Working Group Coordinators
Anne Duggan, Wayne State University
a.duggan@wayne.edu
Fanny Marchaisse, Northwestern University
fannymarchaisse2023@u.northwestern.edu
In the history of French and Francophone fairy tales, there are strong tendencies of gender and other forms of fluidity that challenge gender binaries as well as those underpinning human vs. non-human animals, beings vs. things, nature vs. culture, etc. In the 1690s cross-dressing and other forms of metamorphosis often challenged normative models of gender and sexuality and supported egalitarian relations between women and men; authors of fantastic tales explored queer relations between humans and things within unstable universes, neither fully fictional nor fully realistic. In the nineteenth century, fairy tales were rewritten in ways that often blurred the boundaries between imagined, magical worlds and “real,” historical ones. Our group will explore the many forms of fluidity—between human and non-human, feminine and masculine, the real and the imaginary—found within the French and Francophone fairy-tale traditions.