In her engaging, thoroughly researched book Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy, Anne Duggan explores the previously overlooked roles of fairy tales and queerness in the oeuvre of French auteur Jacques Demy. Exposing the ways in which fairy tales and queerness are, at once, at odds and in concert with one another, Duggan convincingly argues that, “Demy’s fairy-tale films prove to be so many reimaginings of gender, sexuality, and class, reimaginings that are part and parcel of a queer sensitivity” (7). This subtle queering has a destabilizing effect upon the binaries that underpin many traditional tales, binaries that include “feminine and masculine, queer and straight, lower class and upper class, and nature and culture, which uphold a heterosexist, bourgeois order in which capitalists, men, and heterosexuals are privileged over the working class, women, and queers” (7). Composed of an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue, the book includes detailed discussions of five of Demy’s films, and shorter treatments of many others.
In her introduction, Duggan contextualizes Demy within French New Wave cinema, discusses the profound influence the genres of the fairy tale and the musical had upon his own creative process, and defines her notion of “queerness,” which she constructs broadly as employed by critics such as Alexander Doty. She then lays out the ways in which Demy’s films can be understood to embody this queerness.
Chapter 1 examines the tensions between the fairy tale and melodrama, using Demy’s Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as case studies. Both films, she argues, juxtapose “fairy tale moments…magical moments” against “the reality of loss, repression, and feelings of impotence” (41). This conflict between genres exposes the ways in which fairy tale endings can preclude the claiming of queer identities and possibilities.
In chapter 2, Duggan addresses Demy’s Donkey Skin, an explicit retelling of a traditional tale. Focusing upon the intersection between the trope of incest and the notion of camp, Duggan reveals the ways in which the film’s portrayal of incest can be read as coding for queerness and sexual difference. By identifying potentially subversive elements present in older versions of the tale, particularly that of Charles Perrault, and saturating the film with “camp” signs, Demy effectively queers the traditional story, creating “alternative sexualities and gender identities that undermined the sociosexual order of postwar France” (70).
Chapter 3 explores Otherness through class in Demy’s The Pied Piper, another explicit fairy tale retelling. While this chapter is somewhat anomalous because it does not address queerness or sexuality per se, Duggan makes a strong case for its inclusion by emphasizing its theme of Otherness, which can be read as queerness, and its use of the fairy tale. This theme of class as an analog for queerness will be taken up again at length in the following chapter.
Chapter 4 provides a fascinating study of Demy’s Lady Oscar, an adaptation of Riyoko Ikedo’s manga The Rose of Versailles, and its relationship to the Maiden Warrior tradition. Duggan traces the relevant history of the Maiden Warrior narrative type before delving into her argument, which draws upon aspects of queerness explored in earlier chapters of the book. In Lady Oscar, “the crisis of class and gender as well as heteronormativity are all in play and come to a head in the French Revolution, which marks the end of an ‘Old Regime’ of gender, sexuality, and class” (107). Breaking with tradition by portraying a maiden warrior heroine who refuses to renounce her masculinity and who is actively queer, Demy, Duggan argues, boldly and explicitly embraces rebellion on both sexual and class registers for the first time.
Duggan concludes with an epilogue in which she thoughtfully probes Demy’s relationship with the fairy tale, noting its inherent paradox: “these dreams that are fairy tales can provide us with hope for a better future; they can open up a space of freedom that allows us to imagine alternative universes, including queer ones… [but] fairy tales can also be used to communicate heteronormative and bourgeois ideologies, thus setting us up for failure by inculcating us” (143). Demonstrating the ways in which Demy simultaneously embraces and troubles the fairy tale, Duggan argues that Demy’s engagement with the genre is decidedly postmodern.
Existing at the intersection of film studies, fairy tale studies, and queer theory, Queer Enchantments will appeal to scholars from a variety of disciplines. Perhaps most excitingly, it is an important contribution to the growing body of literature engaged with fairy tales and queerness. Readable and compelling, Queer Enchantments models interdisciplinary scholarship at its best.
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[Review length: 760 words • Review posted on March 12, 2014]