Article

Queerness in Adaptation: Constructions of Sexuality and Identity in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946) and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991)

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Abstract

Fairy tales are powerful tools of socialisation where, often, identity is of some thematic significance. In this regard, this essay analyses how Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946) and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) differentially depict their characters – being la Bête/the Beast, Belle, Avenant/Gaston, and their primary relations – in connection to normative sexual and gendered ideas of each film’s time of production. In this essay, I argue that the characters are depicted in a variety of relations to these ideas, in which they exhibit varying degrees of Otherness, as well as representing and parodying normative masculinity. This is done through an examination of the role of sexuality and the manner in which desire manifests in each film, how alternative notions of sexuality are depicted in reference to a heteronormative social order, as well as the presentation of the relationship between la Bête/the Beast and Avenant/Gaston, which, I argue, constitutes a homosocial rivalry. Furthermore, this essay will discuss the performance of gender in each film, the different types of masculinities and femininities that are represented therein, and a certain notion of “over performance”; this, I argue, subverts both the traditions of the fairy tale insofar as they pertain to identity, as well as the cultural associations established in the mind/body dualistic account.

Keywords: Beauty and the Beast, queer reading, gender performance, compulsory heterosexuality, desire, othering

How to Cite:

Anderson, Jake. ‘Queerness in Adaptation: Constructions of Sexuality and Identity in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête (1946) and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991)’. Policeman’s Helmet Soup [Dublin, Ireland], vol. 1, no. 1, 2026, pp. 24–39, https://phsjournal.ie/article/pubid/49/.