flor_cejka

I saw this book on a princess display in a bookstore, and I wanted to like it, but in paging through it I was too off-put by a lot of the representations of non-white princesses (it felt sort of like tokenizing/exoticizing) to want to read the whole thing. It also perpetuates various problematic gender/sexuality assumptions. For example, princesses become queens by marrying (not by, for example, inheriting in their own right, my best friend pointed out). There is mention that some princesses stay princesses their whole lives, in a way that's presented as value-neutral, but it comes right after a statement that implies becoming a queen is equivalent to becoming a grown-up (getting to wear makeup -- which is its own set of problematics), which I feel undercuts that message. There are some strong princesses, and I love the "Prince S." page (trans twins ftw!), but on the whole the book just made me too uncomfortable to recommend it.

2022-11-14 18:29