“Fitcher’s [Queer] Bird”: A Fairy-Tale Heroine and Her Avatars

The heroine of “Fitcher’s Bird” is a perverse self-creation, smart, a dandy, and a trickster with three avatars—sisters, skull, and bird. Her self-rescuing transvestism, ending evil and patriarchy, involves disguise as a fantastic, possibly androgynous bird. In a reading indebted to Luce Irigaray’s critique of patriarchal psychoanalysis, I reflect on the tale’s implicit criticism of the notion of the mirror stage, and on its transgressive representation of women. I undermine the Freudian and Lacanian reliance upon the visual—and, indeed, upon the presumptively male gaze—in a turn with Irigaray and Monique Wittig to feeling, the tactile.