About

Kimberly J. Lau is a scholar recognized for her transformative approach to fairy-tale studies, emphasizing the historical racial context that has profoundly influenced European fairy tales. Her work provides a meticulous historical and narrative analysis, contributing to a deeper understanding of racism within the European tale tradition. Lau's research has garnered significant recognition, including the prestigious 2025 Chicago Folklore Prize and the Brothers Grimm Society of North America Book Award, highlighting her influential contributions to the field. Her scholarship is praised for its literary litigation quality, offering a comprehensive reckoning of racial themes in fairy-tale narratives. As a professor, she is engaged in exploring the intersections of folklore, race, and history, advancing critical conversations within literary and cultural studies. Her work is considered essential for those seeking to understand the racial dimensions of European storytelling traditions.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Political Science
• History
• Gender studies
• Psychoanalysis
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Psychology
• Literature

Selected publications

• Monstrous Longings in the Age of Insurrection: A Twighlight Postmortem

  Utah State University Press eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychoanalysis
  • History
  • Psychology

  The University Press of Colorado, including the Utah State University Press imprint, publishes forty to forty-five new titles each year, with the goal of facilitating communication among scholars and providing the peoples of the state and region with a fair assessment of their histories, cultures, a

  PublisherDOI

• Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox

  2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art

  is a rich and enthralling marvel.On the surface, a series of interlaced adaptations of Bluebeard, Fitcher's Bird, Mr. Fox, and the ballad of Reynardine; beneath the surface, a teeming and provocative wonderland that opens those adaptations and their intertexts to the workings of gender and race, romance and desire, imperialism and geopolitics.The novel begins with a challenge: Mary Foxe, a muse conjured by the writer St. John Fox, appears after an extended absence, clearly no longer content to comply with the terms of his imagination.Boldly defiant, she returns to inspire not literary genius but a contest of narrative wills, a struggle for control of St. John's stories.At stake is his authorial identity, one Mary hopes to transform from villainous "serial killer," based on his pattern of killing off his female characters in gruesome and violent acts perpetrated by his purportedly sympathetic male characters, to more conscientious and thoughtful writer, more conscientious and thoughtful man (4).The precise terms of the challenge are never made clear to St. John, nor to the reader, but he consents to the game nonetheless, albeit with some trepidation, and that game structures the remainder of the novel as Mary and St. John narrate and renarrate, negotiate and renegotiate their own and each other's stories.Formally experimental, Mr. Fox is at times focalized through St. John, at times through Mary, and on occasion through St. John's wife, Daphne.While such fluctuations in perspective are not in themselves necessarily experimental, they become so in Mr. Fox as the focalizations shift and slip in

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• PowerThe Archaeology of a Genre

  2021-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Power is arguably the dominant analytic of our time. It has animated virtually all critical inquiry in the humanities and humanistic social sciences since the late twentieth century, and it continues to drive a great deal of contemporary scholarly, artistic, and cultural production. If such claims a

  PublisherDOI

• Fantasies of Femininity Redressed: Angela Carter’s Authorial Self-Fashioning

  Springer eBooks · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Art
  • Aesthetics
  PublisherDOI

• Of Genres and Geopolitics

  2019-03-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Narrative genres, like the fairy tale and the novel, are often caught up in geopolitical fantasies ranging from the national and imperial to the postcolonial and diasporic. This chapter explores temporality in the European fairy tale and the global novel as a critical register that not only facilitates the mutual adaptation of the two genres but also opens possibilities for their radical reinterpretation. It offers a reading of Karen King-Aribisala's The Hangman's Game, acutely punctuated by "Snow White," as an example of how the doubled motions and intercalated transformations of the European fairy tale and the global novel might enrich our sense of multiple histories in process. As hybrid narratives, the European-fairy-tale-as-global-novel and the global-novel-as-European-fairy-tale disturb each other's traditional genre boundaries and ultimately expose the geopolitical dimensions of their production. The European fairy-tale's formulaic structure provides certain cohesion to the genre that suggests the universality of individual tale types.

  PublisherDOI

• The Vampire, the Queer, and the Girl: Reflections on the Politics and Ethics of Immortality’s Gendering

  Signs · 2018-08-13 · 106 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article reads Neil Jordan’s 2012 film Byzantium as a bridge between two distinct vampire vogues: one nineteenth century, masculinist, and queer; the other twenty-first century, heterosexualized, and focalized through the girl. In general, the vampire challenges chrononormativity, both because he enjoys a fantastic immortality and is associated with queerness and because the very genre of which he is a part is highly formulaic and intertextual, which produces a recursive form. This recursivity means that the vampire is perpetually defined by an open secret, the characteristic disjuncture between what the audience already knows and what the characters cannot see; for characters and readers in the know, this open secret also condenses codes of queer recognition. Byzantium, as the hinge between the two vampire vogues, uses the figure of the girl to play with both the vampire narrative’s reiterative history and the vampire’s open secret in ways that simultaneously draw out the gendered limitations of the first vogue’s queer resistance to chrononormativity and recuperate the second vogue’s purported depoliticization. In so doing, the film challenges the implicit heteronormativity of mortality and encourages a rethinking of immortality as an ethical project.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What Goes Around Comes Around:

  Utah State University Press eBooks · 2017-08-15 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Masculinity and Melancholia at the Virtual End: Leaving the World (of Warcraft)

  differences · 2017-12-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Avatar suicide videos ritualize an avatar’s final exit from the virtual world. Focusing on such videos in the context of World of Warcraft, this essay argues first that the avatar-player relationship produces a fluid subjectivity; then, drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of melancholy gender, the author contends that this subjectivity enables a recognition of the same-sex love and desire prohibited by heterosexist culture through an enactment of its loss. As such, avatar suicide videos dramatize death in order to create an important space of public grieving in which the cultural prohibitions against such recognition and mourning might be suspended. Disrupting norms of aggressive heteromasculinity in dominant gamer culture, these videos might help us imagine alternative ways of living with melancholy gender.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Imperial Marvels: Race and the Colonial Imagination in the Fairy Tales of Madame d'Aulnoy

  Narrative Culture · 2016-01-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article reads Madame d’Aulnoy’s late seventeenth-century contes de fées against a cultural backdrop shaped by nascent ideas and ideologies of “race” as informed by early European exploration and travel and by France’s expanding colonial empire. Although colonization has been largely excluded from dominant paradigms of early modern French culture, recent scholarship suggests that it nonetheless figures prominently in the cultural imagination of the period. Building on this scholarship and its attention to the colonial underpinnings of key cultural debates of the early modern period, this article excavates the traces of emergent racial logics in d’Aulnoy’s contes de fées—expressed in the fantastic landscapes of the European imperial imagination, in the ethnographic descriptions of les sauvages in the French Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France (Jesuit Relations) and other travel writings, in the New World colonial policies of assimilation and Frenchification, and in the early racial typologies beginning to circulate at the end of the seventeenth century. Through these readings, I argue that d’Aulnoy’s contes de fées provide a particularly compelling example of the centrality of race to the development of the fairy tale as a literary genre despite a long genealogy that has completely overlooked its significance.

  PublisherDOI

• Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy by Anne E. Duggan (review)

  Marvels & Tales · 2016-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy. By Anne E. Duggan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013. 195 pp.Anne Duggan's Queer Enchantments is an innovative reading of Jacques Demy's cinema in relationship to the fairy tale and an analysis of how that relationship contributes to a queer sensibility and camp aesthetic that distinguishes Demy from other French New Wave auteurs; it also opens up new possibilities for our understanding of the fairy tale. Attending to both the fairy tale and melodramatic film from the perspective of genre-as opposed simply to narrative and thematic content-Duggan illustrates how the two simultaneously collaborate with and challenge each other in Demy's fairy-tale films to generate productive spaces for his multidimensional social critiques, which she interprets within and against the historical backdrop of post-World War II France. Throughout, Duggan returns to the conjoined questions of what the fairy tale might tell us about Demy's films and what Demy's films might tell us about the fairy tale. As such, Queer Enchantments fills the scholarly lacunae that result from a critical tendency to overlook or ignore the importance of the fairy tale to Demy's oeuvre in particular and to film history more generally, and from the marginalization of queer theory in fairy-tale studies.In four richly detailed and insightful chapters that focus on Lola (1961), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Donkeyskin (1970), The Pied Piper (1972), and Lady Oscar (1979), Duggan significantly expands current scholarship on fairy tales and film, which tends toward considerations of filmic adaptations and the implications of such adaptations for fairy-tale studies. Duggan's extensive and nuanced close readings, on the other hand, are grounded in formal analysis. By privileging film as a medium, Duggan goes well beyond typical scholarly discussions of fairy-tale films that understand them simply as contemporary versions of tales and, as a result, center on questions of narrative and thematic adaptation without addressing the cultural and theoretical work that film itself might facilitate.In her chapter on Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, for example, Duggan discusses Demy's strategic use of color to intensify each film's relationship to melodrama and thus its cultural messages about fairy-tale dreams and the realities of oppressive gender constraints; at the same time, Duggan argues, color also emphasizes the gradual process of capitulation to social norms in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and the ways such submission renders women invisible. More specifically, Duggan points out that as Genevieve slowly consents to her mother's pressures to conform to hegemonic ideals, the color of her clothing clashes less and less with her mother's clothing and environment until they are represented through the same palette. In one particularly telling scene, the pattern of Genevieve's dress perfectly matches the wallpaper in her mother's home, rendering her completely invisible. Along these lines, Duggan further suggests that the claustrophobia of French bourgeois society-a central theme in both of these films and one that Demy chafes against in all of the films in Duggan's archive-is represented by Demy's use of iris-in and irisout (17) to tightly frame and contain the action in Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Color, music, temporality (represented through slow and accelerated motion), technical framing shots (iris-in and iris-out, the creation of proscenium arches through long shots), and character staging in relation to props are just a few of the formal qualities that Duggan reads in relation to each film's thematic content and Demy's specific sociopolitical and historical critique. …

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Frequent coauthors

• Stephen D. Winick

  Library of Congress

  2 shared

• Peter Tokofsky

  2 shared

• Barre Toelken

  1 shared

• Pauline Greenhill

  1 shared

• Teri Brewer

  Film Independent

  1 shared

• Norma E. Cantú

  1 shared

• Margaret A. Mills

  1 shared

• Rosan A. Jordan

  1 shared