Exercise in interpretation »If you're a woman, become a man!«

Thursday's discussion on gender in Balkan fairy tales added
to fairytale opening of Red Dawns festival in Wednesday by
providing with theoretical frame and background. Lilijana
Burcar explained how fairy tales which challenge the binary
construction of masculinity and femininity were told by
women in literary saloon in Ludvik XIV palace as a direct
critique of his rule. Women who were forced into marriage
due to economic and political reasons found an escape in
fairy tales. Even though fairy tales are organic forms, they
do not change spontaneously only. Little Red Riding Hood, at
first sexually independent girl who manages to escape the
wolf, Perrault turned into a helpless child who ends up in
wolf's stomach, being saved only with a help of a male figure.
A strong moral dictum can be drown out of it: women, do not
wander in wood on your own, and do not be surprised if/when
you're violated if you chose to do so. With a different aim,
in the 19th century the fairy tales were transformed to serve
the strengthening of the national consciousness and
consequently the widening of the gap between public in private.
Grimm's Snow-White is in the latest versions asked to perform
more and more household work (also more explicitly determined)
for the seven dwarfs than in previous ones. It seems as that
the fairy tales lost its role in challenging the patriarchal
system.Those who attended the discussion had an opportunity
to listen to Zdena Gajser telling Balkan fairy tales where
distinctions between genders are shadowed and female figures
really are heroines. Nonetheless, even this stories to certain
extent confirm heteronormativity: the princess
(otherwise dressed as a men) has to change into the man to lie
with her wife. Neither homosexuality nor transvestism are
acceptable. What is then the possibility for a lesbian marriage
in the fairy tales, Suzana Tratnik asked herself, and in the
next breath answered: it is an utopia.
Not only that the heroines in fairy tales are not able to
maintain their homosexual relationships as such, also in real
life so-called 'virginjesha' assume on themselves a masculine
gender and do not really establish homosexual relations. Balkan
fairy tales which challenge the heteronormativity then do so
only to certain extent. I am ending with two questions that
appeared to me in relation to the discussion: to what extent
(will) contemporary Balkan writers and story tellers use the
potential of the fairy tales for a subversion of the patriarchal
system?
And why there is no known old Slovenian fairy tale that would even
attempt to do so?

Tanja Škander