Damsels in Redress: Women in Contemporary Fairy-Tale Reimaginings (Damsels in Redress 2017)

With the ever-growing profusion of fairy-tale reimaginings across literature, film, television, theatre, and other artistic forms, a continuing concern among critics today is the portrayal of women. How do these reimaginings represent women’s roles? To what extent do they redress portrayals that have been considered problematic from a feminist standpoint in traditional tales? To what extent do they perpetuate those portrayals? What constitutes a feminist reimagining? How have the fairy-tale heroine, the witch, the (step)mother, the (step)sister, and the fairy godmother evolved since the dawn of second-wave feminism?
This conference aims to foster interdisciplinary scholarship by bringing together a range of ideas about the representation of women in contemporary reimaginings of traditional fairy tales, such as those from the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. We welcome proposals that explore this representation from a variety of perspectives and fields of study, including but not limited to literature, film, television, theatre, gender, feminist, and queer studies. We also welcome creative exploration on the theme of the fairy tale and how this theme can be interpreted with regard to women.