Published: 2025-12-31

Misogynoir and Origins: Disney’s Snow White, Toxic Speech, and the Fairy-Tale Public Sphere

Pauline Greenhill , Heidi Kosonen
Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura
Section: Studies
DOI https://doi.org/10.32798/dlk.1933

Abstract

Feminist scholar Allison Craven recently coined the term ‘fairy-tale public sphere’ to explore how characters, images, and concepts from traditional culture, popular children’s literature, and wonder narratives come to play roles in civil discourse as referent, sign, trope, and/or invocation. When such representations enter mediated discourse, the fairy-tale public sphere transforms into a location for debates around race, gender, and other matters of serious import and acrimonious disagreement. It also becomes an arena where fairy-tale motifs and ideas form the grounds for types of speech that are damaging and harmful to minorities and to a democratic social fabric. In this article, the authors examine how racism, sexism, misogyny, and misogynoir operate through debates about the seemingly innocent topic of fairy tales and film. In their case study, dealing with Disney’s recent live-action adaptation Snow White by Marc Webb (2025), online discussions manifest as toxic speech with serious consequences.

Supporting Agencies

The authors gratefully acknowledge research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Insight Grant 435-2019-0691) and from the Research Council of Finland (project number 340650). They also thank Aleksi Knuutila, Em Penner, and Kayleigh Armstrong for research assistance and the two anonymous reviewers and the Research Seminar of the Centre for Contemporary Culture (University of Jyväskylä) folks for their helpful suggestions.

Keywords:

anti-feminism, anti-woke, ATU 709, hate speech, Rachel Zegler, Snow White

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Greenhill, P., & Kosonen, H. (2025). Misogynoir and Origins: Disney’s Snow White, Toxic Speech, and the Fairy-Tale Public Sphere. Dzieciństwo. Literatura I Kultura, 7(2), 132–155. https://doi.org/10.32798/dlk.1933

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