The paper examines how the restoration of law and order and the celebration of a dominant discourse of physical beauty and prowess in a fairytale entail the death of the ‘atypical.’ It discusses why the death or defeat of the ‘atypical’ not only legitimizes violence on the ‘Other’, but enables a narrative of love and union through a grammar that is exclusionary, stereotypical, and egotistical and imbued in biopolitical codification of sexual identity.
Feminist and queer rethinking of fairytales by Olga Broumas, Leslie Feinberg, and Jeanette Winterson debunks the normalizing motives that shape the ending of these stories with a “happily ever after.” Social ideals are instilled in a child’s mind through the deployment of normative temporality and heteronormal bonding, which have at their heart notions of stability and eternal happiness. Jack Halberstam’s concept of queer temporality challenges the depiction of the fairytale heroine as a finger-puppet at the hands of a planned future and lacking human agency and choice. The figures of the monster, gnome, and other atypical beings are introduced to disrupt smooth narrativity and blow up the significance of the hero's journey towards a wishful idyll.
The paper re-reads the 'moral’ aspects of the fairytale to explain how they establish standard codes of performance through a guarded, suspicious, and inimical treatment of the ‘unfamiliar.’ It leads to the argument that the fairy tale’s narrative progression through eliminating the 'Other' validates modern global predicaments, such as classism and racism.

Authors:
Sarbani Banerjee, Indian Institute of Technology, India

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Sarbani Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT, Roorkee, INDIA.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule

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