Gender In Fairy Tales

With the survey of researches done on the topic of intertextuality and gender, the topic of this research is seen as not explored much in literature. This research aims to study the discourse on language and gender in fairy tales. Most of the contemporary fairy tales are criticized and explored as retellings of popular fairy tales that explore the gender in fairy tales. These writers (most of are feminists) wished to shed light on the images of women in literature. They wanted to exhibit female empowerment and independence in their works to build the foundation of female identity. However, in some works, they tend to be bias on their representations. They reversed gender roles: women as powerful and the men as weak. In this text, they tend
to portray men as the way that they were represented in previous works. As discussed in the essay of Kuykendal and Sturm, ‘We Said Feminist Fairy Tales, Not Fractured Fairy Tales! The Construction of the Feminist Fairy Tale: Female Agency over Role Reversal’ these “feminists” are being one-sided on representing men that they are perpetuating different image of men and women to children as their audiences. Contrary to their desire to build foundation to female identity, younger audiences cannot emulate to the female protagonists. Unlike to these texts, this research aims to be different. This research will study on the subversion of gender representations in the selected short stories of Dean Francis Alfar. The purpose of this study is to have better understanding on gender portrayals. The objective of this research is to study on the subversion and transformation of images of women and men in fairy tales.