I just saved you–does it matter what I look like? Reading and discussing feminist fairy tales with a group of 12-year-old girls

Abstract

Using a post-structural lens which situates gender as discursively produced, this study investigates how four 12-year-old girls read feminist fairy tales and what feminist issues and concerns they discern and relate to in these texts. The study used a dialogic approach in Action Research informed reading groups to stimulate their thinking and explore their experience of gender constraints. The article explores how the girls drew on discourses and discursive practices to position themselves in relation to the texts, often breaking the frame of the text and creating ‘counter-fictionals’ and using performativity to construct their versions of femininity. The author argues that the book group acted as a liminal space that allowed the girls a safe space for exploring and subverting gender constructs and constraints.