Maléfica (—): The powerful woman who rejects the feminine role

Maleficent, the "witch" of Sleeping Beauty, is one of the most imposing villains ever animated: tall, angular, androgynous, horned and black-caped, mistress of her own kingdom and of a power no one granted her. For queer criminology, she embodies the feminine variant of the coded villain —distinct from Scar or Jafar, but from the same stock—. Her defining trait is not effeminacy, but the rejection of the normative feminine role: Maleficent has no husband, no children, seeks neither love nor domesticity. She is sovereign, celibate, self-sufficient, and her power is in no man's service. And the film writes exactly that —that refusal to occupy the place of wife and mother— as the mark of her evil.

// The theoryUntamed feminine power as threat

Queer coding, as Buist and Lenning work it, is not limited to male effeminacy: it includes every transgression of the gender norm. Maleficent transgresses the feminine norm. Against the princesses —young, docile, marriage-oriented— and against the maternal fairy godmothers, she is the woman who stepped out of the mold: androgynous in design, sovereign in power, indifferent to motherhood and romantic love. Patriarchal culture codes that untamed feminine power as unnatural, and fiction translates it into villainy. Here queer criminology joins hands with feminist criminology: both reveal that the woman who does not submit to her assigned role has been labeled, again and again, as witch, as monster, as deviant. Maleficent is not evil for what she does; she is presented as evil for what she refuses to be.

// The crackNeither deny the coding, nor flatten every female villain

The crack would be to deny that Maleficent's androgyny and sovereignty are coded as a threat —the angular design, the deliberate absence of any maternal trait and the contrast with the domestic fairies belie it—. The opposite crack is to declare that every powerful female villain is automatically a case of queer coding, when sometimes she is just an antagonist archetype. The honest reading distinguishes: in Maleficent the rejection of the gender role is deliberately written as the root of her evil, and that is the trope in action. It is not about canceling Maleficent —indeed, modern rereadings have rehumanized her as victim, not monster—, but about recognizing the cultural pattern that punished the sovereign woman with the label of witch, in order to stop reproducing it.

// The reappropriationFrom uninvited witch to wronged fairy

Maleficent's origin in Sleeping Beauty (Disney, 1959, based on the tale by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm) is, literally, a wrong: not being invited to the christening of Princess Aurora. The curse on the spindle —that the girl will prick her finger and fall into a death-like sleep— is born of that public exclusion, of a social snub. There is already the germ of a criminological reading: a powerful woman who is humiliated by being left out of the respectable circle, and whose response is cataloged as pure evil without attending to the offense that set it off. The figure of the fairy turned witch condenses centuries of cultural ambivalence toward the woman with knowledge and power of her own: healer or poisoner, godmother or curse, as the story that judges her sees fit.

The film Maleficent (2014), starring Angelina Jolie, is the canonical example of feminist reappropriation of the character. The film rewrites the wrong as something far more brutal —an intimate betrayal and a mutilation (the theft of her wings) that functions as a recognizable metaphor for sexual violence—, and shifts the focus from the villain to the trauma that produced her. The "true love's kiss" ceases to be romantic and heterosexual and becomes maternal: it is the bond between Maleficent and Aurora, and not a prince, that breaks the spell. With this, the modern revision rehumanizes the figure the original condemned, and turns her from monster into victim and agent of her own story, in line with the rereading that critical and feminist criminology proposes for so many "witches."

This rereading links with the queer coding of the Disney villain without forcing it. Maleficent belongs to the same iconic family as Ursula, Scar or Jafar: figures whose difference from the norm —of gender, of desire, of how they occupy power— is drawn as a threat. In her case, the androgyny of the design, the sovereignty without a man and the deliberate absence of motherhood mark her as "other" before any act. Search terms like queer coding Disney villains, feminist reappropriation of Maleficent or the witch as the woman who will not submit all point to the same pattern: popular culture has used the archetype of the non-normative woman or queer person as shorthand for evil, and the critical work consists of naming that pattern in order to stop reproducing it. The 2014 Maleficent does not erase the 1959 one: she answers it, and in doing so reveals how much prejudice there was in the first.