8 different articles about queer fairytales, queer comics, feminist fairytale retellings etc - highlighted notes under cut







Introduction: “Suffering Sappho!”: Lesbian content
and queer female characters in comics

Comics have been an important locus of queer female identity, community, and politics for generations. Whether taking the form of newspaper strips, comic books, or graphic novels and
memoirs, the medium has a long history of featuring female same-sex attraction, relationships, and identity. This special issue explores the past place, current presence, and possible future
status of lesbianism in comics. It features essays about cartoonists such as Jennifer Camper, characters such as Wonder Woman, and titles such as Lumberjanes. This special issue also
includes a roundtable that examines underrepresented identities in lesbian comics. These pieces address subjects ranging from the depiction of a Latina lesbian protagonist in AMERICA: The Life and Times of America Chavez and the debut of the first lead Black lesbian female superheroine in Cyberzone to the presentation of queer women in graphic novels from South Asia and the experience of re-reading Hothead Paisan in the age of Trump.
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The final roundtable piece closes out our special issue on a note of both celebration
and frustration. In “PoC, LGBTQ, and Gender: The Intersectionality of
America Chavez,” Laura M. Jim enez interweaves her personal narrative of systemic
erasure as a “fat, Latina lesbian with a learning disability,” with a discussion of her
career as a children’s and young adult literature scholar, and, ultimately, her reading
Gabby Rivera’s AMERICA: The Life and Times of America Chavez. Despite the transformative
role America Chavez plays for Jim enez and numerous other readers, who
finally got to see themselves in Rivera’s writing and Joe Quinones’s illustrations,
Marvel ultimately canceled AMERICA (along with the aforementioned World of
Wakanda by Roxane Gay and Ta-Nehisi Coates). The exhilarating highs and subsequent
lows conveyed in Jim enez’s piece leave the editors of this issue wondering
with heavy hearts: How many steps forward are we taking in representation in lesbian
comics, and is it enough to resist the number of steps we are taking back?



Making space: Jennifer Camper, LGBTQ anthologies, and queer comics communities
Margaret Galvan

Juicy Mother and Juicy Mother 2, in the introduction to the first volume:
Back in the day there were titles like Gay Comix, Wimmin’s Comix, Real Girl, and Tits
and Clits, but they’re no longer published. Where are the comix by and about women,
people of color and queers? I want an alternative to the alternative, but there are few venues
for these stories.
And so Juicy Mother was born. Here is a home for the stories about the rest of us. Here
are comix for Discerning Homosexuals, Uppity Ladies, Fierce People of Color and all
their friends. (7)
In these two paragraphs, Camper argues that her impetus for creating these twentyfirst-
century comics arises out of the lack of comics publishing spaces for LGBTQ stories,
citing erstwhile collective comics series of the 1980s and ’90s that brought together
marginalized artists to represent their experiences
While contemporary LGBTQ creators
face fewer barriers in publishing that some of the earlier publications she cites were
designed to combat, Camper argues that there remains a need for places to house these
narratives. Moreover, by filling this “home” with intersectional identities, she crafts the
anthology itself as its own, world-making counterpublic

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Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the
Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy by Anne E. Duggan (review)

Anne Duggan’s Queer Enchantments is an innovative reading of Jacques Demy’s cinema in relationship to the fairy tale and an analysis of how that relationship contributes to a queer sensibility and camp aesthetic that distinguishes Demy from other French New Wave auteurs; it also opens up new possibilities for our understanding of the fairy tale. Attending

Throughout, Duggan returns to the conjoined questions of what the fairy tale might tell us about Demy’s films and what Demy’s films might tell us about the fairy tale. As such, Queer Enchantments fills the scholarly lacunae that result from a critical tendency to overlook or ignore the importance of the fairy tale to Demy’s oeuvre in particular and to film history more generally, and from
the marginalization of queer theory in fairy-tale studies.


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At the same time, she also considers the ways that such a queer sensibility challenges the boundaries
of the genre, pushing against the fairy tale’s hegemonic ideological underpinnings
by rendering visible its always already present subversive undercurrents.
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In Queer Enchantments Duggan moves from the heteronormativity of
“Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella” in Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to
the queer potential of Donkeyskin with Demy’s citation of Cocteau’s camp aesthetic
to the socioeconomic dimensions of heteronormativity in The Pied Piper
and the sex/gender instability of the maiden warrior figure in Chinese folklore,
French folktales, and Japanese manga in Lady Oscar.

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Lewis C. seifert
Introduction
Queer(ing) Fairy Tales

As an example of anxiety about the socializing role of fairy tales, the recent
Lithuanian incident is not unprecedented, of course. Such debates have
swirled around fairy tales from the moment they entered the canon of children’s
literature—debates about the effects of fantasy, violence, and more recently,
gender stereotypes.

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What is at stake, then, is whether fairy tales are inextricably bound up with the pursuit and fulfillment
of heternormativity. Beyond the example of Amber Heart, recent developments indicate that this is not the case: a small but growing body of contemporary queer fairy-tale adaptations use nonnormative representations of gender and sexuality,2 and a small but growing body of queer scholarship brings critical attention to those adaptations and, increasingly, to their precursors. The five essays in this special issue of Marvels and Tales are another contribution to what is taking shape as an exciting (and long overdue) new subfield within fairy-tale studies, namely, queer fairy-tale studies.

As a practice, queer is also a verb, in addition to being a noun and an adjective. “To queer,” in this sense, is to make strange by accentuating what departs from normative social expectations about gender and sexuality, thus exposing the notions of “normal” gender and sexual identities as myths (albeit powerful ones). As a critical practice, queering necessarily involves reading against the grain so as to pick up signs and meanings neglected or obscured by heteronormative interpretations. As Kay Turner argues in her essay in this special issue, queer reading requires “working through intuition and
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It is undeniable that fairy tales have been—and continue to be—used to
enshrine normative heterosexual love. But this is precisely the reason we need
queer fairy-tale studies. Queer readings aim to show, first of all, that there is
nothing inevitable about the link between the fairy tale and heteronormativity.
Faced with this task, queer fairy-tale studies might look to the accomplishments
of feminist fairy-tale studies. Over the past forty years, feminist interpretations
and adaptations have made significant progress toward complicating the image
of the fairy tale as a bastion of patriarchal gender roles. We now know that the
history of the genre is not monolithically patriarchal, just as we now see many
new fairy tales that contest traditional masculine and feminine roles.5 In similar
fashion, queer perspectives have the potential to undo or at least unsettle the
genre’s seemingly self-evident connection with heteronormative desires and
structures.


Queer analyses have given prominent attention to twentieth- and twentyfirst-
century fairy-tale adaptations. Among others, Tison Pugh’s work on the Oz
series (Innocence; “There Lived”), Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère’s
(Queering the Fairy-Tale Canon) and Jennifer Orme’s (“Mouth to Mouth”) work on
Emma Donoghue, and Anne Duggan’s book on the films of Jacques Demy
explore the many ways that adaptations queer the fairy-tale genre.6 But classic
fairy tales too are rich terrain for queer reading, as Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill’s
important volume of essays, Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (2012),
demonstrates. Central to the queer critical strategy that Turner and Greenhill
outline in their illuminating introduction is the need to shift our focus “from
normative sexual dynamics—like the happy ending of wedded heterosexual
bliss—or patriarchal moral lessons—like the punishment of curious girls—to
the tales’ internal struggles, suggestive of multiple and more complex desires and
their perversely performative nature” (3). Paying closer attention to the journey
fairy-tale characters make—and not letting ourselves get overly preoccupied
with their destination—will bring to the fore the queer sideways growth of many
fairy-tale protagonists, their lingering in moments of nonnormative desires and
relations.7 Linked to this is the need to confront the presumption of innocence
that often surrounds classic fairy tales. Queerness may go unnoticed until we
recognize that innocence is little more than a façade and that fairy tales give voice
to cultural taboos of all sorts, including queer desires.8 But once we recognize
this, keeping our eyes open for telling and often neglected details, fairy tales can
reveal a world of unexpected, unfamiliar, and unpredictable desires that shatter
the illusion of (normative heterosexual) innocence.
If fairy tales have this power, it is because of an inherent queerness, “the
interpenetration of fantasy and reality . . . [that] allows for eccentricity and
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strange making” (Turner and Greenhill, “Introduction,” 6). The enchanted
worlds of fairy tales are at once real and unreal, and this paradox opens the
door to queerness, to an unsettling of our conceptions of what is normal.
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Turner, Kay and Pauline Greenhill. Transgressive Tales : Queering the Grimms. Wayne State University Press, 2012. Series in Fairy-tale Studies. EBSCOhost.


Sleeping Beauty (ATU 410) is the quintessential Grimms girl.Deep in slumber, she is nothing but a pretty face, a supple body there for the gazing, there for the taking. She is passive, yielding, available, and—of course—silent, enchantingly incapable of speaking her mind, much less voicing any resistance to the hero’s advances. Ruth Bottigheimer (1986) has carefully documented the Grimms’ bias for silent girls and women, the brothers’ tendency to diminish female voices in Kinder- und Hausmärchen, particularly by overwriting female speech through their own edit(orializ)ing practices, altering the agency of women’s words by casting them in the pas-sive voice of narrators and limiting the range of verbs used to characterize women’s speech acts. 

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Representations of same-sex relationships between female characters in all-ages comics: Princess Princess Ever After and Lumberjanes


In more recent years, there has also been the emergence of comics depicting
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LBTQ) characters for an all-ages
readership with the publication of Princess Princess Ever After (2016) by Katie
O’Neill and Lumberjanes (2015–2017), created by Shannon Watters, Grace Ellis,
Noelle Stevenson, and Brooke Allen. Both texts are speculative fiction comics: the
first is a fairy-tale-inspired romance that pairs the relationship narrative arc with
an adventure, while the second is a supernatural adventure-based comic that incorporates
a same-sex relationship as well as transgender and queer characters into
the narrative. With representations of lesbian, bisexual, and queer characters still
accounting for a small percentage of the narratives available to younger readers, it
is important to examine the ways in which their stories are told. This essay will
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Princess Princess Ever After and Lumberjanes are rated as “all-ages” comics by
their publishers, meaning that each comic’s style, narrative, and content have been
assessed as appropriate for readers of any age. Starting in the 1950s, comics were
rated by the Comics Code Authority (CCA). This regulatory body for the comics
industry was an alternative to government regulation, but one that, Heike Bauer
notes, “forbade the open representation of gay and lesbian characters” until 1989
(224). When mainstream publishers, such as Marvel and DC, withdrew from the
CCA in the early 2000s, individual comics publishers began to develop their own
age ratings systems. (These systems are more akin to rating systems used for video
games, which range from early childhood to adult over six categories, rather than
publishing categories, such as middle grade or young adult, for novels.) This deregulation
of comics in the twenty-first century has thus coincided, and likely aided,
the increase in the publication of all-ages comics with LGBTQ characters. In general,
the all-ages rating carries the connotation that children and young adults will
be the primary readership


Rudine Sims Bishop argues that books can provide mirrors, windows, and sliding
glass doors for readers, opportunities to view and step into the worlds and lives both
similar and different to from their own experiences. When a reader is confronted
with a general lack of representation of themselves in literature, the few narratives
that do offer “mirrors” for the reader, or their relationships, can be incredibly important
and the act of reading can “become a means of self-affirmation” (Bishop 1).
Princess Princess Ever After and Lumberjanes provide much needed opportunities
for the younger reader to identify with the central characters, particularly in terms of
gender and sexuality, whether on their heroic adventures or within their core friendship
group. As a form, comics provide a unique method for reflecting different kinds
of representation. Scott McCloud argues, in his theorization of the comics form, that
cartoons have the ability to “focus our attention on an idea” because cartooning

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“isn’t just a way of drawing, it’s a way of seeing” (31). He suggests that the cartoon, as
an iconographic style of comics, “is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness
are pulled” (36), enabling the reader to inhabit the cartoon through the process of
reading.Marjorie Allison extends this observation about the comics form by drawing
attention to what happens for the reader when marginalized voices and stories are
“brought to the centre and given a privileged place” (74). “By seeing and reading
themselves into the story,” she asserts, “readers can actively reimagine how the world
is constructed and how they are similar to and different from the world the writers
present” (74). Depending on their personal experiences and identity categories,
younger readers may see and read themselves into the narratives in ways that
enlighten their own sense of self. With a dearth of literature that portrays non-adult
LBTQ characters for an all-ages audience specifically, it is relevant to consider how
reflections of marginalized identities are constructed for the child and young adult
reader in the few examples that exist. Both Princess Princess Ever After and Lumberjanes
employ romantic relationships between central female characters to imply the
respective characters’ queer identities. The exception to this formula is the construction
of Jo’s queerness as a transgender character in Lumberjanes: her gender identity
is revealed through a conversation in Issue #16. As Jo does not (yet) have a romantic
storyline, nor has her sexuality been defined, my main textual analysis will not focus
on her character. Overall, my analysis will focus on the visual and verbal narrative
construction of those same-sex relationships.

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Princess Princess Ever After (PPEA) is a revisionary fairy tale that constructs a love
story between Princess Amira and Princess Sadie, exploiting and participating in
Western fairy-tale conventions, in order to communicate a message of empowerment
and inclusion.



Princess Princess Ever After and Lumberjanes are examples
of comics, and of literature generally, that expand the range of narratives centering
and giving space to the depiction of young female characters and their same-sex relationships.
Whether they might relate to hero princesses or hardcore lady-types, it is
important, and increasingly relevant, that child and young adult readers have more
and more opportunities to have their own experiences reflected back to them, too.
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We Said Feminist Fairy Tales, Not Fractured Fairy Tales!
The Construction of the Feminist Fairy Tale: Female Agency over Role Reversal

A child’s first exposure to literature is often a fairy tale, frequently a derivative of one of the classics by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault.

The cultural norms represented in fairy tales play a large part in the socialization processes of the child who reads them. Contained within these cultural norms are the shared beliefs
about gender roles held by the child’s society. The development of a gender identity is integral to a child’s self-perception. According to Judith L. Meece, gender conceptions are important for understanding not only the self but also the behavior of others.3 Additionally, they affect the way children are treated by peers and adults and influence future behavior expectations.4 As
children grow, they use information from their parents, peers, school, literature, and the media to form theories on how men and women are supposed to behave. Literature in general,
and fairy tales in particular, gender children. The characters depicted in stories help children to determine what it means to be male or female as it applies to behavior, traits, or occupation
within a child’s culture.5 In this capacity, fairy tales can be powerful cultural agents, telling the child who reads them how they should behave with regard to gender.
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Though the European canon (Grimm or Perrault) are thought of as “original” fairy tales, “There is no genuine or authentic version of a fairy tale.”24 In fact, tales are constantly being reworked and adapted to reveal new facets of a culture or the creativity of an author or storyteller.25 Re-vision, a term whose groundwork is laid in feminist postculturalist thought, indicates an author’s decision about which original elements to retain and which to refute when creating his new vision of the text.26 “Feminist rewriters of fairy tales have reworked the conventions of the genre so as to encode discourses that contradict or challenge patriarchal ideologies that are increasingly viewed
as anachronistic in today’s society.”27 Re-visions are one form of contamination.28

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It would seem, then, that in order to truly re-vision a fairy tale, thereby creating a work that is artistically new and rings true to a child, feminist authors must cease attempting to simply reverse
gender roles. Rather, they must re-vision the entire work and create something from the ground up. Donna Jo Napoli is one feminist author who has found success re-visioning fairy tales, creating
feminist rather than fractured fairy tales.33 She has altered generic conventions in three main areas in her books that allow her to rework the discursive foundations of the traditional material: narrative
strategy, representation of male and female characters, and renegotiation of patriarchal ideologies and values.34
Napoli chooses narrative strategies that subvert the traditional omniscient anonymous narrator in order to present other sides of the story. She frequently chooses a first-person narrative, allowing the protagonist to be the agent of his own narration. Feminists frequently write of the importance of giving voice, agency, and subjectivity to those who have previously been silenced and objectified. A female protagonist is enabled if she narrates her own story.
In children’s literature, the character’s voice serves as a metaphor of female agency, providing her with the potential for self-determination. In The Magic Circle, a feminist re-vision of Hansel and Gretel, Napoli makes a deliberate decision to give her sorceress protagonist (the traditional witch) voice and agency. Napoli’s decisions regarding the sorceress invite the readers to empathize with a character who has not only been objectified and vilified in the traditional tales, but whose representation has, more generally, “been symbolic of misogynist attitudes toward women.”35



Feminist fairy tales must be stories in which the main character is empowered regardless of gender. In order to do this, more authors should follow Donna Jo Napoli’s lead and re-vision traditional stories by changing narrative conventions, empowering female and male protagonists, and developing  narratives that encode truly feminist themes and values
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[rewrite and consider all things not just straight up role reversal, be thoughtful about it.]


(Un)Happily Ever After: Fairy Tale Morals, Moralities, and Heterosexism in Children's Texts

little exists in this literature that directly addresses a child’s developing gay, lesbian, or bisexual orientations. The author argues that rampant heteronormalcy in children’s texts must be challenged just as feminists and multiculturalists challenge the moral and social prescriptions of “conventional” master narratives. Sociological and psychological studies substantiate that children’s toys, games,
cartoons, songs, and books affect children’s perceptions of themselves and their world; this essay therefore reminds that “traditional” fairy tales and nursery rhymes are potent cultural markers that substantively impact childhood and by extension adult feelings of self-worth and legitimacy

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