Tales for Fairies

A groundbreaking exploration of how classic fairy tales have been transformed to illuminate and celebrate queer identities.

This scholarly account provides a trailblazing examination of how contemporary authors, artists, and creators have reclaimed the fairy tale for queer audiences. Alba Morollón Díaz-Faes examines the queer threads in classic fairy tales—like those in the works of Giambattista Basile, the Brothers Grimm, and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy—while tracing how queer communities have reshaped these stories to reflect changing social and political realities from the 1990s to the present. This comprehensive study historicizes three periods of queer transformation of the fairy tale: the first wave of fairy-tale publications for a predominantly gay male readership in the 1990s, a second wave in the 2000s that navigated queer politics through nuanced tales of monstrosity and heroism; and a third wave in the 2010s of online queer communities circulating creative contestations to Disney’s fairy tales. With case studies from film to text to social media, Díaz-Faes demonstrates how the inherent fluidity in fairy tales allows for the amplification of queer voices and experiences. Ultimately, Tales for Fairies not only reveals the long-standing compatibility between queerness and the fairy tale but also charts an evolving landscape where imagination, activism, and retelling intersect to create a vibrant tradition of queer enchantment.

Author Biography

Alba Morollón Díaz-Faes is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at the NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal. She has been a visiting scholar at Brown University and Wayne State University. Her work is at the intersection of fairy tales, queer studies, cultural studies, and contemporary literature in English.