Dancing Beyond Heteronormative Boundaries: Jeanette Winterson’s The Twelve Dancing Princesses
Dancing Beyond Heteronormative Boundaries: Jeanette Winterson’s The Twelve Dancing Princesses

Summary/Abstract: The Twelve Dancing Princesses, written by the Grimm Brothers, is one of the wellknown fairy tales that has been adapted and rewritten several times in different languages, cultures, and texts. Among those works is Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989), which incorporates the post-modern retelling of this fairy tale. In the second chapter of the novel, Winterson retells the story of the twelve princesses using intertextual allusions to the traditional fairy tale that embodies androcentric biases and gender constraints submerged within the patriarchal system. However, in this new recreation, the writer, initially, challenges the heteronormativity and its phallocentrically constructed gender roles, then, she demonstrates to the passivized and tamed princesses, ways of violating male-assigned gender roles and identities by creating an all-encompassing space in which there is no othering and violence. Thus, considering the issues regarding heteronormativity and its boundaries and grounding its argument in feminist and queer literary critical theory, in this study, I have aimed to display how the fluid dynamics of gender construction can be revealed by transgressing the heteronormative boundaries and phallocentric dictations, and how wo/men can live happily ever after in accordance with ‘their own tastes’.

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