Binary Outlaws: Queering the Classical Tale in

François Ozon’s Criminal Lovers (1999) and Catherine Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty (2010)

Anne E. DugganWayne State University

Turner, Kay. 2012. “Playing with Fire: Transgression as Truth in Grimms’ ‘Frau Trude.’” In Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms. 245-74.

“Even if many tales hurtle headlong towards normative reunion, marriage, and stability, often the route navigates a topsy-turvy space filled with marvels, magic, and weird encounters that don’t simply contradict the ‘normal’ but offer, or at least hint at, alternative possibilities for fulfilling desires that might alter individual destinies” (248).

Coulthard, Lisa. 2010. “Desublimating Desire: Courtly Love and Catherine Breillat.” Journal for Cultural Research 14.1 (January): 57-69.

Drawing from the work of Žižek, Coulthard argues that within the scheme of heteronormative forms of courtly love, desire can only be sustained by distance; proximity to the “Real” of the lady “leads to brutal revulsion and rejection” (2010, 62). In effect, explicit sex disrupts “an idealized rhetoric of distanced desire through an emphasis on actual, desiring female bodies” (2010, 65).

Garcia, Maria. 2011. “Rewriting Fairy Tales, Revising Female Identity. An Interview with Catherine Breillat.” Cineaste (Summer): 32-35.

“Breillat sets out to overturn the male fantasy that forms the subtext of nearly all the romantic fairy tales upon which young girls are weaned—that men awaken the virgin to her sexuality and, by extension, to her identity” (2011, 33).