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Cinderella’s Transformation: Public Liminality and Style as Subversion in Gossip Girl (The CW 2007–2012)

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Fairy Tales on the Teen Screen

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Abstract

Many contemporary teen retellings of the ‘Cinderella’ tale continue to focus on the spectacle of the girl’s glamorous transformation, and how it serves to secure the affections of a male suitor or to indicate that the girl is worthy of desire. Gossip Girl is an unusual case because it represents a communitas of Cinderellas who engineer their sartorial transformations to more challenging, and potentially empowering, ends. The teen communitas unsettles the feminine stereotypes embedded in Perrault’s earlier ‘Cinderella’ text, such as docility, passivity and reliance on heterosexual male approval for economic security and social validation. Through their subversive use of DIY practices and masquerade, the heroines collectively challenge some of the rituals and regulations that govern girlhood. Agency is embedded in these performative rebellions, providing an opportunity for the heroines to enact resistant practices through disruptive displays of public liminality. Spectacle and masquerade are the expressive materials through which the heroines confront these gendered relations, pushing the discursive boundaries of girlhood into unexpected territories.

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  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Athena Bellas

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Bellas, A. (2017). Cinderella’s Transformation: Public Liminality and Style as Subversion in Gossip Girl (The CW 2007–2012). In: Fairy Tales on the Teen Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64973-3_5

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