“The Snow Queen”: Queer Coding in Male Directors' Films

With its less familiar counterpart, heterosociality, it draws attention to the institutionalization of specific kinds of interactions between and among the sexes. [...]when homosexual relationships become conventionally tabooed-consider, for example, the number of North American jurisdictions failing to legalize or otherwise opposing same-sex marriage-homosocial relationships are rarely proscribed. Incorporating but not condemning taboos such as adult-child sex (sometimes characterized by the slippery term pedophilia), incest (between social if not biological siblings), and lesbian attraction (most obviously between the Little Robber Girl and Gerda)2 in one story, without nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century readers seeing the narrative as unsuitable for children, might seem quite a feat.3 Yet many literary critics deny this manifest content in the plot.