The Girl in the Forest: Medievalism as Feminist Imaginary Chantal Bourgault du Coudray Once upon a time, I was three years old, and I loved to dress up in the Little Red Riding Hood cape that my mother sewed especially for me. This photograph was taken in the backyard of my parents’ home in Australia. The setting, with its square of lawn surrounded by a corrugated asbestos fence, is iconically suburban. But the red cape speaks of another world entirely: a medieval world of wolves and forests that I inhabited in my imagination. In this photograph, I am the archetypal “good girl”; ready to follow the path and head straight to Grandma’s house without any dallying. But as I grew up, I discovered feminist thought, and the temptations of wolves, and eventually wrote a book about werewolves in popular culture. 1 Given this subsequent history, it is impossible for me to view this photograph from my past without also seeing my present and future; in the words of Catherine Clément, it is one of those memories that “contains seeds of the future that one finds retroactively”. 2 It therefore seems a suitable image to introduce this essay, which explores the ways in which certain strands of feminist thought and writing have found seeds of the future in the medieval period. Just as I find myself interpreting this photograph in terms of my personal narrative of becoming, feminist thinkers have sometimes looked to the medieval period in order to explore broader sociocultural processes of becoming. In this essay I examine some of the strategies and effects of such intersections between feminism and the medieval, coalescing my findings around the figure of Little Red Riding Hood, who has a knack for bringing the agendas of both feminism and medievalism to a popular, and international, audience. This essay had its genesis in my invitation to speak at a symposium on medievalism. Although I am not a medievalist, the invitation prompted me to consider what might be termed the medievalist strategies of feminist thought; strategies that are abundantly evident in an influential article by Susan Bordo. Bordo has been a significant contributor to the fields of feminist philosophy and feminist cultural studies, and her work has largely traced the systematic