Gender Swapped Fairy Tales: unsurprisingly, princesses are just as good as princes at finding their way through forests
Aimed at gender-conscious parents, Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett’s Gender Swapped Fairy Tales aims to raise awareness of the complex associations of gender
It was a fairy tale of a year, 2020, meaning that around the world, many of us have been sealed in our towers behind increasingly forbidding forests – though in this case the (vaccination) needle is expected to prove to be the liberator rather than Sleeping Beauty’s imprisoning agent.
It was also a fairy tale in that the world’s stories were told in multiple versions, many with unreliable or disputed origins. The world’s superpowers and swarms on social media wrestled to control the narrative. The most horrifyingly apt phrase of the century may be “alternative facts”.
Here we’ll stick to the less appalling “alternative fictions” of fairy tales: fate, enchantments, morphological transformation, the emotions of junior royals.
This may be your scenario: it’s bedtime for your child – largely unchanged by the viral wolves floating in the air, clinging to door handles and exercising the minds of hereditary and non-hereditary leaders. Over the past year this ritual has blown out into an epic negotiation. Your commitment now stands at reading two stories plus telling one you invent on the spot.
