anna Campion, the fairest of them all, to whom this work is dedicated. IV Table of Contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 The Case of ‘The Queer Minstrel’ ............................................................................... 1 1.2 Queer, Queering, Fairy tales ........................................................................................ 3 1.3 Re-Vising the Fairy-Tale Canon .................................................................................. 5 1.4 A New Frontier for Fairy-Tale Studies ........................................................................ 7 1.5 The Present Study: ‘Fairy LGBTales − Mapping Queer Fairy-Tale Retellings from the 1990s to the 2010s’ ................................................................................................ 9 1.6 Structure of the Thesis ............................................................................................... 11 2 Once Upon a Certain Time: The Fairy Tale Through History .................................... 14 2.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 14 2.2 Defining the Fairy Tale .............................................................................................. 16 2.3 Origins ....................................................................................................................... 20 2.4 The Fairy Tale’s Italian Forefathers: Straparola and Basile ...................................... 23 2.5 Conteuses et Conteuses: Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century French Salons ........... 29 2.6 Institutionalisation of a Genre: Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination ............................................................................... 39 2.7 Fairy Tales for Modern Times: Disney, Feminist Retellings and the Advent of Queer FairyTales…………...……………….……………………………………………...54 3 Tales for Fairies: Building Identity and Community Through Gay Fairy Tales in the Nineties .................................................................................................................................... 69 3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 69 3.2 Early Years of the Gay Community and the Significance of an Emergent Gay Literature ................................................................................................................... 72 3.3 The AIDS Crisis and its Effects on Gay Identity and Gay Literature ....................... 76 3.4 Constructing Community Through Reclaimed Gay Fairy Tales ............................... 79 3.5 Peter Cashorali’s Fairy Tales: Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men and Gay Fairy and Folk Tales: More Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men ...................... 83 3.5.1 Homophobia ................................................................................................... 84 3.5.2 Mortality, HIV and AIDS ............................................................................... 88 3.5.3 The Margins of Gay Subculture ..................................................................... 92 3.6 Michael Ford’s Happily Ever After: Erotic Fairy Tales for Men .............................. 97 3.6.1 Unfolding Identities Within Gay Subcultures ................................................ 99 3.6.2 HIV/AIDS and Magical Contagion .............................................................. 104 3.6.3 Queer Belonging ........................................................................................... 108 3.7 Conclusions ............................................................................................................. 112 V 4 Heroes vs. Monsters: Tracing Monstrousness, Monstrosity and the Normalisation of Queerness in Fairy-Tale Retellings From the New Millennium ...................................... 115 4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 115 4.2 No More Queer Monsters? ...................................................................................... 118 4.2.1 Eradication of the Queer Threat Through Normalisation ............................. 119 4.2.2 Monstrous Potential ...................................................................................... 122 4.3 Navigating Fairy-Tale Dichotomies in Contemporary Retellings ........................... 125 4.3.1 Heroes ........................................................................................................... 127 4.3.1.1 Jim C. Hines’ The Stepsister Scheme…………………………....…..128 4.3.1.2 Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle………...…………….…133 4.3.2 Monsters ....................................................................................................... 138 4.3.2.1 Catherynne M. Valente’s ‘Bones like Black Sugar’……………........139 4.3.2.2 Lauren Beukes’ The Hidden Kingdom……….…………...............…143 4.3.2.3 Once Upon a Time……...……………..……………………………..149 4.4 Conclusions ............................................................................................................. 153 5 Queer Fairy Tales 2.0: Parodying the Disney Paratext from Online Counterpublics......................................................................................................................156 5.1 Introduction: Mainstream Fairy-Tale Parodies ........................................................ 156 5.2 Queer Online Counterpublics .................................................................................. 159 5.3 Digital Fairy Tales ................................................................................................... 161 5.4 Camping Up the Fairy Tale ..................................................................................... 164 5.5 Tim Manley’s Alice in Tumblr-Land ....................................................................... 167 5.6 YouTube’s Fairy-Tale Parodists: Brittany Ashley and Todrick Hall ...................... 174 5.6.1 Brittany Ashley’s Lesbian Princess ............................................................