MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This conference paper examines revisionist versions of Cinderella in U.S. literature, film, television, and new media within the context of the proliferation of popular culture texts between 2000 and the present that either re-tell or re-imagine canonical fairy tales. Focusing on representations of the character of Cinderella as an intelligent, independent, and “spunky” young woman in novels such as Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Just Ella *(1999), TV series such as ABC’s *Once Upon a Time *(2011-present), YouTube series such as *Feminist Fairy Tales *(2011-present), and films such as *Ella Enchanted *(Tommy O’Haver, 2004), *A Cinderella Story *(Mark Rosman, 2004), and Disney’s live-action *Cinderella (Kenneth Branagh, 2015), it interrogates the ways in which the cultural function of fairy tales has shifted in the early Twenty-First Century to allow them to be deployed for the purposes of working through ideologically-contested notions of what it is and what it means to be an empowered woman—socially, individually, and sexually. To this end, this paper argues that these texts can be understood as both an extension of and a response to critiques of the hegemonic function of fairy tales as tools of patriarchal enculturation mounted by Second Wave Feminist authors such as Olga Broumas, Anne Sexton, and Angela Carter in their re-writings of the Cinderella story. It also situates the “empowered” fairy tale princesses in these recent iterations of that story at the intersections between Second Wave, Third Wave, and Post-Feminist discourses in order to explore the ways in which it has become a site of ideological struggle over the role of female empowerment in both women’s and men’s “happily ever after.”