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The mere sight of Disney villains have struck fear into the hearts of many a child. From the Evil Queen, to Maleficent, to Ursula. From the black flowing capes to the ashen skin and pointy horns, the aesthetic of these villains alone is often enough to evoke a sense of dread in the audience. Ursula from The Little Mermaid (1989) may not be officially a queen in the Disney universe, but she is a notorious villain amongst fans. Although The Little Mermaid was released in 1989, the film, and thus Ursula, have a fanbase that has evolved and grown up to now, despite the film not being remade into a live-action version as yet. This chapter will analyse the comments of three fan-made YouTube videos regarding Ursula, and will examine the fan comments, with specific focus on the comments regarding Ursula's physicality or any positive comments about her. This will show fan positivity towards a villainous character, despite what may be depicted as a negative body image. Ursula, an octopus, looks quite different from other villains. The primary research methodology will include participatory culture and discourse analysis in order to understand why fans adore her, and how they do not necessarily accept her as a villain, but that there is an outpouring of positivity towards her body image.

For every hero, there is a villain, and for every villain there should be a story. But, how much do we really know about the villain? Gender and Female Villains in 21st Century Fairy Tale Narratives: From Evil Queens to Wicked Witches seeks to fill a gap in the field of gender representation and character evolution, with chapters centred on female villains in the fairy tale narratives of the twenty-first-century media.

This book aims to bring together a collection of interdisciplinary research on the evolution of female villains from television and film, the impact of these characters on filmmaking, storytelling, narrative structures and considerations with regard to gender representations.

Within the realm of fairy tale study, the characters of princesses, princes, heroes and the damsels-in-distress have been researched extensively. However, the female villain has rarely been the central focus of academic study. This book is the first collection of chapters based on female villains in the twenty-first century fairy tale narratives.

The teenage girl constructs her identity amidst a chorus of conflicting voices. She both replicates and resists the patterns of good girl/bad girl as displayed by earlier generations, trying to figure out who she is and how she might live in her body, in the world.

Evil women – bad girls – defy the binary definitions of good and bad, both in body and spirit. They are the bad feminist, they are the Sea Witch, they are the art monster. But when we claim the monster as our role model, we commit her (and ourselves) to the constraints of the patriarchy – replicating a predetermined way of being a girl. There must be a way to define ourselves beyond these constraints. How does one become the monster?

Teen identity is constructed via research, rehearsal and performance: the trying on of multiple possible selves. One person's performed identity becomes the benchmark that others measure themselves against.

Like Courtney Love, who said she didn't want to be with the band, she wanted to be in the band, we all want to belong. We all want to stand out. How sharply we carve the edges of ourselves to fit.

This interactive ‘Fakebook dialogue’ allows Bec and Simmone to draw a line through theory and personal experience, bringing the voices of academia to life, and imagining them in conversation with ourselves and the women whom we have resisted, used as role models or temporarily dreamed ourselves into being. Our piece is set in the nexus of the body and the self. We incorporate autotopography and self-representation as shaped by shared cultural objects to interrogate existing modes of replication and resistance and try to imagine the monstrous shape of our true identity.

A motif, as defined by Jean-Charles Seigneuret (1988, p. 17), is an ‘essential part of a contemporary academic discipline known as thematology or thematics’ and that ‘two factors may explain the rise of the thematological method: its interpretive potentialities and its intrinsic congruency with the history of ideas’.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm first introduced the story of Snow White and her evil stepmother the Queen in 1812. Decades later, the character of the Queen, who later becomes the Evil Queen, is depicted in copious narratives and several different mediums. A central parallel in most of the representations of this character is that she is presented as evil. As such, how the Evil Queen character is represented in media sees a congruence of specific aesthetical characteristics, which combines to symbolize a rhetorical motif for evil.

THERE are now so many meetings of the Library Association and its branches and sections that the good custom of recording meetings and the discussions at them has fallen into desuetude. In a way it is a gain, for when the discussion was commonplace the account of a meeting became a mere list of those who attended and spoke, bones without flesh; but in the days when The Library Association Record really was a record, its reports were a part of the educational and informational material of every librarian. Something should be done about this, because 1938 opened with a series of meetings which all deserved the fullest report. The principal one was the investiture meeting of the President of the Library Association on January 17th. The attendance was greater than that at any meeting of librarians in recent years, of course other than the Annual Conference. Chaucer House was beautifully arranged, decorated and lighted for the occasion, an atmosphere of cheerfulness and camaraderie pervaded the affair. The speeches were limited to a few preliminary words by the retiring President, the Archbishop of York, before placing the badge on his successor's neck; a brief, but deserved panegyric of Dr. Temple's services by Mr. Berwick Sayers; and then a delightful acknowledgment from His Grace. The serious point the Archbishop made was his surprise at learning the wide extent of the library movement and his conviction that it must be of great value to the community. His lighter touch was exquisite; especially his story of the ceremonial key, which broke in the lock and jammed it when he was opening a library in state, and of his pause to settle mentally the ethical point as to whether he could conscientiously declare he had “opened” a place when he had made it impossible for anyone to get in until a carpenter had been fetched. Altogether a memorable evening, which proved, too, as a guest rightly said, that one cannot easily entertain librarians, but, if you get them together in comfortable conditions, they entertain themselves right well.

In recent years, there has been no shortage of research on the enormous pressure women face to have children. Similarly, the pressures put on mothers and the impossibility for women to live up to the ideal standards of motherhood are increasingly the subject of scrutiny. However, a shadowy figure lurks in the cultural imagination: the woman who refuses to have a child, or worse, hates the children she has. If narratives of maternal distress, anxiety and regret represent ‘the last taboo’, then narratives of willful rejection exist even outside of those boundaries.

This chapter explores narratives of women who are villainised for their negative relationships to motherhood and mothering, in canonical texts of the Western Anglosphere culture. Drawing examples from the Bible, from Charles Dickens, and from the Disney corporation, Çakmak and Rumson demonstrate the variations and ongoing poignancy of the narrative that women who reject or fail to have children are evil.

Betta is the only person there to talk to when I get home. She is my family. (Field notes, May 9, 2007)I don't know what I want but the first thing I want is for my family to come to Canada because everyone in my class has their family in Canada. (Ji-Sook's letter to Santa, December 5, 2006)

It is expected that students enhance their awareness of businesses’ role in human rights protection as a key factor in their corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement and core objective achievement, as well as understand the effects of gender-based violence on organizational performance and identify and develop policies for a socially responsible strategic plan for effective communication with current and potential stakeholders.

The case of AFF Consulting Group in Mexico illustrates the challenges that firms face when doing business in an environment riddled with inequality and gender-based violence. The firm is challenged with developing a socially responsible strategic plan to ensure effective communication with stakeholders. The case has been developed as a narrative to demonstrate the intricacies of internal dynamics and discussions, which lead to strategic planning and decision-making.

The case study illustrates the challenges of business dynamics in an emerging market. It is applicable, especially, for undergraduate and graduate students in management studies related to CSR, ethics, human resources, collaborator management and human rights.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

Conversations around diversity, race and science fiction and fantasy films/television have sparked in response to recent casting decisions made in the upcoming live-action The Little Mermaid, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Star Wars' Obi-Wan Kenobi (Deggans, 2022; Romano, 2022). Backlash against casting of actors of Color in these genres highlights racial projects where a cultural memory of whiteness comes up against multicultural change. The authors of this paper feel that there is great potential in using current-day racial issues around fantasy films/television to explore these racial projects with students in social studies classes (Omi and Winant, 2014).

Using a qualitative textual analysis (Peräkylä, 2005), the authors examined online news media outlets addressing the casting of actors of Color in the aforementioned media pieces. After reviewing over twenty articles, the authors determined two major themes that would serve as the findings.

In this paper, themes of nostalgia for an imagined ‘way things were’ and future-based fears of how things will become emerged from the analysis, revealing a need for engaging students in the history of sci-fi and fantasy media, and the existing, diverse histories of storytelling featuring multiple races.

The authors argue that examining racial projects found in contemporary sci-fi and fantasy casting are chances for students to understand complex racial histories and how they blend into current-day cultural landscapes, and are opportunities to practice analysis of real-life racial histories and richly-imagined fantasy worlds, noticing how and why the two often collide when it comes to race.