Entre o estigma e a subversão: a pedagogia da maldade feminina e as tensões psicanalíticas em (re)leituras de contos de fadas clássicos

Abstract

This dissertation examines the construction of female evil in classical fairy tales and in their contemporary retellings, focusing on the relationship between villainy, punishment, and gendered moral pedagogy. It argues that figures such as stepmothers, witches, and evil queens function not merely as narrative antagonists but as symbolic devices of moral discipline directed at women, particularly in relation to the body, desire, aging, and motherhood. The main objective of the study is to investigate how these characters are produced as narrative obstacles whose elimination or punishment operates as a condition for moral closure, as well as to assess whether and to what extent contemporary rewritings effectively disrupt this mechanism. The research adopts a qualitative, theoretical-analytical methodology, based on the critical reading of a corpus composed of canonical fairy tales—especially Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and The Little Mermaid—and contemporary literary, audiovisual, and performative reinterpretations. The theoretical framework brings together feminist criticism, psychoanalytic approaches, and cultural studies, mobilized in a non-dogmatic manner and with particular attention to the risks of naturalizing historically situated gender constructions. The findings indicate that, although many contemporary retellings grant villains voice, interiority, and motivation, a significant number of these narratives merely shift punishment from the moral to the psychological realm, promoting a form of humanization that ultimately neutralizes the critical potential of these figures. Genuine subversion is shown to occur only when narratives abandon the requirement of female punishment as a means of restoring symbolic order. In this regard, contemporary performative aesthetics, especially in theatre and dance, emerge as privileged spaces of resistance by suspending moral judgment and relocating conflict to a structural level. The study concludes that female evil should be understood not as an individual or psychological attribute but as a historically constructed narrative device whose critique requires dismantling the mechanisms that sustain it as a disciplinary instrument.