LimaUniformNovemberAlpha wrote:If it's scientifically sound, teach it. If not, don't. That's it.
Yes, sure, you can come up with a scientific explanation for, say, why Vanity Fair exists and, theoretically, you can explain why it takes the shape it does... why? Because, fundamentally, it was written by a physical entity and exists in the universe and therefore is a thing in the universe and that's one of the things that science does.
However, if we want to understand what exactly the messages in Vanity Fair are... that is not a scientific enquiry.
Wallenburg wrote:Well, if you had actually read "fairy tales" in their original, unadulterated form, you would know that they are, indeed, very sexist, and establish very rigid gender structures. That goes for all sorts of other forms of social hierarchy they promote. After all, these were stories told in the Medieval Era. It wasn't exactly a time when egalitarianism was the ruling philosophy.
As to the program, I don't see how fairy tales can lead to increased domestic violence in Australia. I'm sure the program would spend its time better by talking about other subjects.
To be honest, they're not sexist. They definitely don't have "pure, unadulterated forms" to imagine they do is to entirely miss the point. Fairy tales are not short stories. They don't look like short stories, they don't work like short stories and they are thus just not short stories. Also, compare and contrast fables.
Sexist would be, for instance, if the messages were of the form [gender] ought to behave in [fashion] or [gender] is like [so].
Invariably, what happens is that fairy tales are sexist in the sense that if you read dozens of them (and you do have to read dozens) then you notice certain recurring patterns (for example, [passive female]). This is, of course, an entirely specious argument to make because most people do not read dozens of fairy tales.
Compare and contrast Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. In the former, we have Cinderella who lives a life of servitude and wants to escape it... the unfairness of her situation is entirely the point. In the latter, we have a princess who is cursed and falls asleep for [years]. Both escape these fates, of course, and both broadly do so passively. Difference is that in Cinderella it is a female character who enables Cinderella to be who she is meant to be (a status denied to her by her evil stepmother) and then Cinderella is sufficiently interesting that a dude becomes obsessed with her. This is problematic in the sense that it's less a rags to riches story and more "the good stuff will out in the end". In Sleeping Beauty the standard critique is that it's a bit rapey.
If you read the standard set of tales, i.e. Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rapunzel and whatever ones I can't think of off the top of my head right now you are likely to mostly read about female characters that need rescuing... but if you're only reading ten or so different stories what you're actually doing is suppressing narrative freedom. And it is obviously problematic to conflate Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella with the stupidly trusting Snow White or essentially comatose Sleeping Beauty. People just don't read enough fairy tales to get a sense of the restrictiveness of the roles they contain because with the standard set (and we can quibble about what that is) it is very easy to overplay the similarities. And, frankly, I don't think they suggest that their characters are normative... the normativeness comes from the overwhelming impression.
Of course, the thing with fairy tales is that they're not meant to be static. It doesn't really matter, for instance, if we're using a traditional Rapunzel narrative or the one from Tangled (which is a better film than Frozen, to be clear). The trouble is "OMG but that's not how it goes" is strong. Nor are they meant to be fixed... just ask Hans Christian Andersen. And, maybe, you feel that there's no real way of redeeming say Sleeping Beauty... that the narrative is inherently problematic... then let it fall by the wayside. I mean, when was the last time you read that one about the dogs with saucer-sized eyes. And there are plenty more which are considerably more obscure than that... the issue is that I do not remember them even as vaguely as this one (a further complication is that I used to read a lot of folk tale type anthologies and if I do vaguely remember one it is entirely possible it is not from the Anglo-German-Hans Christian Andersen mainstream... one I seem to remember about three brother princes who are sent to retrieve a bird from a cage strikes me as being Russian*).
Which is to say... if you actually care about confronting fairy tales as problematic... the way to do it is not to engage pupils with critical critiques at an age where they'll accept them as a choir receives a sermon, but to get them to write (and illustrate) their own versions. Which, you know, is what we used to do all the time. [Reading the article makes the age of the pupil no clearer, I assume they're young for the interest in fairy tales.]
*And, of course, there are a great many similarities between the stories.
Ifreann wrote:But Reppy, what if we raise a generation of people who actually think about the media they consume? People might think that something I like has sexist implications and that would make me feel bad!
The day I am shown an English teacher armed with an English syllabus that encourages thinking about media consumption rather than one part frightening all self-thought (and simultaneously enjoyment) out of the pupil and the other part preaching a proscribed interpretation, is the day I will believe in deities for I will have encountered incontrovertible evidence of a miracle.
Let us not, not for a single moment, remove ourselves from the reality in which we live.
