Jennifer Orme

Bio: Jennifer Orme is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Queer & Queer theory. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 3 publications receiving 54 citations.

Mouth to Mouth: Queer Desires in Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch

Abstract: Exemplifying the intertextuality of what Stephen Benson has called "postCarter Generation" fairy tales, Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997) can be seen to "re-engage contemporaneously with an already multilayered polyphony, adding a further critical layer to the plurality" of the genre (Makinen 151). Kissing the Witch consists of twelve revisions of "classic" literary fairy tales from Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, and one final "new" story.1 Each tale recounts the trials of an innocent persecuted heroine figure based upon well-known characters such as Cinderella, Snow White, or the Little Mermaid. The narrator in each case is the character as an older, wiser self. Most of these heroines come to a kind of awakening to their own desires and experience a personal transformation with the help of a (usually older) female character - often the fairy godmother or wicked fairy/stepmother/witch transformed from their pre-texts into caring mentor figures. When she reaches the end of her telling, each narrator turns to this character and asks to hear a tale. On the page following the conclusion of each tale, set off in a framing border, italicized, and centered on the page, are variations of the following lines that follow the narration of the first tale, "The Tale of the Shoe": In the morning 1 asked Who were you Before you walked into my kitchen And she said, Will I tell you my own story? It is a tale of a bird. (Donoghue 9) For each successive tale the time and place of the first line, the meeting of the third, and the final line, which becomes the title of the next story, alter appropriately to make specific links between the narrations that precede and follow it. These interstitial moments work as an internal structural-framing device that provides a formula for the passing on of the storytelling duty, continuity between the tales, and cohesion for the book as a whole. Because of its recursive structure, the proliferation and staged orality of its voices, and its overt representation of multiple types of female desires, Kissing the Witch is a particularly complex text to read from any perspective. It is one such perspective - queer reading - that I will attempt here, on the grounds of an apposite match of text and critical approach. The desires encoded in the stories are as varied as the tellers themselves. They include same-sex sexual desire between women, heterosexual desire of women for men, desires for autonomy and freedom, and desires for individual subjectivity, for belonging, and for knowledge. Kissing the Witch can unreservedly be called a feminist text, but as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick makes clear in Epistemology of the Closet, feminism and the study of sexuality are not coextensive - that is, "gender and sexuality represent two analytic axes that may productively be imagined as being distinct from one another as, say, gender and class, or class and race" (30). Part of this productive distinction makes intelligible the characterization of Kissing the Witch as feminist text but not necessarily as queer text. While it does represent various women's struggles for autonomy in heteropatriarchal culture, it does not attempt to conflate and then redress sexual and gendered hierarchies by merely presenting one or two universalized lesbian characters in opposition to heteronormative desire. Instead, each tale tells of the different complex and contingent desires of its female protagonists, and it is in the reader's approach to these desires and the book's structure that a queer reading can be produced, albeit far from automatically. In fact, Kissing the Witch frustrates not only hegemonic patriarchal discourses and normative desires, but also the desires of the critic who wishes to describe its structure and themes in a tidy package. This structure is not amenable to diagramming, and all that can be said consistently of the stories-except the last, original tale - is that they reimagine some of the best-known fairy tales; that all of the narrators are women, except when they are birds or horse skulls; and that each of them learns something from the figure to whom she passes on the narration of the next tale. …

Narrative Desire and Disobedience in Pan's Labyrinth

Abstract: In an early scene in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, Carmen, the very pregnant mother of the protagonist, Ofelia, takes a book of fairy stories from Ofelia's hands and says, "I don't understand why you had to bring so many books, Ofelia. Fairy tales, you're a bit too old to be filling your head with such nonsense."1 As soon as the words pass her lips, Carmen feels a sudden need to vomit. And thus an important theme of the film is presented as a warning: rejecting fairy tales will make you barf. While I raise this warning as a joke, the importance of story and storytelling to Pan's Labyrinth is no joking matter. Attention to story is paramount in this film, and not as a panacea for the hardships of "real" life; the relationship between characters and various types of narrative is key to survival, both of the stories themselves and of the characters who tell them. This paper asks how the narrative desires of the characters interact at the level of story ("what" is being told) and how the desires at work in the narrative itself play out at the level of discourse ("how" a story is told - in cinematic texts in terms of miseen-scene and editing). Key to my reading of Pan's Labyrinth is the notion of disobedience: the refusal of characters to submit to the narrative desires of others at their own expense as well as the disobethence of the film itself to satisfy audience desires and conventional generic expectations. In this reading the fairy tale is the vehicle through which the film not only problematizes and resists reductive and regulatory discourses of particular characters within the text but also challenges audiences and critics who may be tempted to produce reductive readings or employ totalizing textual theories. Pan's Labyrinth is an original cinematic fairy tale that makes clear visual and verbal references to oral, literary, and cinematic fairy-tale traditions. In its intertextual references Pan's Labyrinth announces its fealty to the fairy tale in the alignment of its heroine with well-known fairy-tale heroines like Snow White, Lewis Carroll's Alice (Alice in Wonderland 1865), and Dorothy of MGM's The Wizard of Oz (1939). Ofelia's connections to these characters is particularly apparent in her appearance: her black hair, white skin, and red lips; the dress and pinafore her mother gives her; and the red shoes she taps at the end of the film. Intertextual references also contribute to the hybrid nature of this particular text, which employs familiar imagery, plot structures, and character types not only from fairy tales but also from other genres such as the period political drama, horror, and dark fantasy. Thus, Pan's Labyrinth's hybrid nature itself constitutes a form of disobethence to audience expectations of each of these genres by combining genres that are normally distinct. Also notable are the "disobedient" or unconventional choices Guillermo del Toro made as the writer, director, and producer of the film and which he remarks upon in his extradiegetic voice-over commentary on the DVD.2 Disobedience is an important factor in fairy tales. So much so that Vladimir Propp notes "interdiction" and "violation" of the interdiction as functions 2 and 3 in Morphology of the Folktale. Indeed, it is often a specific disobethent act that sets the tale in motion or continues it on its trajectory: Snow White disobeys the dwarves and answers the door to the witch; Dorothy runs away from the farm; Alice leaves her sister to chase the white rabbit. In Pan's Labyrinth disobethence is a primary theme that is coded as positive, and even essential to survival. And, I would like to argue, disobethence does not function only as a theme in Pan's Labyrinth, but it also can be found at the level of discourse, and it is closely related to narrative desires. Narrative Desire Discussions of narrative desire and the dynamics of reading pleasure are most often inflected by psychoanalysis, as shown in Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot and Teresa de Lauretis's Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, and Cinema, both published in 1984. …

A Wolf's Queer Invitation: David Kaplan's Little Red Riding Hood and Queer Possibility

Abstract: The concept of queer invitation is explored in this reading of David Kaplan’s short film Little Red Riding Hood (1997). I propose that queer reading is activated by the acceptance of the queer invitation initiated primarily by the wolf figure in the film. This invitation to queer reading demands the suspension of the culturally dominant versions and interpretations of the tale by the Grimms and Perrault and activates gay cultural knowledges of celebrity intertexts in their stead. The suspension of “what everybody knows” about the tale and the wolf figure in particular opens space for a repositioning of the wolf-man through the representation of the wolf but also through the relationships between the cinematic visual, verbal, and musical channels and extratextual references to Vaslav Nijinsky and Quentin Crisp. Although offering a queer reading, I do not attempt to offer a template for queer reading of fairy tales; rather, I suggest that situated and specialized cultural knowledges are integral to queer reading and are therefore not available to, or accepted by, all audience members at all times.

The Queer Art of Failure

Abstract: Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure sets itself the task of ‘dismantl[ing] the logics of success and failure with which we currently live’ (2011: 2). To do so it constructs what Halberstam calls a ‘silly archive’, which ranges from the animated cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants to Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović’s performance art to Elfride Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. Failure, for Halberstam, is not to be avoided, as it offers insights, ways of being, forms of politics and paradigms of resistance to current hegemonies. Working within the realm of queer theory and cultural studies, the book strangely echoes the 1970s sentiments of punk refusal as well as the global gay liberationists’ call for the invention of revolutionary sexualities outside of familial relations. Its dismantling of failure aims to show how winning is currently predicated upon losers. The inequitable neo-liberal ideologies that constitute today’s winners and losers relies on a basic assumption: those who lose did not work hard enough and thus deserve their fate. Halberstam asks us to consider the justice in winning in a global economy whose winners – the 1 per cent – do take all, leave very little for the rest of us, and next to nothing for those at the bottom end of the economic hierarchy. With ‘low theory’, an approach adapted from Stuart Hall’s reading of Antonio Gramsci, Halberstam brings together an eccentric array of sources. Low theory, for Halberstam, aims broadly and looks to arrive at counter-hegemonic options that are widely accessible. He defines low theory as less beholden to a particular telos and, again citing Hall, sees it ‘not as an end onto itself but “a detour en route to something else”’ (Halberstam 2011: 15). In a book about failure, it follows that Halberstam envisions low theory as a means to eschew goal-oriented politics and social theories. It is ‘open’ to ‘unpredictable outcomes’ and is ‘adaptable, shifting, and flexible’ (2011: 16). Halberstam predicates his low theory on what Hall describes as Gramsci’s ‘open’ Marxism. According to Hall, Gramsci’s theories were derived from the application of Marxist ideas to the real political problems that he faced in life, not from a deterministic application of theory in service of a teleological political project. Halberstam inserts himself into this logic by envisioning an ‘open pedagogy’ that is similarly amenable to questioning, that is bottom-up in its perspective and that ‘detaches itself from prescriptive methods, fixed logics, and epistemes’; instead, it ‘orients us toward problem-solving knowledge or social visions of radical justice’ (2011: 16–17). A large part of Halberstam’s silly archive is animated and stopmotion movies of the past decade, designed, made and marketed for mass audiences, mainly comprising children. Halberstam calls these movies ‘Pixarvolt’, finding in the works of Pixar and DreamWorks recipes for collective rebellion against capitalist economies and power and, in short, a ‘revolt’ against the status quos of neo-liberal humanism. These films, Halberstam argues, are made for children, who he sees as kinds of failed subjects, people for whom the world is not designed, who are clumsy and frustrated with various forms of authority, who are ready and willing to view the world in new ways, and for whom a revolution is a promising option. In these films, Halberstam sees ‘a rich technological field for rethinking collectivities, transformation, identification, animality, and posthumanity’ (2011: 174). He notes that Pixarvolt’s plots usually revolve around a struggle between human and non-human creatures in relationships that ‘resemble what used to be called “class struggle,” and they offer numerous scenarios of revolt and alternatives to grim, mechanical, industrial cycles of production and consumption’ (Halberstam 2011: 29). Pixarvolt films also focus on escapes from captivity that culminate in utopian dreams of freedom, elements in which he finds neither childishness nor a trajectory towards adult freedom but the dreams and means of social transformation. Key to Halberstam’s analysis is the counter-intuitive connections he argues the films create between communitarian revolt and queer forms of embodiment. Pixarvolt films, Halberstam argues, can provide new modes of thinking and new models of family, parenting and sociality. ‘While many Marxist scholars have characterized and dismissed queer politics as “body politics,”’ Halberstam argues, ‘these films recognize that alternative forms of embodiment and desire are central to the struggle against corporate domination’ (2011: 29). Halberstam concedes that there are no guarantees that animated

Narrative space and spatial transference in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimmʼs fairy tales

Abstract: Owing to the lack of concrete information provided by the narratives and the genreʼs unspecified setting, narrative space in fairy tales has been largely overlooked or dismissed as an inactive background for the action. Research which has considered this topic typically views it in terms of its symbolic potential, studying space in order to learn about other narrative elements (e.g. characters) or the implied meanings of the texts. This dissertation views narrative space as a concrete, material aspect of the narrative which is significant in itself. The main research question posed in the dissertation is: what do fairy tales tell us about narrative space and what does narrative space tell us about fairy tales? The main aim of the dissertation is therefore twofold: first, it examines how narrative space is structured in fairy tales and how the fairy tale conveys space-related information; second, it asks whether there is anything about the traits and structure of fairy-tale space that can be seen as genre-specific, i.e. that sets the fairy tale apart from other short prose narrative genres. The research is based on a textual analysis of the English translation of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimmʼs collection Kinder- und Hausmarchen (Childrenʼs and Household Tales, 1857). While its primary focus is on fairy tales, the dissertation also considers other genres included in the collection (animal tales, legends, religious tales, etc.). The research combines the knowledge produced within fairy-tale scholarship (folklore and literature studies) with the methodological tools of narratology. By considering narrative space and spatial transference, the dissertation aims to prompt a reconsideration of the fairy-tale genre and its definitions. One of its key findings is therefore a revised definition of the fairy tale as a genre which encompasses two domains – the magical and the non-magical – separated by a firm boundary, which must be crossed in the course of the story. What sets this interdomain boundary apart is the fact that it can be crossed from both sides, but only temporarily and only if certain conditions are met. The examination of genres through the prism of the domain has led to a reconsideration of our initial genre classification and prompted the conclusion that aetiological tales, Schwank tales, and didactic tales, which were initially listed as independent genres, are modes (subgenres) rather than genres. The thesis also shows that fairy-tale space is dynamic and relational, and that the lack of explicit spatial information should not be seen as an indication of the insignificance of space, but rather an expression of the genreʼs stylistic parsimony. Although the findings are based on the study of the Grimmsʼ fairy tales, the dissertation aims to provide an analytical framework that is applicable to other fairy-tale corpora.

Geographic enchantments : the trickster and crone in contemporary fairy tales and storytelling

Abstract: or metaphoric representations of place and space; reconfigurations of place to address nonlinear perceptions of place and space; the play of scale, borders, and symbols; and the cartography of concepts (e.g. identity) rather than physical places (ibid 40). Collage proved particularly useful in a study of the varied textures of Panama City—a city which is “ensconced and revealed in multiple layers” (ibid 550; see figure 2). Here, collages served both as lively orientating devices in the final research output (guiding the reader through the research booklet), and to give “a physical ... as well as a subjective, lived space sense of place” to the mapping practices of research (ibid). It proved a particularly appropriate medium for evoking the confusion of the researcher as “an outsider observing the community” (ibid), and the confusion of the city spaces. Finally, collage was able to compel a different, more attentive way of looking, that switches between the general (the collage as a flattened ‘image’) and the particular (details of texture, flashes of the underlying map, and photographic details of the city) (ibid). images or other media over a surface, to give increased density and texture. Both collage and montage are ‘disruptive’ media, however whilst in montage “reality seems to stutter” (Doel and Clarke 2007:899), allowing us to insert critique in the ‘gaps’ (e.g. Dittmer 2010), collage “emphasizes the diversity and fragmentation of [experience]” (Rose et al. 2009:2103). 138 Powell (2010:539-40) comments on these conventions: “typically maps are thought of, and used, as a directional tool, a graphic means of representing places that are held to particular conventions of scale, scope, symbol, and legend”—in short they act as a geophysical, utilitarian “orientation device.” 139 This includes social mapping (e.g. Cairns et al. 1995; Serriere 2010), concept mapping (e.g. Novack and Gowan 1996; Prosser 2008), and cognitive mapping (Lynch 1960; Seyer-Ochi 2006). See Powell (2010:540) for more detail on each of these forms of mapping, and on the cross-disciplinary and academic-public collaborations of this new “visual genre” of mapping.

Wondrous transformations: rereading and rewriting wonder in contemporary anglophone and francophone fairy tales

Abstract: This thesis compares contemporary anglophone and francophone rewritings of traditional fairy tales for adults. Examining material dating from the 1990s to the present, including novels, novellas, short stories, comics, televisual and filmic adaptations, this thesis argues that while the revisions studied share similar themes and have comparable aims, the methods for inducing wonder (where wonder is defined as the effect produced by the text rather than simply its magical contents) are diametrically opposed, and it is this opposition that characterises the difference between the two types of rewriting. While they all engage with the hybridity of the fairy-tale genre, the anglophone works studied tend to question traditional narratives by keeping the fantasy setting, while francophone works debunk the tales not only in relation to questions of content, but also aesthetics. Through theoretical, historical, and cultural contextualisation, along with close readings of the texts, this thesis aims to demonstrate the existence of this francophone/anglophone divide and to explain how and why the authors in each tradition tend to adopt such different views while rewriting similar material. This division is the guiding thread of the thesis and also functions as a springboard to explore other concepts such as genre hybridity, reader-response, and feminism. The thesis is divided into two parts; the first three chapters work as an in-depth literature review: after examining, in chapters one and two, the historical and contemporary cultural field in which these works were created, chapter three examines theories of fantasy and genre hybridity. The second part of the thesis consists of textual studies and comparisons between francophone and anglophone material and is built on three different approaches. The first (chapter four) looks at selected texts in relation to questions of form, studying the process of world building and world creation enacted when authors combine and rewrite several fairy tales in a single narrative world. The second (chapter five) is a thematic approach which investigates the interactions between femininity, the monstrous, and the wondrous in contemporary tales of animal brides. Finally, chapter six compares rewritings of the tale of ‘Bluebeard’ with a comparison hinged on the representation of the forbidden room and its contents: Bluebeard’s cabinet of wonder is one that he holds sacred, one where he sublimates his wives’ corpses, and it is the catalyst of wonder, terror, and awe. The three contextual chapters and the three text-based studies work towards tracing the tangible existence of the division postulated between francophone and anglophone texts, but also the similarities that exist between the two cultural fields and their roles in the renewal of the fairy-tale genre.

Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale

Abstract: Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Elizabeth Wanning Harries Year: 2001 Pages: xiv + 216 Publisher: Princeton University Press Prices: $18.75 US