Naturalizing Deviants: A Queer Study of Robert Stromberg’s Maleficent and Bill Condon’s Beauty and the Beast

Abstract

The paper aims to expose the issue of censored representations and the curtailed reading of fairy tales that do not acknowledge the presence of Queer and how the new film adaptations of the same tales have attempted to deconstruct the binaries by giving us multiple options to choose from.  The articles on fairy tales that have been written so far or their visual adaptations only mention a few gay characters here and there, and also show what is obvious, but these articles fail to identify the Queerness as a naturalized phenomenon. The paper resorts to Judith Butlers concept of naturalization to show how Disney films like Maleficent (2014) and Beauty and the Beast (2017) are the new age films that break such censorship. The theoretical framework used here is Queer Studies in which a few theories and concepts of Judith Butler, and Jack Halberstams are employed to come to a better understanding of how these films make gender not a mere binary- of man and woman- but an area of a larger discourse where queerness in human beings is naturalised by abandoning the heteronormative regime.

 Keywords: Queer, Judith Butler, Maleficent, Beauty and the Beast, fairy tales