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Notwithstanding the cross-dressed wolf, the story of "Little Red Riding Hood" has not been perceived to be a particularly queer tale. Rather, since at least the publication of Charles Perrault's canonical version, it has been interpreted as the definitive cautionary tale to never stray from the path. Queer reading, however, is all about straying from the path, particularly one built on binary oppositions between masculine and feminine, active and passive, and hetero- sexual and homosexual.1 Just as the multiple versions of the oral folktale and the literary fairy tale make finding a universal meaning or purpose for any tale difficult and problematic, queer theory resists stable definition or easily repeatable reading practice.2
What can be asserted relatively confidently is that, following the most well-known versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, the tale is usually recognized as the quintessential instantiation of stranger danger, which typically opposes an active male predator to a passive female victim. A queer reading of any particular version of the tale should focus on the ways that sexuality, gender, and desire trouble the tale's putative warning. My reading of David Kaplan's 1996 short film Little Red Riding Hood explores the ways in which the representation of the wolf figure, a reordering of cinematic narrative structural hierarchies, and the presence of celebrity intertexts offer what I call a queer invitation to reassess the relationship between the girl and the wolf in the less well-known folkloric version of the story, "The Story of Grandmother." In this essay I look closely at the film to examine the ways in which its so-called perversity works to challenge heteronormative hegemonic discourses about "Little Red Riding Hood" and the binary structures that support them 3
Charles Perrault penned "Le Petit Chaperon Rouge," the first literary version of the tale, in 1697 and is responsible for giving the girl her distinctive headwear and for not providing her with an escape from the wolf's attack. Perrault also includes a moral that specifically links the wolf to male sexual predators and warns young women that it is "no surprise" that they should be attacked if they are imprudent enough to be fooled by these men. By the time the Grimms finished tinkering with their version...