Gender Swapped Fairy Tales

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In Gender Swapped Fairy Tales,Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett have given us an ingenious update to these familiar stories. As Sleeping Beauty becomes Sleeping Handsome and powerful princesses ride to the rescue, it’s enough to make any hard-baked gender traditionalist cough up a mince pie crumb or two. After countless run-ins with scheming wizards, I started to find myself feeling hostile and suspicious towards any old man strolling across the pages. In the introduction, Fransman and Plackett talk about the patterns and differences the algorithm had on the stories, talking about how the female characters name began to appear first in the titles, how the women were described as handsome, and the young boys as being pretty, and how the wicked mothers became fathers, the Kings became Queens, the hags old men, and the witches wizards. This gender-bent Three Musketeers retelling from debut author Lillie Lainoff not only features a band of swordfighting women, but a main character with POTS.

Gender Swapped Fairy Tales by Karrie Fransman | Goodreads

A new collection, Gender Swapped Fairy Tales, takes a much tamer approach, aimed at gender-conscious parents: authors Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett simply change gendered words (reproduced from Andrew Lang’s late-Victorian/Edwardian series of Fairy Books) from male to female and vice versa.Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. The princess climbing the captive’s beard resembles a warrior, and her stylised hair could be an indigenous-style headdress. This is a fairly quick read as well, so I would recommend it to folks seeking to understand more of the unwritten expectations we tend to place on women versus men. This new collection features gorgeous and thought-provoking artwork by Karrie Fransman, who explains in an introductory note that she “drew inspiration from the textiles and furniture of the countries and centuries in which the stories originated”.

Gender Swapped Fairy Tales - AbeBooks Gender Swapped Fairy Tales - AbeBooks

When the first Frozen film came out, it was before I had a baby, so I was blithely ignorant of the whole phenomenon beyond picking up a vague sense of approval that this was, finally, a mainstream feminist fairy tale.

Ye Xian, a 1,200-year-old story remarkably similar to that of Cinderella, tells how a magical fish (who in some versions is the reincarnation of Ye Xian’s dead mother) begowns the titular character for the Spring Festival. I was all set to hear how confused and empowered she felt – but that’s only because, for me, it is too late. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. There’s nothing like seeing a Brienne of Tarth-style knight looming over a supine, sprawled, half-dressed boy to make you feel on a visceral level how weird and creepy the assumptions underpinning the original Sleeping Beauty are. Andrew and Nora Lang’s “Fairy Books” series was published between the late 19th and early 20th century, so of course it's going to contain the ideas and ideals of the time.

Gender Swapped Fairy Tales by Karrie Fransman, Jonathan Gender Swapped Fairy Tales by Karrie Fransman, Jonathan

The emphasis on women’s looks and men’s chivalry and red-blooded behaviour that are so readily deployed in the original tales are noticeably absent in these new versions casting a new light on these new stories. In 1960s Houston, Texas, Evie and her band of bad girls have always lived by a code: protect your own. Despite this, you like story time – even though the kid is perfectly capable of reading their own stories: the intimacy of reading stories out loud, that special quiet time; the importance of modelling literacy and the arts in your family life; values that you teach through stories.

Plackett created an algorithm to swap instances of ‘he’ to ‘she’ and ‘son’ to ‘daughter’ while keeping the stories exactly the same.

Gender Swapped Fairy Tales (Hardback) by Jonathan Plackett

In the Grimms’ version of Cinderella, her stepsisters are not pantomime ugly – they are beautiful – but they do have big feet.Jonathan, a creative technologist wrote an algorithm that swaps the genders in any text, changing “he” to “she” and “her” to “him,” “princes” to “princesses” and “Beauty” to “Handsome,” and applied it to the classic texts edited by Andrew Lang (published between 1889-1913), including stories collected by the Brothers Grimm. Jonathan and Karrie (husband and wife) have a daughter whom they wanted “to grow up in a world where little girls can be powerful and where little boys can express their vulnerability without anger. There are already many articles and essays on how fairy tales are supposedly “problematic”, which have become abundant since the beginning of the 21st century. Travelers Along the Way is the story of two sisters, Rahma and Zeena al-Hud, stuck in the Holy Lands during the Third Crusade.