Cristina Bacchilega - Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997)

One text that I’ve been reading is Cristina Bacchilega’s Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. She talks about how retellings of fairy tales aren’t just playful updates but rather devices that actively challenge the old structures of power and gender hidden inside the originals. As she writes, “Fairy tales are never innocent; they are always already ideological.” That line really stuck with me, because it reframes fairytales as cultural tools, shaping how we think about gender, power, and morality.

I’ve always been drawn to fairytales and myth, but often through the imagery (enchanted forests, animals, magic). Bacchilega makes me consider how those images are carrying narratives with them, whether I intend it or not. She writes about authors like Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood, who twist traditional stories to expose the way women are positioned in them. That feels close to what I want to do visually: to use whimsical or hyper-feminine motifs as a way of reworking the “scripts” we inherit from culture. I’ve been exploring this idea by retelling current events through the visual language of fairytales and medieval imagery, and it feels pertinent - a timeless mode of storytelling, shaped through a feminist lens.

For me, the key takeaway is that retelling, whether in words or images, is political. To echo Bacchilega, “Postmodern fairy tales expose the fairy tale’s complicity in cultural processes of gender construction.” In my practice, I want to play with that complicity- leaning into the aesthetic pleasure of fairytales while also twisting them, unsettling their neat morals, and making space for new narratives.