Cuentos de ayer y de hoy: de la heterosexualidad obligatoria tradicional a la inscripción del amor lésbico

Abstract

From the 19th century onwards, fairy tales have been used to acculturate children. Taking into account that the homosexual experience is totally absent from them, we may conclude that, generally speaking, they have contributed to the denial of its existence. In order to palliate this problem of invisibility, women writers from all over the English-speaking world have inscribed the lesbian experience in their revisions of traditional fairy tales.What interests me most is that their inscriptions follow the strategies of recent studies in lesbian literary theory. Thus, in my paper I will analyse the way in which a motley corpus of literary texts deals with theoretical questions such as the myth of lesbianism as a menace to hegemonic patriarchal institutions, the mother/daughter relationship, the lesbian continuum, and the problem of language, among others.