This Instagram poet is rewriting fairy tales with modern gender roles

Think about what you learned from the fairy tales you heard growing up. Scratch beneath the surface of those grand tales of bravery and everlasting love and you’ll see the gender stereotypes,  moral lessons, and a very black and white worldview.

Nikita Gill wants nothing to do with any of that. Instead, the Instagram poet and author wants you  to reexamine the fairy tales you grew up hearing and reading. 

That’s the point of her new book — Fierce Fairytales: Poems & Stories to Stir your Soul — in which she dismantles the gender dynamics and stereotypes in the childhood fables that have, for centuries, gone unchallenged. When Gill revisited stories she’d loved watching on Disney VHS tapes like a “proper ’90s kid” — stories like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Hansel and Gretel  — and read them through the lens of adulthood, she was disappointed.  Read more…

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