Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

The Beast In The Beauty: An Analysis Of Cultural Gender Biases And Stereotypes In The Classic Fairy Tale “Beauty And The Beast” And Implications In Modern Retellings, Lauren Lefler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast to examine the way that this tale has been used throughout history to address the concerns of young women, as well as reinforce the culturally accepted gender roles of the time of their publication. The first chapter defines the fairy tale genre and features some of the most common criticism on the genre, it will then define and offer critical perspectives on the monster bridegroom motif which Beauty and the Beast is a part of. The second chapter will look at the first two publications of the text, the …

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations Of “Peau D’Âne” In Contemporary French And English Texts, Amy M. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations of “Peau d’Âne” in Contemporary French and English Texts explores trans-genre and transmedia adaptations of Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale using feminist and narratological theories to examine gendered aspects of storytelling and the treatment of father-daughter incest and blame in the work of selected French, British, and American creators. Texts are read comparatively, with analyses of the adaptations’ plots, motifs, characterizations, and modifications, both in relation to Perrault and to the other adaptations. This dissertation features prose and poetry texts by female authors—including Christine Angot, Catherine Cusset, and Emma Donoghue—in the first two chapters. Reading these …

Blindness And The Beast: Disability, Fairy Tale And Myth In Wilkie Collins’ Poor Miss Finch, György Kiss

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

The paper offers a close reading of Wilkie Collins’ 1872 novel, Poor Miss Finch through the lens of fairy tales, gender, and disability studies. In Poor Miss Finch, we follow the life of a young blind woman, Lucilla Finch, who falls in love with a man named Oscar Dubourg, whose appearance can be described as “monstrous”. This plot evokes the popular tale of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, which the paper argues is the inspiration of Poor Miss Finch. In his work, Collins incorporates and rethinks many elements of the fairy tale to fit them into the 19^{th …}

What Makes A Woman "Pious And Good": The Function Of Several Grimm Brothers' Cautionary Fairy Tales, Hannah Montante

English (MA) Theses

This thesis explores how several of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, “Little Snow-white and the seven dwarfs,” “The Juniper Tree,” and “Cinderella” exhibit patriarchal expectations of women that fairy tale protagonists strive to uphold, while female villains feel driven to violence and artifice because of their inability to fit into this role. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published these stories in nineteenth-century Germany, which was predominantly Protestant and held the belief that women should be nurturing homemakers who took care of their husbands and children. These cautionary tales instruct women on how to behave and appear physically, likely because these stories …

A Tale Of Two Trans Men: Transmasculine Identity And Trauma In Two Fairy-Tale Retellings, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Transgender identities in fairy tale retellings are rare, but can reveal much about gender fluidity. Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Boy, Snow, Bird conflates transgender identities with mirrored falsehoods and fairytale spells, pathologizing a trauma victim who turns out to also become an abuser, while Gabriel Vidrine’s novella “A Pair of Raven Wings” depicts a queer transgender man with dignity, making it clear that the trauma he suffers is at the hands of bigots rather than being an invention of a sick mind or the cause of his transition. Pairing these fairy-tale retellings illuminates the topic of gender fluidity in fairy tales …

The Most Beautiful Of All: A Quantitative Approach To Fairy-Tale Femininity, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Feminist folklorists have long asserted that women’s bodies are represented in fairy tales differently than men’s bodies, in normative and sexist ways. By using computational approaches to analyze a corpus of canonical fairy tales, I assess these claims and establish that women’s bodies are depicted in distinctive ways in fairy tales. This finding is important for scholars interested in fairy-tale studies, gender studies, and computational approaches to folklore studies.

Masculinity And Men’S Bodies In Fairy Tales: Youth, Violence, And Transformation, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The study of masculinity in fairy tales lags behind the study of femininity, a lack this article addresses by reviewing the intersections of masculinity studies and feminist theory and using a dataset based on canonical fairy-tale collections to empirically tease out representations of men's bodies in fairy tales. Crucial findings include the significance of youth, physical stature, violence, and transformations in depictions of men's bodies in fairy tales, which contribute to a construction of hegemonic masculinity as fragile yet the unmarked norm.

Exploring Kindergartners' Understandings Of Gender : Responding To Picture Book Read Alouds With A Focus On Fairy Tales, Karen Marie Maher

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation explores four of my kindergartners’ understandings of gender across one academic year with an in-depth study of responses to a series of picture book read alouds including Cinderella variants. Critical literacy offered opportunities for these young students to critique inequities within social practices (Au & Raphael, 2000; Vasquez, 2014, 2017); whereas, poststructuralist feminism framed the inquiries into the locations of deeply ingrained gender identities (Blackburn, 2005, 2006; Blaise, 2005a, 2005b, 2014; Villaverde, 2008). This critical analysis of literature provided a means for the kindergartners to uncover underlying messages of power and inequity by interrogating whose voices were heard …

The Monstrous Self: Negotiating The Boundary Of The Abject, Katya Yakubov

Theses and Dissertations

Through the lens of the horror film and the fairy tale, this thesis explores the notion of the grotesque as a boundary phenomenon—a negotiation of what is self and what is other. As such, it locates the function that the monstrous and the grotesque have in the formation of a personal and social identity. In asking why we take pleasure in the perverse, I explore how permutations of guilt, victimhood, and desire can be actively rewritten, in order to construct a stable sense of self.

Happily Ever After And Other Lies My Childhood Told Me, Rachel Anna Neff

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A manuscript-length book of poetry with a critical preface centered on the idea of mythology, nursery rhymes, and foundational (Western) fictions and how the cultural norms and expectations that those texts create influence an individual, particularly with respect to gender and gender identity.

Computational Analysis Of The Body In European Fairy Tales, Scott Weingart, Jeana Jorgensen

Jeana Jorgensen

This article explores how digital humanities research methods can be used to analyze the representations of gendered bodies in European fairy tales, a flexible and pervasive genre that has influenced Western children's education and acquisition of gender identity for centuries. By blending the theoretical and methodological concerns of folkloristics, gender studies, and large-scale scientific research, this article demonstrates the utility of cross-disciplinary collaboration in asking traditional questions of traditional materials with new methods. To facilitate this research, a hand-coded database listing every reference to a body or body part in the 233 fairy tales was created. Analysis revealed strong indications …

Understanding ‘The Body’ In Fairy Tales, Scott Weingart, Jeana Jorgensen

Jeana Jorgensen

Computational analysis and feminist theory generally aren’t the first things that come to mind in association with fairy tales. This unlikely pairing, however, can lead to important insights regarding how cultures understand and represent themselves. For example, by looking at how characters are described in European fairy tales, we’ve been able to show how Western culture tends to bias the younger generation, especially the men. While that result probably won’t shock anyone more than passingly familiar with the Western world, the method of reaching these results allows us to look at cultural biases in a new light. Our study and …

Sowing Seeds Of Subversion: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers' Subversive Use Of Fairy Tales And Folklore, Shandi Lynne Wagner

Wayne State University Dissertations

"Sowing Seeds of Subversion: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers' Subversive Use of Fairy Tales and Folklore" focuses on the fictional works of nineteenth-century British women authors, analyzing their use of fairy-tale and folklore motifs to criticize social mores, in particular those surrounding domestic ideology and the institution of marriage. By situating texts within their sociocultural contexts, I explore how nineteenth-century women authors revised and adapted classic fairy tales to communicate subversive, proto-feminist social criticism to a variety of audiences. I examine fiction and poetry published in literary annuals, in fairy-tale collections, and in the more generally available collections of poetry and …

Happily Ever After: Is Disney Setting Us Up? A Study On Disney Princesses And Their Influence On Young Women And Their Personal Love Narratives, Brittany Danielle Minor

Theses & Dissertations

This study discusses the issue of whether the influence of Disney films affects the girls who watch these films once they become adult women. Disney "princess" films are animated movies produced by Disney, featuring princess characters such as Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine and Pocahontas. The purpose of this study is to discover how watching Disney princess films as a child affects the decisions adult women aged 20-37 make when it comes to their love lives. A survey, completed by 40 females aged 20-37, was conducted and relating literature was explored for data collection. The surveys were analyzed …

Turning Into A Shadow: Textual Management Of Sexual Violence In Taketori Monogatari, Otilia C. Milutin

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper is an integral part of an ongoing doctoral research which examines the varied textual representations of sexual violence in Heian and Kamakura monogatari. The first part of this dissertation, opening with the section presented here, addresses the three mid-ninth to mid-tenth century texts, Taketori, Utsuho and Ochikubo monogatari, whose representations or misrepresentations of sexual violence shaped Murasaki Shikibu’s own, in the eleventh century Genji monogatari.

The present study focuses on the Taketori text and its management of sexual violence; it traces the work’s textual lineage and underlines the consistent and sustained attempts to sanitize its content …

Les Contes De Fées Oubliés: Vision D'Un Monde Plus Égal, Deborah Amato

Honors Theses

J’ai toujours aimé les contes de fées et j’ai toujours été intéressée par la question de l’égalité entre les sexes. Il y a deux ans, j’ai suivi un cours intitulé « Women in Myth and Fairy Tale». Nous avons lu et analysé des contes de fées aussi vieux que Cupid and Psyche, qui date du IIe siècle, et aussi récents que la version de Disney de la Belle et la Bête (1991). J’ai examiné alors pour la première fois les stéréotypes masculins et féminins que ces contes présentaient. Après cette expérience, j’ai voulu approfondir ma connaissance des premiers contes de …

Computational Analysis Of The Body In European Fairy Tales, Scott Weingart, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This article explores how digital humanities research methods can be used to analyze the representations of gendered bodies in European fairy tales, a flexible and pervasive genre that has influenced Western children's education and acquisition of gender identity for centuries. By blending the theoretical and methodological concerns of folkloristics, gender studies, and large-scale scientific research, this article demonstrates the utility of cross-disciplinary collaboration in asking traditional questions of traditional materials with new methods. To facilitate this research, a hand-coded database listing every reference to a body or body part in the 233 fairy tales was created. Analysis revealed strong indications …

Happily Ever After Take Two: Rewriting Femininity In Hybridization Fairy Tale Films, Megan Estelle Troutman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The tradition of fairy tales has evolved drastically over the past five hundred years. At the beginning of the 20th century, fairy tale cartoons became widely popular as an independent medium, as well as introductions to larger films. In 1937, Walt Disney started the tradition of fairy tale cinema with the release of Snow White. Since that time, Disney has released and re-released eleven princess fairy tale films. Critics and parents alike ridicule Disney for its depictions of women as submissive and subservient. Recent films have used fairy tale tropes, without referring to a specific classic tale, in order to …

Living Fairy Tales: Science Fiction And Fantasy's Visionary Retellings Of "Beauty And The Beast", Adrien E. Sebree

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis explores how science fiction and fantasy retellings of the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" bring visionary insights to the fairy tale. Stories such as Tanith Lee's science fiction novella "Beauty" and Mercedes Lackey's fantasy novel The Fire Rose constitute living and developing incarnations of "Beauty and the Beast." To better explore the visionary leaps made by these stories, they are placed in contrast with one of the original recordings of the story by Madame Marie Le Prince de Beaumont and the 1991 Disney film version, Beauty and the Beast.

Telling Old Tales Newly : Intertextuality In Young Adult Fiction For Girls, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

In one of the inaugural articles in feminist literary criticism, "Feminism and Fairy Tales," Karen Rowe followed Simon de Beauvoir's lead in claiming that fairy tales structure the consciousness of girls and women, and in a negative way. As Donald Haase has noted, "In Rowe's view, the fairy tale--perhaps precisely because of its 'awesome imaginative power'--had a role to play in cultivating equality among men and women, but it would have to be a rejuvenated fairy tale fully divested of its idealized romantic fantasies" (5). In the years since Rowe's essay first appeared, however, it has been unclear whether the …