This paper engages introductory IR textbooks via a folklorist reading of tropes associated with the fairytale Donkeyskin . This approach engages the ways in which textbooks define and delimit a canon of the discipline by using fairytales to uncover rhetorical, narrative and other striking resemblances to non-IR modes of expression. The paper contributes to the literature in world politics and popular culture by looking at how the way in which we tell the story of IR is an exercise in constructing a canon of ‘the discipline.’ I argue Donkeyskin’s story of fleeing an impossible dilemma resembles narratives in IR textbooks in which textbooks both present metatheoretical standards/aspirations for the discipline and claim the discipline has historically failed to achieve these aspirations. I conclude that because the standards are contradictory, textbook narratives offer only one option to students: flee conversations about metatheory and the standards which define and demarcate the discipline.
