Startseite Gender Fluidity: From Euphemism to Pride
Artikel Open Access

Gender Fluidity: From Euphemism to Pride

An Editorial with Comprehensive Bibliography on Gender Fluidity in Children’s Literature and Fairy Tales
  • Sophie Raynard-Leroy EMAIL logo und Charlotte Trinquet du Lys
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 30. Dezember 2021
Artikel downloaden (PDF)
Open Cultural Studies
Aus der Zeitschrift Open Cultural Studies Band 5 Heft 1

The project for this special volume emanated from the accelerated frequency of the expression “gender fluidity” in the current vernacular and research theories. The general excitement over this new concept prompted reactions from some of our scholars of the early-modern, because we argue it is certainly not new (even if the expression per se is). It has always been pervasive in literature and in fairy-tale/folklore studies – cross-dressing episodes in particular. The various studies that we offer in this volume are meant to show how this concept has been represented over time – from the early-modern to the post-modern periods – in fairy tales and children’s literature following a continuum from the implicit to the more explicit.

As an expression, “gender fluidity” has been only recently coined, therefore, it is essential to first define it as it is currently understood in order to be able to reflect back on those texts representing gender-bending phenomena and theorize about them using today’s tools and new understandings about sexuality. A gender-fluid person will change either identity (identifying themselves as male or female) or expression (expressing their gender to the rest of society, i.e., dressing as male or female), or both, from the gender they have been assigned at birth, throughout the course of their life. It is understood that gender usually develops from early childhood to adolescence, and most people identify with a gender in their early adulthood.

However, gender-fluid persons can experience more than one gender change during their life, while transgender persons will identify and express themselves with a gender different than the one assigned at birth for the rest of their life, whether they go through gender reassignment (surgical and/or hormonal) or not. This often results for gender-fluid individuals in complex psychological hardship caused by the “othering” both from the transgender community, for whom they are not “trans” enough, or most contemporary societies, for which they are outside of the normative behavior set by the binary system of genders (Katz-Wise).

Cross-dressing, as a form of gender fluidity’s expression mostly familiar to early-modern scholars, can be considered as one that is non-conforming to the assigned gender at birth. It is often frowned upon in our contemporary, western societies, where boys who dress like girls are called sissies, while girls who dress like boys are called tomboys. In French, the much more derogatory term of garçon manqué (literally, a failed boy) explicitly reflects failure on one’s sexuality if the gender performance expectation of the female sex assigned at birth is not met.

The expression is still used nowadays without much reflection on its semantic significance and without the awareness that it might even be offensive to our new sensitive reception of old sexual designations. Today in France the reverse – calling a male a fi-fille (a girly-girl) – would be perceived as offensive to boys. So, this is not to say that the current vernacular is now completely accepting of gender bending: it is still biased and outdated though as a society the western world starts opening to various ways of gender expressions. In early-modern Europe, homosexuality and bisexuality were not acceptable by the standards of the Catholic Church nor the society at large. An example of this would be Paul Scarron’s Mazarinade against Cardinal Mazarin, the de facto ruler of France since Louis XIV was too young to rule at the time. In his poem, Scarron associates Mazarin’s presumed bisexuality with the failure of the French government, and his acts of sodomy are paralleled with him sodomizing France. Even if we should hesitate to claim a moralistic role given by Scarron to the poem, the author uses, however, Mazarin’s bisexuality as an insult toward the Cardinal (Lyraud). Yet, despite the conservative public and/or satirical discourse and the strict binary system in place for assigning specific roles to males and females, gender nonconformity existed – as it has always existed in any society – and many early modern European folk and fairy tales as well as novellas treat the subject of gender transgression through actions, disguises, upbringing, etc. These texts were primarily written for an audience of adults and in the case of some French women-authored fairy tales, for an audience of young women as premarital education defying the patriarchal norm, but they were never intended for young children. As such, some of these stories can be seen as reflections of the institution of marriage within the patriarchal society, with sexuality being implicitly a large part of it. In the case of European fairy tales, the first attempt to write with a children’s audience in mind would be Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s Magasin des enfants (1757), followed in the nineteenth century by the Brothers Grimm, George Sand, and La comtesse de Ségur among others. It is only from the “infantilization of fairy tales,” to use Lewis Seifert’s term (Seifert 25–39), that we see a much stricter gender conformity in this genre, and most of the tales representing gender fluidity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ European corpus are completely eliminated in volumes intended to children. For those texts aiming at adult/young adult audiences, with sexuality being a vital subject of interest, yet one to express in metaphorical terms and indirect ways, cross-dressing is often a resort (see Raynard’s two studies of cross-dressing in Catherine Bernard’s Frederic de Sicile).

In fairy tales as in the real life of early modern Europe, trans representation and authentication were essential to the survival of women-to-men cross-dressers, and this idea does not really differ with postmodern representations of gender fluidity. The normalizing of transgender identities and experiences was essential to women warriors (ATU 514**; AT 884a) if they wanted to succeed in their quests, whether it is on the historical battlefield, or in the fairy tales of Straparola, Basile, and female writers such as d’Aulnoy, Murat, or L’héritier (1690s). Even though the current terminology did not exist in the early modern European lexicon, the normalization of gender was often a question of life and death: being “caught” wearing a male outfit was a disgrace that a woman could not afford. At the same time, and especially in seventeenth-century women’s authored fairy tales, the characters do not want to cut ties with their past, which is also the case for many transgender people today. Cross-dressed heroines never try to cut from their roots because they always know they have to come back to their original gender, being therefore fluid and not trans. It was not the intention of the proto-feminist authors to radically reassign the gender of their heroines, but show that women of the time could be as excellent, and even superior, to some of their male counterparts. By virtue of their time spent cross-dressing within the tale, which represents a narrative liminal space in which they have to linger in order to succeed, these heroines exist outside of the binary categories of gender norms, and therefore have the freedom to display traits traditionally associated with both men and women.

Once their cross-dressing artifice is finally discovered – or if they no longer need their male gender expression – and they return to their female gender expression and the binary patriarchal society, these heroines, especially L’héritier’s Leonore, future Marmoisan, continue to identify with both female and male genders, keeping the best of their assigned gender at birth (female) and the best of their male identity (“Marmoisan” Œuvres Meslees, 1696). The authors go even further in their trans representation as they never fully depict their heroines as having only traditionally female characteristics: Marmoisan is born with a twin brother whom she resembles to the point that they are indistinguishable physically, the only difference being that their behavior is opposite, with him having all the defects of a spoiled gentleman while she displays the best qualities of a woman and at the same time can also manipulate weapons with more skills than all the young men she meets on the battlefield. The credibility of Marmoisan’s identity is put into question within the narrative because they refuse to follow the rules of a male gendered individual (brutal, rapist, bully, dirty, etc.). They are qualified as queer by their fellow soldiers but they incarnate what women want in men (soft, reverent, polite, mannered, yet strong, protective, etc.); hence, the woman they save from an abusive male soldier falls in love with them as a man. Therefore, they present as queer for both male and female individuals because even though they are identified, physically, as a man, they do not align to normative standards of gender.

Furthermore, after Marmoisan’s return to a female expression, they still keep the role assigned to a male (savior, ruler, negotiator) and are better suited than any other man at court, according to the prince’s father, to be the future king’s primary advisor. In Murat’s “The Salvage,” the heroine Constantine, future Constantin, is immediately represented as identifying more as a male than a female in her youth, and the author reverses Straparola’s presentation of the heroine by glorifying her male qualities and skills before even representing her as female (Straparola, “Constantin-Constantine,” fable IV-1, Piacevole Notti, 1551; Murat, Histoire Sublimes et Allégoriques, 1699). In that sense, both Leonore-Marmoisan and Constantine-Constantin, after their cross-dressing episode, never come back to being only female, making them non-binary, even though the marriage with a prince/king at the end of the fairy tale would make the reader think that they are back to the patriarchal realm, and everything is back to normal. The male characters with whom the heroines end up married also question their own sexualities since both fall in love with the heroines as the latter identify and represent themselves as a man. It is even more obvious in a passage of Murat’s narration, when the king, future husband of Constantine, is riding on a horse with the beast behind him, and the scene is clearly evocative of sodomy (Trinquet 2–17).

D’Aulnoy’s “Belle-Belle ou le Chevalier Fortuné” (Les Contes des fées, 1697), also an ATU 514** (AT 884a) version based on the same Italian sources as Murat’s and L’héritier’s tales, is the exception to the rule. None of the heroes have any agency, the heroine’s disguise is clearly nothing more than cross-dressing as she displays none of the male qualities of her counterparts in Murat’s and L’héritier’s tales, and the prince is behaviorally queer, displaying many traditionally feminine traits. However, in d’Aulnoy’s “Finette Cendron” (Les Contes des Fées, 1697), even though the eponymous heroine does not identify as gender fluid, nor is a trans man, she has the behavior, advocacy, and experiences of a grown patriarchal man as she replaces her incapacitated father, taking care of her family’s estate (saving her sisters, killing the ogress, etc.), while the prince she will eventually choose to marry is represented as a damsel in distress that the heroine will save (see Trinquet du Lys 2019 et 2006).

Women warriors in early modern fairy tales are always fighting to be accepted in their societies, but never while compromising the female characteristics that they value. They are at odds with societal norms because they are never accepted for who they are nor who they represent, especially in the case of Finette Cendron and Marmoisan. Their authors, by creating such characters, challenge, as early as the 1690s, the status quo of the gender binary, representation, realities, norms, and the place of gender-fluid individuals in society. This is the case for their heroines, as Erin Calhoun Davis states for real individuals of the trans-fluid-community, that “[t]he categories of man and woman fail to represent fully the diversity of individuals’ experiences, behaviors, and self-understandings” (105).

Fast-forwarding a couple of centuries, we find adaptations of the same folk- or fairy tales that do not shy in keeping trans- and fluid-genders beyond the happy ending of the story. Often via a rewritten version of early modern and modern tales, or via the creation of new stories, we see that the evolution is representing a very different outcome, which goes hand in hand with Pride and the recent gender theories that have developed after the second feminist wave. If they are still few and far apart, these texts are nonetheless significant in representing the advances made in the arts within the LGBTQIA + community and are not to be ignored in children’s literature. We are proud to feature in this volume the latest research on these stories.

Essays on the Early-modern Legacy of Gender Bending onto the Nineteenth Century

Anne Duggan’s article, “Gender, Class, and Human/Non-Human Fluidity in Théodore and Hyppolite Cogniard’s féerie, The White Cat,” analyzes a forgotten genre, the féerie (fairy play), at its peak in nineteenth-century France, inscribing the concept of gender fluidity within the nature of the marvelous in general. The most popular nineteenth-century féerie, The White Cat, is itself drawn from various fairy tales by seventeenth-century précieuse author Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy. It is a medley of sorts, combining all possible amalgamations and transformations of d’Aulnoy’s already very creative material. The resources of the marvelous are infinite: it can question all identities: sex/gender, species, and class, and this potential is of great interest to us today when we interrogate intersectionality. Note that race comes in much later in fairy-tale adaptations; one has to wait for twentieth and twenty-first-century post colonialist discourse to see it represented in productions though that aspect of intersectionality is still a relatively neglected aspect of fairy-tale adaptations to this day, and we can expect this will be addressed next. With this deep look at the Coignard Brothers’ féerie, we can see that the nineteenth century already started to capitalize on the questioned intersectionality between sex/gender and species and class. That two post-revolutionary (1789 and 1848) male authors expand on seventeenth-century précieuse Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s popular fairy tales (which by then had become the French tradition) is telling. She and her female counterparts (Henriette-Julie de Murat, Charlotte Rose Caumont de La Force, etc.) had made ample use of the resources that literary genre could give them as an escape from the constraints of reality. They created imaginary spaces where, through cross-dressing, metamorphoses and all that magic can produce, those restraints could be eliminated at least within the frame of fiction. In this one piece by the Cogniard Brothers, the gender performances are just one facet of what magical transformations can be: they come alongside species and class repositioning, not according to a mere phenomenon of inversion, but rather to show the full spectrum of possible positions. The carnivalesque nature of the féerie allows for constant mutation. Judith Butler’s later explanation of her concept of gender as performance as “not a singular act” but “a ritualized production” (in order for the identities to be successfully received) is very helpful in helping us understand the concept of gender fluidity and how it is not a new concept: it was represented in those seventeenth-century fairy tales such as d’Aulnoy’s and her précieuse/baroque female counterparts, then more explicitly performed with great comic theatricality in those post-revolutionary productions such as féeries where class identity becomes an important target, and one could argue, the gender-bending continues to be there though not the object of the target that it has become today.

Polly Mangerson’s premise in “Naughty Girl or Not A Girl? Behavior and Becoming in Les Malheurs de Sophie” is that little Sophie’s misfortunes come from the fact that she is mis-playing her gender. By doing so, Sophie merits the punishments to which she is continually subjected and that are reflected in the title of her stories. In France, everyone still knows and rejoices about Ségur’s fictional character Sophie de Réan, and that naughty little girl from another age is remembered and sympathized with for the harsh misfortunes she has to suffer for her unruly behavior that is not deemed suitable for a Second-Empire upper-class girl. This study argues that Sophie’s malheurs (misfortunes) essentially come from the fact that she behaves in a gender non-conforming way in contrast with les petites filles modèles (the model little girls) according to the standards of the time period (Second Empire). The very fact that Les Malheurs continues to be a best-seller shows that those expectations for girls are still somewhat understood if not embraced. But, more importantly for us here, it also shows that Sophie’s gender-bending ways can serve as a model to fantasize about as we believe they were then when Ségur decided to make them the objects of her literary/pedagogical mission. We would like to contend that Ségur would not have made Sophie her titular heroine if she did not find this character worth staging in so many of her stories (there are a few other volumes featuring her beside Les Malheurs). Instead, Ségur may have been somehow fascinated by her alter-ego’s boldness and vindication of more agency and anti-conformism. The universality of Les Malheurs could precisely reside in the conflicting presence of opposite models of feminine behavior, with the behavior of Sophie being much more worth noting and fantasizing about than that of her counter-example les petites filles modèles. In other words, the two opposite constituencies in terms of gender theory (the traditionalists and the progressives) can both find water to bring to their well in these (mis)adventures of Sophie: using them as cautionary tales or, in reverse, identifying with those rebellious acts.

In “Ah!Nana’s fairytale punk-comics: From the Comtesse de Ségur’s ‘Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon’ to Nicole Claveloux’s ‘Histoire de Blondasse, de Belle-Biche et gros Chatchat,” Valentina Denzel invites us to take another look at Comtesse de Ségur’s work, this time her fairy tales – presumably targeting an audience of young children (girls in particular) of the likes of Sophie and les petites filles modèles. Denzel makes us discover a bold second-wave feminist adaptation – transmediated through a comic – of one of Comtesse de Ségur’s fairy tales by author Nicole Claveloux (1976). To go from a nineteenth-century didactic fairy tale to a queer punk tale celebrating the monstrosity of female characters and advocating the exploration of new sexual pleasures, it is practically undergoing a full reversal in tone and message. Or is it? Claveloux operates on the humoristic parodic mode in re-presenting Ségur’s (arguably corny characters given their names in the first place) in reverse, with the conventional models of femininity literally turned upside down. Denzel’s reading of it can aptly serve as a companion to Mangerson’s article on Ségur’s ambiguous texts (as explained above). The very fact that Claveloux did the illustrations for Ségur’s fairy tale, “Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon” (1856), as an intermediary phase to her own subversive adaptation of it can only corroborate our idea that Ségur’s texts contained that subversive possibility of an alternative reading. At any rate they still come across as counter examples of what we, twenty-first-century readers, now expect from the fairy-tale genre.

Friederike Frenzel invites us to reconsider the Victorian classics of children’s literature, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, in a gender perspective. In “A ‘Fabulous Monster’ and a ‘Wonderful Boy’: Gender and the Elusive Victorian Child in Alice books and Peter Pan,” Frenzel proposes to stray from the classic binaries by framing those narratives within the concept of “genderless” children developed in Victorian Era artistic circles that influenced Carroll and Barrie. Peter and the Neverland he rules elude the binary dynamics of heteronormative family life, just like Alice can be situated among the queer creatures she encounters in Wonderland. Furthermore, in these narratives, “genderlessness” and “betwixt” gender-models are inseparably linked to the “dream lands” (Wonderland, Looking-Glass land, Neverland) as distorting, satirizing mirror images of an oppressive “grown-up” society. Alice is represented as an ever-transforming and self-aware visitor of a fantastic realm, while Peter’s very existence is otherworldly, oblivious, constant, and cyclical. We are invited to read those texts using the pretext of a-historicity in fantastic children’s and fairy-tale stories, and applying Ricoeur’s postmodern theory of the linear quest of the hero and the circularity of the journey itself, so as to pay attention to the act of storytelling (as repetition), and the authors in their role as narrators who indirectly perform a gendered, maternal act.

Post-modern Revisions of What was Perhaps too Modern Back Then

“Double Trouble: Gender Fluid Heroism in American Children’s Television,” Lou Lamari’s and Pauline Greenhill’s joint study of the current reboot of She-Ra: Princess of Power (1985–1987), renamed She-Ra and the Princesses of Power for Netflix (2018–2020), also presents a revision with respect to gender and sexual representations going beyond hetero-normative expectations, to the extent of including perhaps the first transgender character on American television for a children’s audience. Yet the study also points at a limitation of this progressive adaptation with the equivocal representation of transgressive character Double Trouble. If the idea that all locations in the gender spectrum can now be exemplified and fully liberated in children’s popular culture is a big first step toward inclusivity, it is important to continue to address issues of discrimination to rectify the fraught process of liberating oneself from cis-hetero-normative standards. More inclusive intersectional representations would avoid potential harm to audiences who may feel misrepresented and further marginalized – and to those who risk having their misconceptions confirmed. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, though a positive intervention, indicates that there is still room for improvement. And without charging members of the LGBTQ + community with sole responsibility, they in particular need to lead the trend, rather than mercenary big studios capitalizing on new ideological trends without a personal or informed knowledge of the realities behind gender fluidity representation. This piece reminds us that liberation comes at a cost. And while joy and celebration are important, we have yet to see representations of the trauma and pain undergone by gender-bending characters in order to achieve them.

Diana Burgos’s article, “The Queer Glow Up of Hero-Sword Legacies in She-Ra, Korra, and Sailor Moon,” echoes Lou Lamari’s and Pauline Greenhill’s study of the evolution of She-Ra’s TV show with respect to gender representations and gender fluidity vindication but also adds two other animated shows, Sailor Moon and The Legend of Korra, as objects of comparison within the magical girl trope. The original Sailor Moon anime, which was based on the famous shojo manga, debuted in 1992 as a show with groundbreaking queer-coded characters and themes. However, Cartoon Network and North American licensing companies felt a duty to erase its queerness and anglicize the show’s Japanese characters through the English dubbed version that was broadcasted from 1995 to 2000. Despite this, its original queer legacy was not forgotten, and fans created and shared their own subtitled versions of the original Japanese series (fansubs). In 2014, the series was rebooted as Sailor Moon Crystal and the English dub did not censor queerness or race. As anime’s most famous magical girl, Sailor Moon extends her influence on American TV shows like The Legend of Korra and She-Ra and The Princesses of Power, whose animation and magical girl narratives are inspired by anime. Burgos gives us a very close reading of each of these series (often focusing on specific episodes) so that readers – who are both familiar and unfamiliar with their context – can discover how their gender representation steers away from hyper-masculine heroes, promotes feminine heroic strength, vindicates emotional fulfillment for the heroine, and teaches healing and empathy for the enemy in a context of warfare. She also explicitly presents Netflix’s She-Ra reboot as a queer retelling of the original 1980’s She-Ra: Princess of Power through an interesting Jungian reading of gender fluidity with focus on the shapeshifting nature of gender performances. Contrary to Greenhill and Lamari above, Burgos commends the effort of inclusion in the creation of the new gender-plural character, Double Trouble (in effect the first transgendered character in a children’s show) in the fourth season of She-Ra. Korra’s case study less explicitly illustrates the pro-gender fluidity agenda than the other shows but does that symbolically and perhaps just as efficiently via the representation of the Spirit World where the heroine travels and encounters queer spirits and animals who guide her and tame her fears. Korra’s finale symbolically implied a same-sex romance between Korra and Asami Sato, which Bryan Konietzo (one of the series’ creators) later explicitly confirmed in both his blog post and the series’ graphic novel sequels. Social discourses helped queer representation in the rebooted She-Ra escape the LGBTQ + subversion and erasure depicted in The Legend of Korra and the original Sailor Moon; they indicate that audience involvement plays a pivotal role in the continuing evolution of queer representation in children’s popular media.

Reflections on the Alternative Possibilities Offered by the Genre (Fairy Tales and Folklore) on Issues of Gender and Sexuality

In “The Transgender Imagination in Folk Narratives,” Psyche Ready chose to study in depth the often-discarded case of ATU 514, “The Shift of Sex,” as a way to demonstrate that transgender themes have always been featured in folk tales. Her premise is that the transgender characters’ happy endings that are characteristic of these tales validates that representation: with the trans hero being systematically rewarded for their transgression, through change of sex. We share Ready’s comforting thought that “this radical story has accompanied humanity for generations” and that this tale type creates a safe space for expressions and experiences of non-normative gender. One could see Ready’s enterprise as one of rehabilitation of traditional gender representations. This was made possible, she argues, by queer and transgender theory and their critical attention to sexuality and transgressive expressions of gender and gender roles. With folk narratives openly addressing societal taboos, today, the genre can be used to explore alternatives to normative sexuality. The presence of world-flipping episodes in folktales (and fairy tales) incites the reader to re-imagine cultural structures, including sexual norms.

Jeana Jorgensen’s “A Tale of Two Trans Men: Transmasculine Identity and Trauma in Two Fairy-Tale Retellings” corroborates Psyche Ready’s theory on transgender identities in the fact that she too considers ATU 514 as the exception to the rule, the rule being for transgender identities to be routinely under-represented or discarded both in fairy tales and society. Her perspective starts more pessimistically in that she points at the limitations of queer theory in general and as applied to fairy tales. The main problem is that it focuses essentially on the LGBTQ aspects while ignoring the T. In this study, she analyzes two retellings that feature transgender characters, only to show that representing transgender experiences is not always done in a positive manner. Worse, she contends that one of the two texts she proceeds at deconstructing for us, actually contributes to reinforcing the negative stereotypes about transgender people. Jorgensen’s own expertise in gender and sexuality studies allows her to point at historical constructions of trans identities that reified them as pathological and different. Making trauma the reason for the character to transition is a classic misunderstanding of transgender identities in popular culture. There is indeed a persistence in western culture to pathologize transgender people and this tendency in turn permeates the media. Even in contemporary fairy-tale scholarship, she argues, gender fluidity tends to be addressed from a cisgender perspective, with cross-dressing in particular receiving plenty of attention as the only one generally accepted by audiences as a sexual transgression (as the success of English pantomimes can confirm). Magic can also be a problem in fairy-tales’ representations of transgender identities with the gender transition being possibly attributed to a mere magic spell, thus robbing the character of the dignity of their own identity. So, while Psyche Ready leaves us with some hopes at seeing alternative representations, Jeana Jorgensen tends to focus instead on the transphobia she detects in these new attempts at representations (from misgendering to othering) and blames it on the persistence of strict binary gender roles as the sexual norms despite the recent adjustment the medical profession made from disorder to dysphoria as psychiatric labels given to transgender experiences. A stigma persists in society, even in the fantastic realm, therefore she concludes that gender fluidity is still mostly rejected and trans people characterized as deviant. In fact, for her it is even a treacherous act from the part of authors to introduce transgender characters if in doing so they aim at rejecting them and prompting cisnormativity. She even makes a case at taking authors to task when they trick us so, because in these misrepresentations, they may contribute to further victimization and marginalization.

Drawing from this improved though still sad state of affairs vis-a-vis the representation of transgender people in children’s media, one can only hope that the new and upcoming LGBTQ + characters will be predominantly heroes rather than villains, but especially authentically trans, that they be the creations of gender-fluid authors themselves or informed by a gender-fluid fanbase. And fairy tales are yet again the perfect genre to experiment with given their long tradition of serving as voices for the disempowered. Instead of using them to further other marginalized characters, we can use them to humanize them, as Burgos prescribes, comforted by the example of the 2014 She-Ra reboot. And what a great prescription it is to do social good via entertainment? May fairy tales and other narratives of popular culture be the safe space where human rights, gender, and sexuality can happily intersect.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all our blind peer-reviewers for their invaluable help in making this volume on par with the latest scholarship, and our copy-editor Felix Balak for his help with reviewing the manuscripts before publication.

Works Cited

Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville. “Baronne d’.” Les Contes des Fees. Claude Barbin, 1697.Suche in Google Scholar

Basile, Giambattista. Lo Cunto de Li Cunti. Overo a Trattenemiento de Peccerille, edited by Napolitaine Mario Petrini, Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1976.Suche in Google Scholar

Calhoun Davis, Erin. “Situating “Fluidity”: (Trans) Gender Identification and the Regulation of Gender Diversity.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2009, pp. 97–130.10.1215/10642684-2008-020Suche in Google Scholar

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) – seven editions, between 1812 and 1857.Suche in Google Scholar

Katz-Wise, Sabra L. “Gender Fluidity: What it Means and Why Support Matters.” Harvard Health Publishing, Children’s Health, December 3, 2020. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/gender-fluidity-what-it-means-and-why-support-matters-2020120321544. Accessed July 19, 2021.Suche in Google Scholar

Leprince de Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie. Magasin des Enfants ou Dialogues D’une Sage Gouvernante Avec Ses Élèves [1757]. Garnier Frères, 1865.Suche in Google Scholar

L’Héritier de Vilandon, Marie-Jeanne. Œuvres Meslees. Jean Guignard, 1696.Suche in Google Scholar

L’Héritier de Vilandon, Marie-Jeanne. “Marmoisan.” Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers, Translated and edited by Lewis C. Seifert and Domna Stanton, pp. 194–212. Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010.Suche in Google Scholar

Lyraud, Pierre. “Violences Scarroniennes: Haine et Littérature Dans la Mazarinade de Scarron.” Talk presented at the 40th International Conference of the SE 17, October 14, 2021.Suche in Google Scholar

Murat, Madame la comtesse de. Histoires Sublimes et Allegoriques, Par Madame la Comtesse D**, Dediees aux Fées Modernes. Florentin et Pierre Delaulne, 1699.Suche in Google Scholar

Raynard, Sophie. “Le Travestissement Comme Moyen D’expression Féminine Dans le Roman de Mlle Bernard: Frédéric de Sicile (1680).” Ventriloquie: Quand on fait parler les femmes (XVe-XVIIIe siècles), edited by Diane Desrosiers and Roxanne Roy. “Les collections de la République des Lettres.” Hermann, 2019, pp. 145–164.Suche in Google Scholar

Raynard, Sophie. “The Female Prince: Or, Frederick of Sicily (1682) by Catherine Bernard.” The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660–1820, edited by April London. Cambridge University Press, 2018.Suche in Google Scholar

Sand, George. Contes D’une Grand-mère (2 Vol). Michel Lévy frères, 1872, 1876.Suche in Google Scholar

Seifert, Lewis. “Madame Le Prince de Beaumont and the Infantilization of the Fairy Tale,” French Literature Series, vol. XXXI, 2004, pp. 25–39.10.1163/9789004333659_003Suche in Google Scholar

Ségur, La comtesse de, née Rostopchine. Nouveaux Contes De Fées Pour les Petits Enfants. Librairie de L. Hachette, et cie, 1857.Suche in Google Scholar

Straparola. Les Facetieuses Nuits de Straparole, traduites par Jean Louveau et Pierre de Larivey. 2 vols. 1573. P. Jannet, 1857.Suche in Google Scholar

Trinquet du Lys, Charlotte. “Women-Soldiers’ Tales during Louis XIV’s War Conflicts.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 33, no. 1, Spring 2019, pp. 140–156.10.13110/marvelstales.33.1.0140Suche in Google Scholar

Trinquet du Lys, Charlotte. “Travestissement, Ambiguïté Sexuelle et Homosexualité Dans Les Contes de Femmes-soldats de la Fin du XVIIe Siècle.” PFSCFL, vol. 81, 2014, pp. 2–17.Suche in Google Scholar

Trinquet du Lys, Charlotte. “Voix Clandestines dans les contes de fées, l’exemple de ‘Finette-Cendron’ de Madame d’Aulnoy.” Cahiers du Dix-septième: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. X, no. 2, 2006, pp. 65–82.Suche in Google Scholar

Appendix: Comprehensive Bibliography on Gender Fluidity in Children’s Literature and Fairy Tales

This bibliography is designed to help researchers find their way through the diverse scholarship on the topic, for multiple countries and centuries. We apologize in advance if we omitted works that are worthy of being cited here.

Albistur, Maïté, and Daniel Armogathe. L’histoire du Féminisme Français. 2 vols. Des Femmes, 1977.

Allmand, Chloe. “‘Boy, Girl, You Are a Sword’: Male Viewer to Female Character Cross-Gender Identification in Game of Thrones.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 54, no. 2, 2019, pp. 161–179.

Asher, Nina. “Race, Gender, and Sexuality.” The Routledge Companion to Race and Ethnicity, edited by Charlton D. McIlwain. Routledge, 2011, pp. 64–72.

Bacchilega, Cristina and John Rieder. “Mixing It Up: Generic Complexity and Gender Ideology in Early Twenty-First Century Fairy Tale Films.” Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity, edited by Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix. Utah State University Press, 2010, pp. 23–41.

Baker, Alyce R. “Heroes, Heroines, and Everything in Between: Challenging Gender and Sexuality Stereotypes in Children’s Entertainment Media, edited by CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and Christopher J. Olson.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, 2018, pp. 482–85.

Barad, Karen. “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2015, pp. 387–422.

Berry, Taylor and Julia Wilkins. “The Gendered Portrayal of Inanimate Characters in Children’s Books.” Journal of Children’s Literature, vol. 43, no. 2, 2017, pp. 4–15.

Billaud, Isabelle. “Masculin ou féminin? La représentation du travesti et la question des savoirs au XVIIe siècle.” in: Cloutier, Annie, Catherine Dubeau and Pierre-Marc Gendron (éd. et préface). Savoirs et Fins de la Représentation Sous L'ancien Régime: Actes des Colloques Jeunes-chercheurs du Cercle Universitaire d’Études sur la République des Lettres (CIERL), 2001–2002. PU Laval (2005), pp. 205–219.

Billone, Amy. “The Boy Who Lived: From Carroll’s Alice and Barrie’s Peter Pan to Rowling’s Harry Potter.” Children’s Literature, vol. 32, no. 1, 2004, pp. 178–202.

Biscop, Kilian, et al. “Subversive Ludic Performance: An Analysis of Gender and Sexuality Performance in Digital Games.” DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2019, pp. 23–42.

Blumberg, Angie. “Strata of the Soul: The Queer Archaeologies of Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde.” Victoriographies, vol. 7, no. 3, 2017, pp. 239–256.

Brennan, Joseph. “‘You Could Shame the Great Arthur Himself’: A Queer Reading of Lancelot from BBC’s ‘Merlin’ with Respect to the Character in Malory, White, and Bradley.” Arthuriana, vol. 25, no. 2, 2015, pp. 20–43.

Brisbin, Ally, and Paul Booth. “The Sand/wo/man: The Unstable Worlds of Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Series.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 46, no. 1, 2013, pp. 20–37.

Brocklebank, Lisa. “Rebellious Voices: The Unofficial Discourse of Cross-dressing in d'Aulnoy, de Murat, and Perrault.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 3, Fall 2000, pp. 127–136.

Bullen, Elizabeth and Naarah Sawers. “The Fairy Tale Police Department: Hybridity, the Transnational Television Fairy Tale, and Cultural Forms.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 31, no. 1, 2017, pp. 24–43.

Butler, Charles. “Experimental Girls: Feminist and Transgender Discourses in Bill’s New Frock and Marvin Redpost: Is He a Girl?” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1, 2009, pp. 3–30.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 1993.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

Byers, Michele. “Who (the) Girls and Boys Are: Gender Nonconformity in Middle-Grade Fiction.” Girlhood Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2018, pp. 92–107.

Calhoun Davis, Erin. “Situating ‘Fluidity’: (Trans) Gender Identification and the Regulation of Gender Diversity.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2009, pp. 97–130.

Clark, Dorothy G. “J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: In and Out of Time.” Lion and the Unicorn: a Critical Journal of Children’s Literature, vol. 31, no. 1, 2007, pp. 80–85.

Cohoon, Lorinda B. “Transgressive Transformations: Representations of Maid Marian in Robin Hood Retellings.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 31, no. 3, 2007, pp. 209–231.

Coombs, Adam. “Queer Oedipal Drag in ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’ and ‘Baadasssss.’” African American Review, vol. 50, no. 1, 2017, pp. 41–58.

Crisp, Thomas, and Brittany Hiller. “‘Is This a Boy or a Girl?’: Rethinking Sex-Role Representation in Caldecott Medal-Winning Picturebooks, 1938–2011.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 42, no. 3, 2011, pp. 196–212.

Crisp, Thomas, and Brittany Hiller. “The Trouble with Rainbow Boys.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 39, no. 4, 2008, pp. 237–261.

Croft, Janet Brennan. “‘Auntie, What Ails Thee?": The Parzival Question in Orphan Black.” Mythlore, vol. 37, no. 2, 2019, pp. 117–140.

Culver, Stuart. “Growing Up in Oz.” American Literary History, vol. 4, no. 4, 1992, pp. 607–628.

Dallacqua, Ashley K. “Wondering About Rapunzel: Reading and Responding to Feminist Fairy Tales with Seventh Graders.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 50, no. 3, 2019, pp. 261–277.

Deszcz, Justyna. “Beyond the Disney Spell, or Escape into Pantoland.” Folklore, vol. 113, no. 1, 2002, pp. 83–87.

Dejean, Joan. Tender Geographies. Women and the Origins of the Novel in France. Columbia University Press, 1991.

DePalma, Renée. “Gay Penguins, Sissy Ducklings … and Beyond? Exploring Gender and Sexuality Diversity through Children’s Literature.” Discourse, vol. 37, no. 6, 2016, pp. 828–845.

Detloff, Madelyn. “Gender Please, Without the Gender Police: Rethinking Pain in Archetypal Narratives of Butch, Transgender, and FTM Masculinity.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 10, no. 1–2, 2006, pp. 87–105.

De Vido, Angelica. “‘I Want to Be a Macho Man’: Examining Rape Culture, Adolescent Female Sexuality, and the Destabilisation of Gender Binaries in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Gender Forum, An Internet Journal for Gender Studies, vol. 60, 2016.

Diamond, Fleur. “Beauty and the Beautiful Beast: Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga and the Quest for a Transgressive Female Desire.” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 26, no. 67, 2011, pp. 41–55.

Dillon,Tom. “‘Jerry Was Oscillating Badly’: Gender and Sexuality in New Worlds Magazine.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, 2018, pp. 161–176.

Duggan, Anne E. Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France. U of Delaware P, 2005.

Duggan, Anne E. “Women Subdued: The Abjectification and Purification of Female Characters in Perrault's Tales.” Romanic Review, vol. 99, no. 2, 2008, pp. 211–26.

Duggan, Anne E. “Feminine Genealogy, Matriarchy, and Utopia in the Fairy Tale of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy.” Neophilologus, vol. 82, no. 2, April 1998, pp. 199–208.

Duggan, Lisa. “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism.” Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, edited by Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson. Duke UP, 2002, pp. 174–194.

Dundes, Lauren, and Alan Dundes. “The Trident and the Fork: Disney’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ as a male construction of an Electral fantasy.” Psychoanalytic Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2000, pp. 117–130.

Dundes, Lauren, and Alan Dundes. “Young hero Simba defeats old villain Scar: Oedipus wrecks the Lyin’ King.” The Social Science Journal vol. 43, no. 3, 2006, pp. 479–485.

Dundes, Lauren. “Disney’s Modern Heroine Pocahontas: Revealing Age-Old Gender Stereotypes and Role Discontinuity under a Facade of Liberation.” The Social Science Journal, vol. 38, no. 3, 2001, pp. 353–365.

Dundes, Lauren. The Upshot on Princess Merida in Disney/Pixar’s Brave: Why the Tomboy Trajectory Is Off Target. Humanities, vol. 9, no. 3, 2020, pp. 83–96. doi:10.3390/h9030083.

England, Dawn Elizabeth, Lara Descartes, and Melissa A. Collier-Meek. “Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses.” Sex Roles, vol. 64, no. 7, 2011, pp. 555–567.

Evans, Tania. “Some Knights Are Dark and Full of Terror: The Queer Monstrous Feminine, Masculinity, and Violence in the Martinverse.” Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 66, no. 3, 2019, pp. 134–156.

Fan, Jason. Queering Disney animated films using a critical literacy Lens. Journal of LGBT Youth, vol. 16, no. 2, 2018, pp. 119–133.

Ferguson, Gary. “Early Modern Transitions: From Montaigne to Choisy.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 53, no. 1, 2013, pp. 145–157.

Flowerday, Kaelyn. “Learning to Read (Gender): Children’s Animation and the New Heterosexism.” Anthós, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 2014, pp. 6. doi:10.15760/anthos.2014.73.

Forrester, Kathleen. “Kinship and the Queer Perversions of Six-Dinner Sid and Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies: Imagine (Un)Doing Family.” Jeunesse, Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 8, no. 2, 2016, pp. 119–141.

Francis, Christina. “Playing with Gender in ‘Arthur, King of Time and Space.’” Arthuriana, vol. 20, no. 4, 2010, pp. 31–47.

Frasl, Beatrice. “Bright young women, sick of swimmin’, ready to … consume? The construction of postfeminist femininity in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.” European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2018, pp. 341–354. doi:10.1177/1350506818767709.

Fredrick, Candice, and Sam McBride. “Battling the Woman Warrior: Females and Combat in Tolkien and Lewis.” Mythlore, vol. 25, no. 3/4, 2007, pp. 29–42.

Ganim, Russell. “Fleur Rebelle, Fleur Royale: The Friendship of Lady Oscar and Marie Antoinette in The Rose of Versailles.” Neohelicon, vol. 46, no. 2, 2019, pp. 767–782.

Gavala, Dikaia. “Let It Go: Revising ‘The Princess Story’ in Disney’s Frozen.” Gramarye, vol. 15, 2019, pp. 67–79.

Gibson, Brian. “Falling for Innocence: Transchild Freedom Vs. Adult Judgment in Tomboy and Ma Vie En Rose.” Children’s Literature, vol. 44, no. 1, 2016, pp. 219–237.

Gillam, Ken, and Shannon R. Wooden. “Post-Princess Models of Gender: The New Man in Disney/Pixar”, Journal of popular Film and Television, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, pp. 2–8.

Gordon Ginzburg, Etti. “Queering the Victorian Nursery: Laura Richards’s ‘My Japanese Fan.’” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 49, no. 4, 2018, pp. 379–395.

Greenhill, Pauline. “‘The Snow Queen’: Queer Coding in Male Directors’ Films.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 29, no. 1, 2015, pp. 110–134.

Greenhill, Pauline and Diane Tye, editors. Unsettling Assumptions: Tradition, Gender, Drag, Logan: Utah State UP, 2014.

Greven, David. “The Fantastic Powers of the Other Sex: Male Mothers in Fantastic Fiction.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 14, no. 3, 2003, pp. 301–317.

Guest, Kristen. “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Resistance and Complicity in Matilda.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3, 2008, pp. 246–257.

Guild, Elizabeth. “‘Le Moyen de Faire de Cela Un Grand Homme’: The Abbe de Choisy and the Unauthorized Body of Representation.” Romanic Review, vol. 85, no. 2, 1994, pp. 179–190.

Haase, Donald. Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches, edited by Donald Haase. Wayne State UP, 2004.

Hannon, Patricia Ann. “Away from the story. A textual comparison of men and women writers of the fairy tale in seventeenth century France.” Dissertation. New York University, 1990.

Harjunen, Catarina. “Queer Perspectives on Erotic Human-Supernatural Encounters in Finland-Swedish Folk Legends.” Lambda Nordica, vol. 24, no. 1, 2019, pp. 46–66.

Harris, Joseph. Hidden Agendas: Cross-dressing in 17th-century France. Biblio17, Vol 156. Gunter Narr Verlag, 2005.

Hansen, Kathryn. “Making Women Visible: Gender and Race Cross-Dressing in the Parsi Theatre.” Theatre Journal, vol. 51, no. 2, 1999, pp. 127–147.

Herzog, Ricky. “Sissies, Dolls and Dancing: Children’s Literature and Gender Deviance in the Seventies.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 33, no. 1, 2009, pp. 60–76.

Hoffmann, Kathryn A. “Of Innocents and Hags. The Status of the Female in the Seventeenth Century Fairy Tales.” Cahiers du Dix-Septième VI, vol. 2, 1992, pp. 203–211.

Holmlund, Christine. “Pippi and Her Pals.” Cinema Journal, vol. 42, no. 2, 2003, pp. 3–24.

Holtzman, Dinah. “The Dangerous Book Four Boys: James Franco’s Psychosexual Artistic Explorations of Boyhood.” Thymos, vol. 7, no. 2, 2013, pp. 120–140.

Honda, Masuko, et al. “The Invalidation of Gender in Girls' Manga Today, with a Special Focus on ‘Nodame Cantabile.’” U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, vol. 38, 2010, pp. 12–24.

Hsieh, Ivy Haoyin, and Marylou M. Matoush. “Filial Daughter, Woman Warrior, or Identity-Seeking Fairytale Princess: Fostering Critical Awareness Through Mulan.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 43, no. 3, 2012, pp. 213–222.

Itmeizeh, Mahmoud J. “The Evolution of Gender Roles and Women's Linguistic Features in the Language of Disney.” Journal of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, vol. 36, 2017, pp. 29–38.

Jay, Gregory. “Queer Children and Representative Men: Harper Lee, Racial Liberalism, and the Dilemma of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’” American Literary History, vol. 27, no. 3, 2015, pp. 487–522.

Jeřábková, Edith, and Francis McKee. “The Princess Fainted on the Spot: On Ester Krumbachová’s Dark Tales.” Philosophia, vol. 10, no. 1, 2020, pp. 95–106.

Jones,Christine A. “Thoughts on ‘Heroinism’ in French Fairy Tales.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 27, no. 1, 2013, pp. 15–33.

Kapurchper, Katie. “Rapunzel Loves Merida: Melodramatic Expressions of Lesbian Girlhood and Teen Romance in Tangled, Brave, and Femslash.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 19, 2015, pp. 436–453.

Kapurchper, Katie. “Something Else Besides a Daughter?: Maternal Melodrama Meets Postfeminist Girlhood in Tangled and Brave.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 40, no. 1, 2016, pp. 39–61.

Key, Adam. “A Girl Worth Fighting For: A Rhetorical Critique of Disney Princess Mulan's Bisexuality.” Journal of Bisexuality, vol. 15, no. 2, 2015, pp. 268–286.

Kelso, Tony. “Still Trapped in the U.S. Media’s Closet: Representations of Gender-Variant, Pre-Adolescent Children.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 62, no. 8, 2015, pp. 1058–1097.

Kidd, Kenneth. “Queer Theory's Child and Children's Literature Studies.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 182–188.

Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens and Sarah Helene Schmidt. “Disney's Shifting Visions of Villainy from the 1990s to the 2010s: A Biocultural Analysis.” Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, vol. 3, no. 2, 2019, pp. 1–16.

Knoepflmacher, U. C. “Introduction: Literary Fairy Tales and the Value of Impurity.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 17, no. 1, 2003, pp. 15–36.

Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. “Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf: Querying Transgression, Seeking Trans/Formation.” Victorian Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 2018, pp. 55–67.

Lakshmi, Seetha, and Suma Aleya John. “The Myth of Normative Gender: Readings on Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit And Sexing The Cherry.” Language in India, vol. 18, no. 3, 2018, pp. 485–493.

Lepri, Chiara. “Education on Diversity. The Contribution of Early Childhood’s Literature.” Studi Sulla Formazione, vol. 22, no. 2, 2019, pp. 325–336.

Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín. “Children’s Literature: Sexual Identity, Gender, and Childhood.” Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies, Special issue on Children’s Literature: Changing Paradigms and Critical Perspectives in Ireland and Beyond, August 25, 2016. https://breac.nd.edu/articles/childrens-literature-sexual-identity-gender-and-childhood/

Liang, Yuanyuan. “Trauma Beneath the Mask: The Camp Aesthetic of Margaret Mahy’s Young Adult Fiction.” Journal of New Zealand Literature, vol. 38, no. 1, 2020, pp. 68–83.

Liggins, Emma. “Gendering the Spectral Encounter at the Fin de Siècle: Unspeakability in Vernon Lee‘s Supernatural Stories.” Gothic Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2013, pp. 37–52.

Limbach, Gwendolyn. “You the Man, Well, Sorta”: Gender Binaries and Liminality in Mulan, Diversity in Disney Films : Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability, edited by Johnson Cheu. McFarland & Company, 2013.

Liming, Sheila. “Romancing the Interstitial: Howe, Balzac, and Nineteenth-Century Legacies of Sexual Indeterminacy.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 72, no. 3, 2017, pp. 311–337.

Lugo-Lugo, Carmen R., and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo. “‘Look Out New World, Here We Come”? Race, Racialization, and Sexuality in Four Children’s Animated Films by Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks.” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2009, pp. 166–178.

Macaluso, Michael. “Postfeminist Masculinity: The New Disney Norm?” Social Sciences, vol. 7, no. 11, 2018, pp. 221–231. doi:10.3390/socsci7110221.

Matsuuchi, Ann. “‘Happily Ever After’: The Tragic Queer and Delany’s Comic Book Fairy Tale.” African American Review, vol. 48, no. 3, 2015, pp. 271–287.

McCabe, Janice, et al. “Gender In Twentieth-Century Children’s Books: Patterns of Disparity in Titles and Central Characters.” Gender & Society, vol. 25, no. 2, 2011, pp. 197–226.

McDermott, Shawna. “The Tomboy Tradition: Taming Adolescent Ambition from 1869 to 2018.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2, 2019, pp. 134–155.

McGuire, Riley. “Queer Children, Queer Futures: Navigating ‘Lifedeath’ in ‘The Hunger Games.’” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 48, no. 2, 2015, pp. 63–76.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications. Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Murphy, Kevin L. “Queering Heterosexuality: Rewriting Oedipal Structures in Lewis Nordan's Sugar Mecklin Stories.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 1, 2014, pp. 31–52.

Murray, Jessica. “A Zombie Apocalypse: Opening Representational Spaces for Alternative Constructions of Gender and Sexuality.” Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 29, no. 4, 2013, pp. 1–19.

Myers, Kristen. “‘Cowboy up!’: Non-Hegemonic Representations of Masculinity in Children’s Television Programming.” The Journal of Men’s Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 2012, pp. 125–143.

Orme, Jennifer. “Mouth to Mouth: Queer Desires in Emma Donoghue’s ‘Kissing the Witch.’” Marvels & Tales, vol. 24, no. 1, 2010, pp. 116–130.

Orme, Jennifer. “‘I’m sure it all wears off by midnight’: Prince Cinders and a Fairy’s Queer Invitation.” Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak. Wayne State UP, 2016, pp. 215–231.

Orme, Jennifer. “A Wolf’s Queer Invitation: David Kaplan’s Little Red Riding Hood.” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies. Special Issue Queer(ing) Fairy Tales, edited by Lewis C. Seifert., vol. 29, no. 1, 2015, pp. 87–109.

Pacheco, Derek. “‘Dwarves and Hobgoblins’: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gothic Children’s Literature, and A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys.” The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, vol. 38, no. 2, 2012, pp. 47–71.

Patterson G., and Leland G. Spencer. “What’s so funny about a snowman in a tiara? Exploring gender identity and gender nonconformity in children’s animated films.” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, 2017, pp. 73–93.

Perea, Katia. “Touching Queerness in Disney Films Dumbo and Lilo & Stitch.” Social Sciences, vol. 7, no. 11, 2018, pp. 225–236.

Pittman, L. Monique. “Dressing the Girl / Playing the Boy: ‘Twelfth Night’ Learns Soccer on the Set of ‘She's The Man.’” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 2, 2008, pp. 122–136.

Pittman, L. Monique. “‘There Lived in the Land of Oz Two Queerly Made Men’: Queer Utopianism and Antisocial Eroticism in L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 22, no. 2, 2008, pp. 217–239.

Pittman, L. Monique. “John R. Neill: Illustrator (and Author) of L. Frank Baum's Queer Oz.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 29, no. 1, 2015, pp. 64–86.

Potgieter, Liske and Zelda Potgieter. “Deconstructing Disney’s divas: a critique of the singing princess as filmic trope.” Acta Academica, vol. 48, no. 2, 2016, pp. 48–76.

Prusko, Rachel. “Queering the Reader in Peter and Wendy.” Jeunesse, Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 4, no. 2, 2012, pp. 107–106.

Pugh, Tison, and David L. Wallace. “Heteronormative Heroism and Queering the School Story in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3, 2006, pp. 260–281.

Pugh, Tison, and David L. Wallace. “The Queer Narrativity of the Hero’s Journey in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda Video Games.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 48, no. 2, 2018, pp. 225–251.

Putman, Amanda. “Mean Ladies: Transgendered Villains in Disney Films.” Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability, edited by Johnson Cheu. McFarland & Company, 2013.

Raynard, Sophie. La Seconde Préciosité. Floraison des conteuses de 1690 à 1756. Biblio 17, 130. Gunter Narr Verlag, 2002.

Raynard, Sophie. (trans. and ed.). The Teller’s Tale: Lives of the Classic Fairy-Tale Writers. SUNY Press, 2012.

Reisman, Mara. “Integrating Fantasy and Reality in Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.’” Rocky Mountain Review, vol. 65, no. 1, 2011, pp. 11–35.

Roberts, S. K. The female rescuer in Newbery fiction: Exploring the archetype of Mother. Research Connection in The ALAN (Assembly of Literature for Adolescents) Review, vol. 30, Fall 2002, pp. 47–53. doi:10.21061/alan.v30i1.a.9.

Robinson, Margaret. “Two-Spirit Identity in a Time of Gender Fluidity.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 67, no. 12, 2019, pp. 1675–1690. doi:10.1080/00918369.2019.1613853.

Rogers, Anna S. “Are Disney Characters ‘Frozen’ in Stereotypes? An Intersectional Analysis of Frozen.” Education, Sciences & Society, 2019, pp. 23–41. https://journals.francoangeli.it/index.php/ess/article/view/8427.

Rowan, Mary M. “Seventeenth-century French feminism: two opposing attitudes.” International Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 3, 1980, pp. 273–291.

Rowan, Mary M. “Crossing borders. Tales of the Abbé de Choisy.” Actes de La Vegas, edited by Marie-France Hilgar, Biblio 17, PFSCL 60, 1990, pp. 225–230.

Saito, Kumiko. “Magic, ‘Shōjo’, and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the Challenges of Changing Gender Identities in Japanese Society.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 73, no. 1, 2014, pp. 143–164.

Sasser, Tyler M. “‘No One Queens It Like Himself’: Performing Unconventional Boyhood in Historical Shakespearean Fiction.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 47, no. 1, 2016, pp. 50–65.

Sardella-Ayres, Dawn. “Rewriting and Re-Whiting The Little Colonel: Racial Anxieties, Tomboyism, and Lloyd Sherman.” Children’s Literature, vol. 47, no. 1, 2019, pp. 79–103.

Schiavi, Michael R. “A ‘Girlboy’s’ Own Story: Non-Masculine Narrativity in ‘Ma Vie En Rose’.” College Literature, vol. 31, no. 3, 2004, pp. 1–26.

Schmiesing, Ann. Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Wayne State UP, 2014.

Sciurba, Katie. “Flowers, Dancing, Dresses, and Dolls: Picture Book Representations of Gender-Variant Males.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 48, no. 3, 2017, pp. 276–293.

Seifert, Lewis Carl. “Queer Time in Charles Perrault’s ‘Sleeping Beauty.’” Marvels & Tales, vol. 29, no. 1, 2015, pp. 21–41.

Seifert, Lewis Carl. “Queer(Ing) Fairy Tales.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 29, no. 1, May 2015, pp. 15–20.

Seybold, Samantha and Massimo Rondolino. “Conforming beasts and compliant princesses: A radical appraisal of Disney’s 1990s Americana rhetoric.” Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art, vol. 7, no. 2, 2018, pp. 95–110.

Shen, Lisa Chu. “Femininity and Gender in Contemporary Chinese School Stories: The Case of Tomboy Dai An.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 50, no. 3, 2019, pp. 278–296.

Shimanoff, Susan B., et al. “Queering the Politics of Lambda Picture Book Finalists: Challenging Creeping Neoliberalism Through Curricular Innovations.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 59, no. 7, 2012, pp. 1005–1030.

Hipley, Heather E. “Fairies, Mermaids, Mothers, and Princesses: Sexual Difference and Gender Roles in Peter Pan.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality, vol. 13, no. 2, 2012, pp. 145–159.

Singh, Karan. “Androgynous Pariahs: Gender Transformations and Politics of Culture in the North Indian Folk Theater Svāṅg.” Asian Ethnology, vol. 78, no. 2, 2019, pp. 429–446.

Smith, Karina. “‘These Things Not Marked on Paper’: Creolisation, Affect and Tomboyism in Joan Anim-Addo’s ‘Janie, Cricketing’ Lady and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's ‘The Pirate’s Daughter.’” Feminist Review, vol. 104, 2013, pp. 119–137.

Smith, Michelle J., and Kristine Moruzi. “Vampires and Witches Go to School: Contemporary Young Adult Fiction, Gender, and the Gothic.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 49, no. 1, 2018, pp. 6–18.

Smith, Sandra Wilson. “Frontier Androgyny: An Archetypal Female Hero in The Adventures of Daniel Boone.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2010, pp. 269–286.

Solis, Santiago. “Snow White and the Seven ‘Dwarfs’-Queercripped.” Hypatia, vol. 22, no. 1, 2007, pp. 114–131.

Staveley, Helene. “Figuring Transition: Play, Performance, and Mimicry in Children’s Books by Thomas King, Mordecai Richler, and Margaret Atwood.” Jeunesse, Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 5, no. 1, 2013, pp. 84–107.

Stephens John. Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children’s Literature and Film. Routledge, 2002.

Stobie, Cheryl. “Fissures in Apartheid’s ‘Eden’: Representations of Bisexuality in ‘The Smell of Apples’ by Mark Behr.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 39, no. 1, 2008, pp. 70–86.

Streiff, Madeline and Lauren Dundes. “From Shapeshifter to Lava Monster: Gender Stereotypes in Disney’s Moana.” Social Sciences, vol. 6, no. 3, 2017, pp. 91–104.

Streiff, Madeline and Lauren Dundes. “Frozen in Time: How Disney Gender-Stereotypes Its Most Powerful Princess.” Social Sciences, vol. 6, no. 2, 2017, pp. 38–48.

Sweeney, Gael. “What Do You Want Me to Do? Dress in Drag and Do the Hula?” Timon and Pumbaa’s Alternative Lifestyle Dilemma in The Lion King. Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability, edited by Johnson Cheu. McFarland, 2013.

Taylor, Nathan. “U.S. Children’s Picture Books and the Homonormative Subject.” Journal of LGBT Youth, vol. 9, no. 2, 2012, pp. 136–152.

Towbin, Mia Adessa et al. “Images of Gender, Race, Age, and Sexual Orientation in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films.” Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, vol. 15, no. 4, 2004, pp. 19–44.

Trinquet, Charlotte. Le conte de fées français (1690–1700). Traditions italiennes et origines aristocratiques. Narr Verlag, 2012.

Trinquet, Charlotte. “Women-Soldiers’ Tales during Louis XIV’s War Conflicts.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 33, no. 1, Spring 2019, pp. 140–156.

Trinquet, Charlotte. “Travestissement, Ambiguïté Sexuelle et Homosexualité Dans Les Contes de Femmes-soldats de la Fin du XVIIe Siècle.” PFSCFL, vol. 81, 2014, pp. 2–17.

Trinquet, Charlotte. “Voix Clandestines dans les contes de fées, l’exemple de ‘Finette-Cendron’ de Madame d’Aulnoy.” Cahiers du Dix-septième: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. X, no. 2, 2006, pp. 65–82.

Tso, Anna Wing Bo. “Transgression in the Gender Representation in MacDonald’s Princess Books.” International Journal of Early Childhood, vol. 39, no. 2, 2007, pp. 11–21.

Turner, Kay. “At Home in the Realm of Enchantment: The Queer Enticements of the Grimms’ ‘Frau Holle.’” Marvels & Tales, vol. 29, no. 1, 2015, pp. 42–63.

Turner, Kay, and Greenhill Pauline. “Introduction: Once Upon a Queer Time.” Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms, edited by Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill. Detroit, 2012, pp. 1–24.

Veisland, Jorgen. “The Burnt Doll: The Dialectical Image and Gender Fluidity in Sandra Cisneros’ Short Story ‘Barbie-Q.’” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2018, pp. 270–273.

Verdier, Gabrielle. “Approaches to the Literary Fairy Tale: Question of Genre and Gender.” Actes du XXIIe Colloque de la NASSCFL, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (1–3 mars 1990), edited by Marie-France Hilgar. PFSCL 1991, pp. 141–146.

Walsh, Abigail S. “Representations of Gender-Diverse Characters in Adventure Time and Steven Universe,” Studies in Media and Communication, vol. 8, no. 2, 2020, pp. 61–69.

Walsh, Abigail, and Campbell Leaper. “A Content Analysis of Gender Representations in Preschool Children’s Television,” Mass Communication and Society, vol. 23, no. 3, 2020, pp. 331–355.

Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde. On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. The Noonday Press, 1994.

Weatherley, Gillian Avril. Avatars of Gendered Societal Constructs in Seventeenth-Century Contes de fees. University of Kansas. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2014, p. 3627502.

Williams, Keira V. “From Oz to Amazon Island: The Popular Evolution of American Matriarchalism.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 50, no. 5, 2017, pp. 1003–1023.

Wilson, Jennifer Louise. “Griboedov in Bed: Meyerhold's ‘Woe to Wit’ and the Staging of Sexual Mores in the NEP Era.” Pushkin Review, vol. 15, 2012, pp. 143–160.

Woltmann, Suzy. “‘Beneath It All Something as yet Unnamed Was Coming into Focus’: A Queer Reading of Malinda Lo’s Ash.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 34, no. 2, 2020, pp. 221–238.

Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg. “Posthumanities and Post-Textualities: Reading ‘The Raw Shark Texts’ and ‘Woman's World.’” Comparative Literature, vol. 63, no. 2, 2011, pp. 119–141.

Young, Joseph Rex. “Useful Little Men: George R. R. Martin’s Dwarfs as Grotesque Realists.” Mythlore, vol. 39, no. 137, 2020, pp. 77–95.

Zarranz García, Libe. “Diswomen strike back? The evolution of Disney’s femmes.” Atenea, vol. 27, no. 2, 2007, pp. 55–65.

Zigarovich, Jolene. “The Trans Legacy of Frankenstein.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2018, pp. 260–272.
Received: 2021-10-26
Published Online: 2021-12-30

© 2021 Sophie Raynard-Leroy and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys, published by De Gruyter

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Special Issue: Gender Fluidity in Early-Modern to Post-Modern Children’s Literature and Culture, edited by Sophie Raynard-Leroy and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys
  2. Gender Fluidity: From Euphemism to Pride
  3. 1. The Early-Modern Legacy of Gender Bending onto the 19th Century
  4. Gender, Class, and Human/Non-Human Fluidity in Théodore and Hippolyte Cogniards’ féerie, The White Cat
  5. Naughty Girl, or Not a Girl? Behavior and Becoming in Les Malheurs de Sophie
  6. Ah!Nana’s Fairytale Punk-Comics: From the Comtesse de Ségur’s “Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon” to Nicole Claveloux’s “Histoire de Blondasse, de Belle-Biche et Gros Chachat”
  7. A “Fabulous Monster” and a “Wonderful Boy:” Gender and the Elusive Victorian Child in the Alice Books and Peter Pan
  8. 2. Post-Modern Revisions of What Was Perhaps Too Modern Back Then
  9. Double Trouble: Gender Fluid Heroism in American Children’s Television
  10. The Queer Glow up of Hero-Sword Legacies in She-Ra, Korra, and Sailor Moon
  11. 3. Reflections on the Alternative Possibilities Offered by the Genre (Fairy Tales and Folklore) on issues of Gender and Sexuality
  12. The Transgender Imagination in Folk Narratives: The Case of ATU 514, “The Shift of Sex”
  13. A Tale of Two Trans Men: Transmasculine Identity and Trauma in Two Fairy-Tale Retellings
  14. Special Issue: Alberto Blest Gana at 100, edited by Patricia Vilches
  15. On Alberto Blest Gana
  16. Alberto Blest Gana: 100 Years Later
  17. New Problems of Realism in Martín Rivas
  18. Paris, the End of the Party in Alberto Blest Gana’s Los Trasplantados
  19. What About Realism? Alberto Blest Gana, Georg Lukács, and Their Chilean Readers
  20. Alberto Blest Gana and the Sensory Appeal of Wealth
  21. The Costumbrismo of Conflict in El ideal de un calavera
  22. Countering Acts of Dispossession through Alberto Blest Gana’s Mariluán
  23. Alberto Blest Gana: Four Chronicles and a Novel
  24. From the Newspaper Serial to the Novel (1853–1863): Mediation of the Periodical Press in the Foundation of Alberto Blest Gana’s Narrative Project
  25. Special Issue: Taiwanese Identity, edited by Briankle G. Chang and Jon Solomon - Part I
  26. The Pandemic and its Repercussions on Taiwan, its Identity, and Liberal Democracy
  27. From Taiwan New Cinema to Post-New Cinema: The Transition of Identity in Cape No. 7 and the Naming Issue of Post-New Cinema
  28. Regular Articles
  29. Friction in the Creative City
  30. The Impact of Image on Translation Decision-Making in Dubbing into Arabic – Premeditated Manipulation par Excellence: The Exodus Song as a Case Study
  31. God, Man, and Nature: Life for Reason and the Reason Behind the Universe – A Panentheistic Approach to Life of Pi
  32. The Revival of the Past: Privatizing Cultural Practices in the Festival Era
  33. “Riffraff” On the Waterfront: A Critical Analysis of Labor Imagery on the Imagined Docks of the Hollywood Dream Factory, 1934–1937
  34. “Thrice the brindled cat hath mew’d” – The Three Trials of William Hone
  35. Erratum
  36. Erratum to “‘Thrice the brindled cat hath mew’d’ – The Three Trials of William Hone”
https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0140
Creative Commons
BY 4.0

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Special Issue: Gender Fluidity in Early-Modern to Post-Modern Children’s Literature and Culture, edited by Sophie Raynard-Leroy and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys
  2. Gender Fluidity: From Euphemism to Pride
  3. 1. The Early-Modern Legacy of Gender Bending onto the 19th Century
  4. Gender, Class, and Human/Non-Human Fluidity in Théodore and Hippolyte Cogniards’ féerie, The White Cat
  5. Naughty Girl, or Not a Girl? Behavior and Becoming in Les Malheurs de Sophie
  6. Ah!Nana’s Fairytale Punk-Comics: From the Comtesse de Ségur’s “Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon” to Nicole Claveloux’s “Histoire de Blondasse, de Belle-Biche et Gros Chachat”
  7. A “Fabulous Monster” and a “Wonderful Boy:” Gender and the Elusive Victorian Child in the Alice Books and Peter Pan
  8. 2. Post-Modern Revisions of What Was Perhaps Too Modern Back Then
  9. Double Trouble: Gender Fluid Heroism in American Children’s Television
  10. The Queer Glow up of Hero-Sword Legacies in She-Ra, Korra, and Sailor Moon
  11. 3. Reflections on the Alternative Possibilities Offered by the Genre (Fairy Tales and Folklore) on issues of Gender and Sexuality
  12. The Transgender Imagination in Folk Narratives: The Case of ATU 514, “The Shift of Sex”
  13. A Tale of Two Trans Men: Transmasculine Identity and Trauma in Two Fairy-Tale Retellings
  14. Special Issue: Alberto Blest Gana at 100, edited by Patricia Vilches
  15. On Alberto Blest Gana
  16. Alberto Blest Gana: 100 Years Later
  17. New Problems of Realism in Martín Rivas
  18. Paris, the End of the Party in Alberto Blest Gana’s Los Trasplantados
  19. What About Realism? Alberto Blest Gana, Georg Lukács, and Their Chilean Readers
  20. Alberto Blest Gana and the Sensory Appeal of Wealth
  21. The Costumbrismo of Conflict in El ideal de un calavera
  22. Countering Acts of Dispossession through Alberto Blest Gana’s Mariluán
  23. Alberto Blest Gana: Four Chronicles and a Novel
  24. From the Newspaper Serial to the Novel (1853–1863): Mediation of the Periodical Press in the Foundation of Alberto Blest Gana’s Narrative Project
  25. Special Issue: Taiwanese Identity, edited by Briankle G. Chang and Jon Solomon - Part I
  26. The Pandemic and its Repercussions on Taiwan, its Identity, and Liberal Democracy
  27. From Taiwan New Cinema to Post-New Cinema: The Transition of Identity in Cape No. 7 and the Naming Issue of Post-New Cinema
  28. Regular Articles
  29. Friction in the Creative City
  30. The Impact of Image on Translation Decision-Making in Dubbing into Arabic – Premeditated Manipulation par Excellence: The Exodus Song as a Case Study
  31. God, Man, and Nature: Life for Reason and the Reason Behind the Universe – A Panentheistic Approach to Life of Pi
  32. The Revival of the Past: Privatizing Cultural Practices in the Festival Era
  33. “Riffraff” On the Waterfront: A Critical Analysis of Labor Imagery on the Imagined Docks of the Hollywood Dream Factory, 1934–1937
  34. “Thrice the brindled cat hath mew’d” – The Three Trials of William Hone
  35. Erratum
  36. Erratum to “‘Thrice the brindled cat hath mew’d’ – The Three Trials of William Hone”
Jetzt anmelden und 20% sparen
Institutioneller Zugang
Wie funktioniert Authentifizierung?
Haben Sie eine Idee, wie wir unsere Website verbessern können?
Bitte schreiben Sie uns.
© 2025 De Gruyter Brill
Heruntergeladen am 7.11.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/culture-2020-0140/html
Button zum nach oben scrollen