Gender Variance in Fairy Tales

I really wanted to include some gender variance in my stories, something outside a binary model. But most of the stories are in a pseudo-historical setting, and one is from a non-western culture, so I was wary of trying to overlay modern western queer identities. It's one of those tricky problem solving challenges you get as a writer, only this one is all wrapped up in the fraught world of identity politics, as well as my own personal experiences of my identity. So it's got a tasty topping made from stress fruit.

A friend linked me to an article called 'Gender Variance in Edo Period Japan,' by Marie Kudo, which I found a really useful insight into a third gender identity within Edo Japan. I've used some of the information in that story in my Kitsune story, 'Fox Spirit', which is a retelling of a traditional Japanese folk story, 'On a Contest Between Women of Extraordinary Strength'. Even though I can't straight up write a trans character in that setting, it still feels empowering to write a character that doesn't fit into a binary model of gender. And, as a trans writer, that's important to me. It's also probably one of the most stressful things I've tried to do as a writer. I have an enormous qualifying paragraph at the start. I write this blog with the expectation the internet will find me wanting, and some sort of identity criminal. But I've tried, in good faith, to do something that's important to me. Internet lynch mobs make this a terrifying time to take risks as an artist, but I've done my best, and that's all I could do.

Feminist Fairy Tale Erotica

My book of erotic feminist fairy tales is free today and tomorrow.

Here's the blurb:

Into the Wild Wood: Erotic Feminist Fairy Tales

A collection of six feminist fairy tales with an erotic lesbian twist. From retellings of tradition tales, to an original story based on traditional Irish and Welsh mythology and fairy lore, this collection aims to celebrate love between women, and take a wry poke at traditional fairy tale themes and motifs. Something for the head and for the heart.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019BH7988?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B019BH7988?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

Fairy Tales Live on Amazon

My collection of erotic feminist fairy tales, Into the Wild Wood, has gone live on Amazon today. There'll be a free promo tomorrow and the next day.

You can find it here.

US: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019BH7988?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B019BH7988?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

Also available in other areas.

Fairy Tales: Female Monsters

I want to talk about subverting the idea of female monsters in fairy tales and other writing. I don’t want to get too bogged down here in theory about the monstrous feminine, because other people have already written about that, and better than I can here (e.g. Barbara Creed, Julia Kristeva, Gilbert and Gubar). This is more of a practical pondering about how to explore these ideas in art.

There are two main types of monstrous females in fairy stories: outright monsters of the mythical variety and crones (or witches). Fairy tales are full of primal fears, and if we look, it seems a fair few of those primal fears are around women and female entities. Some of them might be connected with physical fear of sex and death, and some with the fear of female knowledge and power. In the original versions of many fairy stories, the evil stepmothers that are rife are quite often evil mothers. So, for feminist retellings, I felt that subverting the whole idea of female monsters was important and powerful.

One of the stories I looked at was ‘Jorinda and Jorindel’, a lesser known story in the Grimm collection. In that story, there is an evil, shape-shifting fairy who steals young maidens and turns them into birds, locking them up in her castle forever. Their crime? Having been foolish enough to venture into the wild wood. I found this fairy pretty fascinating, with her shape-shifting and her fiery eyes, and her insatiable appetite for maiden capturing. So, rather than have some bloke come along and defeat her, I wondered what would happen if Jorinda and the fairy got together. What could they learn? What happens to a young woman if, rather than fearing the freaky fairy, she gets it on with her? I like to think the world wouldn’t end, but rather, both of them would come out having grown as people/freaky fairies. So that’s what I wrote.

If we’re to overcome fear, embrace growth, self-knowledge, and sex, then another way to do that is for our heroines to embody that monstrousness and fear, and still prosper and know love. In ‘Red Riding Hood’, the woods are full of danger, and the wolf represents our fears. But what if Red, the young innocent of the tale, and the wolf are combined? That struck me as a powerful way to challenge and interrupt some assumptions and taboos.

In my stories, I embrace monsters, often quite literally. Love yourself a monster, even if the monster is in you.

Fairy Tales: Women as Allies and Lovers

 

In fairy stories, as in a lot of stories, women are often pitched against each other. So one thing I’ve thought about a lot is portraying women as allies, and as lovers. In some of my fairy stories, I’ve just removed the male characters completely, and let the women get on with helping each other, loving each other and saving each other, or themselves. It’s not a matter of everyone holding one another’s hand and being lovely all the time. I still want to retain the darkness essential to fairy tales. The women have hopes, dreams and desires of their own. But often, those can be better achieved by working with other women, and not against them.

‘Snow White’ was one of the stories I really wanted to pick apart in this way. The two main female characters, Snow and the Queen, are pitched against each other, but their battles are defined by the men in the story. The King (Snow’s father, the Queen’s husband) defines a lot of what drives the story: the women’s relationship, the terms of what is beautiful, the relations of power. And the problems are resolved by a prince at the end. The prince had to go, obviously. None of the women in my stories need saving by men. So he didn’t even make it into the story. Then the women need their own aims and desires. The King’s still in the story, but he has to go too. So Snow and the Queen must redefine their own relationship, their aims, their conception of beauty, and then they need to redefine the relations of power. Toppling a patriarch seemed like a good way to kick the collection off.

I’ve thrown out the idea that women must be antagonists. I’ve embraced the idea that friendship and love between women can be both empowering, enlightening and healing.

I want friendship and love between women to be a source of power and magic in my stories, a source of self-discovery and growth. Not all the love with last. Not all the love will be the reason for the happily ever after, but it will help the main character along the path to defining their own happily ever after, and that’s the important thing.

Fairy Tales: The Wild Wood

I’ve been working on some feminist erotic retellings of traditional fairy tales about women who love women (and sometimes fairies and shape-shifters and other creatures).

This is my blog to talk about the ideas I’ve explored while writing them. First up: the wild wood.

I’m calling the collection Into the Wild Wood because woods reoccur so many times in fairy stories. They are the places we much not stray, for fear of wolves or bad spirits or monstrous feminine creatures (of which more later), for fear of discovering things we ought not and learning to stick to the path set by our parents. Forest even spring up, unbidden, invading safe interior spaces, as in ‘Sleeping Beauty’. But in subverting the wild wood, and celebrating love and sex, woods have the potential to become a site of exploration, curiosity, adventure, self-discovery and possibility.

When writing my stories, I want the wild wood to keep its wildness, and even some of its danger, because that sort of wood has much more erotic potential. Writing fairy stories that are over-sanitised is impossible—they are stories defined by the leaking all over of a particularly gothic sort of desire. If they’re not, then they’re not really fairy tales at all. But I’m reclaiming the wild wood for all those good things too: for sexual adventure and self-realisation, and a whole world of possibilities.

Early Inspiration

The Practical Princess and other Liberating Fairy Tales by Jay Williams. Very early inspiration for my current writing project. My mum read this to me when I was a child.