Maleficent: Finally, Disney Gives Us A Positive Witch/Mother

Women’s stories have often been twisted, stolen, and locked away, often in iron-clad phallocentric cages. This has led to benevolent witches turning wicked, powerful woman being framed as bitches, midwives cast as baby-killers, queens/princesses truncated into damsels in distress and, perhaps most pervasively, the demonization/murder of mothers and motherhood.

To hide this ironclad prison house within which women’s lives and stories have been imprisoned, we have been given the fairy godmother, the innocent maiden, the asexual nanny-figure. In ways, the new Disney flm Maleficent—a retelling of Sleeping Beauty from the view of the “villainess”—rights (and re-writes) all of these wrongs, finally breaking down the phallocentric prison within which female tales have been trapped.

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