“OFF WITH HER HEAD!”: WHEN FEMALE POWER BECOMES TRANSGRESSION

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the representation of the Queen of Hearts in Tim Burton's film Alice in Wonderland (2010) as an immobile figure of tensions between gender, power, and authority. Based on the cinematic reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll's work, the study examines how the imagery of Wonderland was constructed from the perspective of contemporary sensibilities, marked by identity fragmentation and the aestheticizing of exaggeration. From this perspective, the Queen of Hearts ceases to be a simple caricature of tyranny and becomes a metaphor for social fear in the face of women occupying positions of power. Her excessiveness, theatricality, and hyperbolic violence are understood as critical parodies of patriarchal power structures, revealing how the sovereign feminine continues to be represented as a threat to the symbolic order. Thus, Burton transforms the Queen's villainy into a distorted mirror of the very authoritarian logic he seeks to satirize, articulating aesthetics and politics in the construction of a visual discourse on power and difference. The chapter, therefore, proposes a reading of the film as a hermeneutic device capable of rethinking the boundaries between authority and subversion, reaffirming the critical potential of cinema as a genre language.