Rapunzel Loves Merida: Melodramatic Expressions of Lesbian Girlhood and Teen Romance in Tangled, Brave, and Femslash.

Publisher: Informa Healthcare Country of Publication: England NLM ID: 9891002 Publication Model: Print Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1540-3548 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 10894160 NLM ISO Abbreviation: J Lesbian Stud Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: London : Informa Healthcare
Original Publication: Binghamton, NY : Haworth Press, 1997-

Adolescent Development* ; Love* ; Motion Pictures* ; Poetry as Topic*; Homosexuality, Female/*psychology; Adolescent ; Child ; Female ; Humans

This article explores the melodramatic expression of lesbian girlhood and teen romance in Disney's Tangled (2010) and Disney Pixar's Brave (2012), as well as "Meripunzel" femslash, fan-authored romantic pairings of the animations' female protagonists. First, Anne Sexton's poem, "Rapunzel," offers a literary precedent for exploring lesbian themes in the fairy tale. The next section shows how Tangled and Brave invoke the narrative conventions of the family melodrama. This generic association reveals the films' uses of rhetoric familiar to youth coming-out narratives, as well as other visual and aural coding suggestive of queer styles. The last section shows how Meripunzel femslash taps into the films' existing melodramatic narrative forms and visual aesthetics, rehearsing their coming-out rhetoric while addressing the pleasures of and problems facing lesbian teen romance. I conclude by problematizing the often conventional expressions of lesbian girlhood in femslash, ultimately arguing for their empowering potential, especially as they indicate revised definitions of "princess."

Keywords: Brave; Rapunzel; Tangled; fan fiction; femslash; girlhood; lesbian; melodrama; romance

Date Created: 20150813 Date Completed: 20160509 Latest Revision: 20171116

20231215

10.1080/10894160.2015.1057079

26264990