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Malinda Lo's 2009 young adult novel Ash retells the "Cinderella" fairy tale, but with a twist: the titular heroine is portrayed as what the author calls "a lesbian Cinderella" ("Is Ash Lesbian"). However, Lo's project to queer the "Cinderella" story does not end there. My queer reading of the novel is predicated not only on the obvious—Lo's revision of Cinderella as a lesbian—but also on the representation of queer characters, temporality, and sociopolitical structures. By writing queer subjects who operate in queer time, Lo challenges assumptions about gender and sexuality and extends the legacy of the "Cinderella" fairy tale. Lo grants her Cinderella a plurality of options beyond escapism through heteronormative romance, while retaining the tale's focus on magic and masquerade. In my analysis of Lo's adaptation, I focus most intensely on the driving force of the narrative: questioning gender roles and normative sexual behavior, particularly for women. Ash challenges the "myth of heterosexual complementarity" of many fairy tales, in which a man and woman are driven to happily ever after by forces seemingly beyond their control (Seifert, Fairy Tales 102). Many "Cinderella" stories, especially the vastly popular 1950 Disney animated film, reaffirm this myth. Alternatively, Ash extends the idealism of the "Cinderella" story to queer potentiality by representing nonheteronormative relationships and creating a recursive queer time of fairy tales, dreams, and the carnivalesque. Further, the novel depicts the complex structural privileging of certain gender and sexual identities that takes place at the intersection of politics, wealth, and class, even within queer communities.
Despite a recent trend of queer revisionings of traditional literary fairy tales, queer theory has only minimally intersected with fairy-tale studies. In Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (2012), Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill argue that seminal source fairy-tale texts remove most overtly sexual, deviant, and class-inappropriate encounters; however, "awash in perverse possibilities, they beg for a queer(y)ing" ("Introduction" 2). A queer reading looks at the complex notions fairy tales portray that might suggest multivalent desires (145). The fairy tale and its conventions create a sort of structural queerness based on the acceptance of magic, fantasy, and ambiguity as they penetrate reality: "[Q]ueerness and temporality uniquely meet in the fairy tale" ("Introduction" 6). The queer time of fairy tales asks readers to...