Abstract: This article contextualizes Disney’s live-action adaptations of their animated feature, Sleeping Beauty (1959), through the “original” fairy-tale narrative by Charles Perrault to showcase the construction of otherness inherent to the villain, Maleficent. Such othering is mainly explored through the lens of queer and dark ecology, to reveal how Disney’s Maleficent (2014) and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019) fit into the textual history of the tale. Disney’s queering of Maleficent in this context works to reclaim her narrative for marginalized identities, revealing a latent queer potential in the films that speaks to both gendered and environmental concerns.
Silvia E. Storti (Thu,) studied this question.