Fun article on two authors gender-swapping Greek myths in an illustrated kids' book.
Hmm... given that they're dealing with the ancient Greeks, it doesn't makes sense to me that they kept the switcheroos heteronormative. There are already Greek myths (e.g., Apollo and Hyacinthus) that depict LBGTQ+ relationships. Why not tweak some of the more famous ones in that direction, too?
Maybe they chose a heteronormative route to keep the book from being banned from school libraries.
It does sound like a good start at providing kids with less patriarchal classical stories. I'm not into kids' books, but I'm curious to see how they rewrite Zeus's many celebrated seductions. Hera doesn't seem like the right protagonist for those—not lustful enough. Will the leader of Mount Olympus become a female deity who uses magical guises to rape human men she has the hots for? Would that be a desirable message for young girls?
With its heroic female leads and men who long to be fathers, Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett’s new book looks at modern mores through an ancient lens.
Their first book was Gender Swapped Fairy Tales. “Because they are a big influence on the way children think and are brought up,” he says. “They form the early building blocks of the expectations on you. And it was an easy place to start because they are so gendered.”
So kings became queens, brave princesses rescued imprisoned princes, and a scary she-wolf jumped out from behind a tree into the path of a pretty boy wearing a red hoodie.
The Greek myths, with their peak patriarchy, dramatic power imbalances and raging toxic masculinity, pretty much demanded to be fed into the gender-swapping algorithm.
In a way, though, their gender-swapped Greek myths are still binary, just binary flipped; certainly, they are heteronormative. But the pair believe that by swapping the two dominant gender constructs, the division will be disrupted and this will get us all thinking about how gender defines everyone and everything. “It’s more important for us to make people think about the current world and how it could be different,” says Plackett.
Hmm... given that they're dealing with the ancient Greeks, it doesn't makes sense to me that they kept the switcheroos heteronormative. There are already Greek myths (e.g., Apollo and Hyacinthus) that depict LBGTQ+ relationships. Why not tweak some of the more famous ones in that direction, too?
Maybe they chose a heteronormative route to keep the book from being banned from school libraries.
It does sound like a good start at providing kids with less patriarchal classical stories. I'm not into kids' books, but I'm curious to see how they rewrite Zeus's many celebrated seductions. Hera doesn't seem like the right protagonist for those—not lustful enough. Will the leader of Mount Olympus become a female deity who uses magical guises to rape human men she has the hots for? Would that be a desirable message for young girls?
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