Let's have a politically correct approach to set notions ….
On 8th August, 2021 Cushy the Book Club, organized an abstract reading session where we discussed two short stories – Cinderella and Red Riding Hood from ‘Politically Correct Stories’ by James Finn Garner. The aim of this activity was to create a discourse and look at these stories with a new lens- what they would have been if written in today’s paradigm.
There was a lot to unpack in both the stories and in the
discussion, we noted how- from subtle changes like the usage of ‘womyn’, ‘god person’ to using wolf as a metaphor to represent a person belonging to a different ethnicity or an immigrant and completely altering the endings, the writer uses irony and satire to denounce the patriarchal power structures that serve to oppress and disempower women. While in red riding hood the grandmother reappearing from the wolf’s stomach asserted that matriarchal identity in today’s world is not dead, Cinderella’s ending presented a hopeful story that did not link the happiness of the female characters hinged upon the actions of men.
At a broader perspective this discussion concluded that how children’s stories are value setting stories that are ingrained in their minds and form the perception of things, people and relationships around them and hence it becomes imperative to create good stories for children to read that are inclusive and aren’t very unrealistic. And as much as reinterpretation of stories is important there is also a need for people from different ethnicities, women, etc. to be the agents of change and have equal propensity to go ahead and write stories from scratch and have protagonists which are non-problematic to a certain degree as at the end of the day a white man cannot have the same lived experiences as that of people from the oppressed community.
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