"Erase de nuevo una princesa: las reescrituras feministas de cuentos de hadas de la España del tercer milenio"

Abstract

In this project, I examine the renewed interest in recent Spanish literature and cinema in the feminist rewriting of fairy tales, identifying the social circumstances for its reemergence. As a genre, the fairy tale exhibits a strong potential for subversion due to its propensity for narrative or/and political manipulation. In the context of Peninsular literature, especially since the Francoist period, this genre became associated with several female authors that opposed the official rhetoric through their feminist rewritings of fairy tales. However, after 25 years of democracy and a supposed advancement towards gender equality in Spain, the strong reemergence of the rewriting of fairy tales is especially significant. My purpose in this project is precisely to offer a broader analysis and characterization of this complex cultural phenomenon that aims at denouncing the disadvantaged social situation of women in the globalized Spanish reality of the new millennium. My focus of study is a wide range of literary and cinematic revisitations/rewritings of fairy tales, produced by both men and women, that explore four main topics within the wider context of globalization: precarious labour conditions and work for women, universal standards of beauty for women, gender violence, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Through the analysis of the works I have selected, I confirm a renewed interest in the feminist rewriting of fairy tales in the last fifteen years in Spain and I prove that these revisions do not merely reproduce patterns of previous periods but constitute a distinctive manifestation: the anti-fairy tale. The Spanish anti-fairy tale of the new milennium is defined by three basic peculiarities: the recurrent presentation of heroines of limited agency, the impossibility of a true happy ending, and the exaltation of females solidarity as an alternative mode of resistance (a novelty in the Spanish tradition of the genre).