What's in a Kiss? Attachments to the “True Love Kiss” Motif in Queer Sleeping Beauty Retellings

In 2017, several British newspapers reported that Sarah Hall, a mother from Nottingham, was seeking to “ban” the tale of Sleeping Beauty from schools (Graham; Johnson). The reason for the ban, they wrote, was that the sleeping princess was unable to give her consent to the fabled waking-up kiss, which Hall maintained promoted toxic, heterosexist behavior among young children. The news broke in November, right after several media outlets had started reporting on the epidemic of sexual harassment in the entertainment industry. Thus, this otherwise small story about the acculturating power of fairy tales was swept away in the heated, often divisive reactions to the “Me Too” movement. Even if most pieces acknowledged that Hall's suggestion was not to ban the fairy tale altogether, but rather to reframe it within a conversation about consent, reporting from conservative-leaning newspapers chose to draw attention instead to virulent online reactions to her message (Wright; Johnson). In the tabloid, The Daily Mail, Rachel Johnson wrote a particularly strong-worded opinion piece, which was given the headline “At last we're united—by a mum trying to ban Sleeping Beauty.” Johnson criticized the focus on the sexual politics of the tale as not only unnecessary and absurd, but as something that “dirtied” a “sweet traditional fairy tale,” a “sacred” narrative that should remain untouched by the “post-Weinstein wrecking ball.” However, it is worth noting that the variant of the tale read by Hall's children, and presumably the one so passionately defended by Johnson, as well as by countless internet commenters, was not particularly traditional. It was Roderick Hunt's 2011 illustrated Oxford Reading Tree: Sleeping Beauty, in which a group of children travel to a magic land where they help a black prince wake a blonde sleeping princess. “You kiss the princess,” instructs one of the children, “Then she wakes up. Everyone knows that!” (Hunt 20). The short book introduces visible changes (the new characters, the black prince) while the core motifs that make up the Sleeping Beauty tale remain untouched. The rescuing prince, the sleeping princess, the waking-up kiss—these are the elements that spark recognition, even a sense of misguided ownership over what we identify as the most basic form of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. But, contrary to popular belief, this does not correspond to a traditional, sacred tale recorded in the distant past, possibly written down by the likes of