Tales for Fairies

Alba Morollon Diaz-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.

"Alba Morollon Diaz-Faes makes a much-needed and welcome contribution to fairy-tale studies! Historicizing English-language gay and queer retellings across media from the 1990s to the 2010s, this study highlights how these fairy tales activate queer wonder, repurpose queer monsters, and navigate the changing challenges of mainstream culture. Cristina Bacchilega, professor emerita, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and coauthor of Justice in 21st-Century Fairy Tales and the Power of Wonder An exquisite blend of sociohistorical criticism, queer theory, and close reading, Tales for Fairies pulls at the queer threads of fairy-tale history and examines closely the overlooked, explicitly queer retellings of recent decades in the strange and fluid genre of fairy tales. This provocative, fabulous book is an exciting addition to the nascent field of queer fairy-tale studies. Christy Williams, author of Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales and coeditor of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies (both Wayne State University Press) I have hoped for a book that might tackle the breadth of emergent queer fairy-tale creation, aided by the LGBTQIA rights movement and technological innovations. Finally, that book has arrived in Tales for Fairies. I am overjoyed! Not unlike a witch's potent brew, the right ingredients are poured into this concise, deftly written analysis by Diaz-Faes. She keenly historicizes contemporary queer fairy-tale projects of reclamation and revision and provides illuminating, highly creative, and politically potent examples from the queer counterpublics of international authors, artists, and fans working to reveal the fairy tale's always-ready queer potential. Just to name a few: Peter Cashorali's revolutionary 1990s anthologies of gay fairy tales for men; cartoonist Jose Rodolfo Loaiza Ontivero's queer Disney parodies; and Alexis Isabel Moncada's wildly popular X campaign, #GiveElsaAGirlfriend. Diaz-Faes's readings of these and many more recent incursions prove techno-capitalism to be a perverse playground for creatively subverting the demonization of difference. The princess is no longer asleep, nor is she following the straight path to crappy endings. The princess read Tales for Fairies, and she's headed to the drag ball. Kay Turner, coeditor of Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (Wayne State University Press)