Queer the Beast! Transformation and Hybridic Masculinity in Villeneuve and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast

This article examines the interconnected relationship of masculinity, hybridity, and adaptation in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991). It argues that the Disney adaptation of Villeneuve/Leprince de Beaumont’s tale reorients feminine lessons attached to the original Beauty and realizes them through Beast instead, creating a kind of intertextual gender hybridity. To contrast Gaston, a character whose masculinity is at the forefront of his personality, the article examines how gender fluidity enters the text through coded and metatextual ways, produced through the contrasts made between Gaston’s performative masculinity and the Beast’s fluid, hybridic masculinity. The article also considers Belle’s role as “funny” girl. It concludes by reading the text as a critique of binary masculinity—in other words, iterations of masculinity that reject the feminine entirely.