Elena Aldunate’s “Sleeping Beauty”: countertext and role reversal

Abstract

This article proposes an analytical and interpretative reading of the story “Sleeping Beauty”, by Elena Aldunate, considering its ascription to science fiction and its co-dependence with a corpus of children’s stories and with the Greek myth of Selene. This reading is based both on the characteristics of the alluded intertexts and on the narrative modifications introduced by the author. It is postulated that, unlike the children’s stories, the expression of the interactions of biological gender and grammatical gender have been inverted, in order to question the binary sociocultural roles in the configuration of the masculine and feminine principles of the tradition.