Abstract
The ‘Red Riding Hood’ tale is continually invoked in contemporary girls’ visual culture, often to explore the space of transgression and freedom symbolised by straying from the straight path of hegemonic femininity, and the consequences of doing so. The film Red Riding Hood revises the gender relations represented in the Perrault and Grimm versions of the tale through its reconfiguration of the heroine’s journey through the forest as a liminal bid for freedom. By pursuing an errant journey into the otherworldly space of the woods, Valerie permanently eschews the ‘appropriate’ domestic femininity that conventional culture requires her to adhere to. Conducting an analysis of how this geography is represented through Valerie’s point of view and omniscient voice-over narration that accompanies her traversal of this terrain, I theorise how an ultraliminal zone also carves out a space for the girl to experiment with an alternative feminine adolescent subjectivity.
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Filmography
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Bellas, A. (2017). An Escape to the Forest in Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood (2011). In: Fairy Tales on the Teen Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64973-3_2
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