This Is Why I Perform

August 24, 2013 in Dance | No comments

I love to perform for a number of reasons. I enjoy the challenge of coming up with new dance routines (I hesitate to say “choreographies” because I prefer improvisation to memorization); I like the rush of being on stage in front of people; and, yes, I dig the attention that I get when I perform. I can see the confidence and skills I gain from performing dance translating into other areas of my life, too: it makes me a better public speaker and teacher, among other things. And my ability to improvise in general, not just with movements, has improved as well.Duet (me & Maria)

But there’s another reason I perform, a major one: I perform in order to reach out to people and demonstrate that anyone can dance.

This was brought home to me at a recent performance I did at a variety show as part of a convention. I had a little trouble reading the crowd, since they hadn’t been properly socialized on how to act as a belly dance audience (we love it when our audiences make a lot of noise – clapping, cheering, anything really!). So I did my best with my belly dance and hula hoop pieces, and smiled, and emoted, and generally had a good time. Enough people afterward complimented me that I figure it was just a quiet crowd, and it’s not like I horribly bombed or anything.

One woman came up to talk to me afterward, though, and said something that just about broke my heart. She said that as a child, she’d loved to dance while she was home alone. She’d turn off the TV, turn on the radio, and dance by herself for hours. But when her parents came home, they turned off the radio, turned the TV back on, and effectively prevented her from dancing any more. As she described this to me, she used the metaphor of a flower that wilts when it doesn’t get any sunlight. And she went on to say that she never danced much after that because she didn’t have the right body type, didn’t have money for classes, and so on.

I looked at her and said, “You can dance. Anyone can dance!” She expressed uncertainty about her age (40s or so), and I said that one of my collaborators has beautiful silver hair and is still dancing (she’s dancing with me in the picture at the top of this post). I gave her my card and told her to look me up, or get in touch so that I could recommend other teachers in the area for her.

It saddens me that people internalize the false message that they can’t dance because they don’t have the right body type, or because they didn’t start lessons early enough, or whatever. It’s not like I’ve been training in some conservatory since I was three years old – I just practice, a lot, because I prioritize dancing in my life. I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to fully go pro, but that’s fine – again, I do it because I love it, and because I get something out of it, and because it helps me spread the message that anyone can try this and pick it up and enjoy it.

If someone decides to give dancing a try because they saw me performing, I’ll take that as the ultimate compliment. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when people praise my technique or costuming or anything along those lines – but to be an inspiration? Totally one of the best things ever.

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Opposing “Women for Academic Freedom”

July 31, 2013 in Academia, Feminism | No comments

A friend brought to my attention this letter by an anonymous group, calling itself Women for Academic Freedom, claiming that a critique of a soon-to-be-published book’s transphobic aspects is actually part of a well-orchestrated attempt by transgendered folks to oppress women. More than they’re already oppressed. Or something.

If that’s what academic freedom looks like, I don’t want any part in it.

Academic freedom does not mean that you get to invent agendas or twist facts to your liking. It should not mean that you get to target a minority group and then blame them for your own problems. It should also not mean that you twist feminism to be a rallying cry in the oppression of others.

According to the CDC, transgender people are among the highest risk groups for HIV infection. This round-up of transgender murder statistics suggests that transgender people are far more likely to be murdered than cis-gendered people (though by how much is difficult to determine, as this is a population often forced to work underground, so statistics can be hard to come by). More stats on physical and sexual violence can be found here.

Somehow the “Women for Academic Freedom” seem to have not noticed any of these truths about how much violence and hardship transgendered people face on a daily basis. It makes me suspect that they’re not, in the end, very good at research. It also looks as though they’ve bought into a zero sum game, similar to what we folklorists like to call a limited-good worldview: the idea that there’s only so much “good” (whether wealth or good luck or general prosperity) to go around in a given community, and thus anyone who’s able to get a piece of the pie is automatically depriving someone else of theirs. Paying attention to the struggles of transgender people need not detract from feminist concerns about the oppression of women.

If anything, this is a rehashing of the old “can a feminist really choose to be a stay-at-home mom?” debate. The important thing, from my rather third-wave vantage point, is that feminism encourages women to choose their own life paths, regardless of whether they’re engaging in a traditionally feminine pursuit or not. What matters is that they’re able to choose it, in a more-or-less unconstrained manner (and I know, we could sit and debate all day about whether any choice in a patriarchal context is unconstrained, but hopefully, eventually, all people, both men and women, will be able to make choices outside unduly coercive situations). And really, I thought we’d gotten over this question – but here it is again, rehashed in a new setting. These “Women for Academic Freedom” seem to be saying, “But those terrible transpeople are adhering to rigid gender roles, which are exactly what we radical feminists are trying to destroy, so that they can no longer oppress women!” Um, people, let’s try this again: it doesn’t matter whether you’re choosing to do something masculine or feminine, whether it’s a woman choosing to stay at home with kids or go out working or try both, or whether it’s a person choosing their gender identity to conform to given gender roles or not… it’s the same debate.

Prescriptive gender roles suck for many people, so let’s simply accept it when people choose to embrace any and all aspects of a gender role, whether or not it’s the one they were assigned at birth. Let’s encourage people to figure out what works for them as individuals, in this weird world of conflicting messages and multiple waves of feminism and lots of backlash against both feminists and non-gendered-conforming individuals. Why can’t we see that this is the same struggle, to police identities?

This excellent Shakesville post already refuted most of the point that the “Women for Academic Freedom” tried to make in their letter. It’s a stellar post, so you should go read it. In case you don’t, however, here are two of my favorite paragraphs:

Simply put, ignoring the lived experiences of trans* folk, sweeping aside the violence they live with, the employment discrimination, the fear that can accompany something as simple as going to the bathroom or shopping for clothes, or all the million other ways that trans* folk are treated as less than? That’s wrong. Trying to teach students that they should hate and fear fellow students, teachers, loved ones, colleagues, who happen to be trans* men and women, is wrong. Re-centering discussions about trans* issues to focus on a relatively privileged group, cis women, is wrong. I know readers of this space know this, but it cannot be said enough.

But academic freedom (although it is far from perfectly applied) is supposed to work both ways. It protects the right to cover trans* issues accurately in class. It protects the right for professors to be trans* activists and allies off-campus and on. For trans* academics, to make their voices heard, and for cis academics to support them. That’s what academic freedom is supposed to do, and by Maude, I will be using mine as much as I can.

Academic freedom is not about teaching hate. It should be about teaching rigorous research skills, and spreading knowledge, and showing students how to sift through facts in order to reach a bigger picture, even knowing that there are often multiple interpretations of a given situation, and no single one may be the only right one.

I’m learning how to become a trans ally, which in no way conflicts with my feminism, or my academic freedom. That’s part of why I write about this stuff, to hopefully promote tolerance, and encourage people to think about the ideas they’ve been indoctrinated with (and I include myself in that category, as I don’t doubt that my cis-gendered privilege sometimes gets in the way of me seeing the actual risks and realities of trans issues).

I engage with trans issues with little risk to myself, which is an indication of the privilege I as a cis-gendered person hold. For an intelligent, compelling rumination on what it is to engage with risk and teach (trans)gender from a sociology perspective, check out this guest post at Conditionally Accepted. I highly, highly recommend it.

And in the meantime, let’s all keep fighting for an academic freedom that doesn’t invent enemies and further the oppression of already-struggling groups, eh?

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In Praise of Oversharing

July 24, 2013 in Feminism | No comments

As someone who wears the “blogger” hat quite frequently, I always wonder how much sharing constitutes oversharing. Does my audience really need to know if I’m feeling cranky and bloated because I’m on my period, or that I made yet another batch of jam with farmers market berries, or that I’ve been lifting weights for X number of consecutive weeks and I’m happy with the results? On a less formal level than blogging, do I write about these things on my Facebook, to keep my faraway friends and family appraised of how I’m doing?

After giving it some thought, I’ve decided that yes, I’m in favor of what might be considered by some to be oversharing. There are both personal and political reasons for this.

On the personal front, I was raised in a household that was very tolerant of difference. We held (and continue to hold) some rather non-conformist values, and I was exposed to multiple cultures at an early age (it helps when your mom is an art teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, working primarily with mentally handicapped high-schoolers). As my parents took me and my sister on various trips, we wandered through art museum after art museum, and later ventured to Europe. It became incredibly obvious that what is considered polite or appropriate varies by subculture and by region. This awareness of how arbitrary social norms are influences me to want to challenge them on principle, to push people to see if they realize whether their responses are due to socially conditioning or individually held values (as though it were easy to distinguish between the two!).

I’m a firm believer in respecting other people’s boundaries, whether we’re talking about giving consent for intimate acts or social interactions. And yet I see no reason to artificially enforce cultural norms that are arbitrary to the point of being silly. Don’t get me wrong, my parents raised me to be polite – but I will bring up politicized issues like the way women’s bodies are treated in our culture, from advertising to fat-shaming, at every opportunity. I will also include my own personal experiences in these conversations. If that kind of oversharing offends you, well, you’d better own that and tell me so, because I’ll respect your boundaries – but you need to be self-aware enough to set them in the first place.

This leads us into my political reasons for oversharing. I hinted at them above, when listing activities that some people might not care to hear about, whether thinking they’re extraneous or icky. What did all those descriptions have in common? They relate to bodies: eating and cooking bodies, menstruating bodies, exercising bodies. As I’ve discussed over at MySexProfessor.com, dualism is an insidious Western mentality that separates minds from bodies, valuing the mental over the physical, the rational over the passionate, and the masculine over the feminine. By talking so much about my body and related activities, I open myself to various kinds of criticism: that I spend too much time in the physical world and not enough in the mental realm that as an academic I’m supposed to inhabit; that I am shallow; that I am vain. The gendered dimensions of dualism make it clear that women are more likely to be aligned with the body than men are, resulting in our devaluing and degradation.

So I share about my life in a small gesture of resistance to the prevalence of dualism. I share about my life in order to say yes, I’m a woman, and yes, I happen to be extraordinarily intelligent, but I do not neglect my physical existence, and if you have a problem with that, well, you should work on those unconscious biases of yours while I’m over here busily (and happily) living my life.

There’s another reason that I share, sometimes to the point of oversharing. I’m painfully aware that people like me did not and do not always have a voice. Very few written records of historical women’s daily experiences exist. Those that do are, in European history at least, overwhelmingly noble (as not many lower-class women could read or write). Other people at the margins of society – gays and lesbians and transfolks, people of color in white-dominated societies, and so on – have also been voiceless and powerless in many situations, throughout many centuries. This makes me angry. I know that our oppressions and struggles are not equal or symmetrical, but I’m angry nonetheless. I’m angry that our experiences get lost and neglected because literacy and education are not yet considered universal human rights. I’m angry that history was written by the victors, most of whom were wealthy, Christian, heterosexual, monogamous, cis-gendered, neurotypical, European white men. I’m angry that even with the wealth of information at my fingertips thanks to the Internet, I still won’t be able to learn about what women’s lives were like in historical periods when men’s lives, and the lives of the rich, and the religious upper castes, were the sole ones being documented.

As a folklorist, I believe in the transformative power of personal narratives, those stories we tell based on our experiences. I want to see everyone’s lives documented. We all have stories, and those stories are treasures.

As a feminist, I want to see women, women’s lives, and women’s experiences and stories valued at least as much as those of men. I want to see that for all oppressed peoples no matter why they’re being oppressed, whether it’s skin color or religion or social class or sexuality or gender identity or nationality or (dis)ability.

So I share about my life. Sometimes I overshare. I broadcast it to the world, documenting it on the screen and in pen and ink. Maybe these small acts of resistance matter as such, and maybe they don’t, maybe they border on solipsism and narcissism. But I share because I know there are people like me living right now who cannot. Because if I’d been born perhaps one century ago, and definitely two or three centuries or more ago, I would not have been able to document my life.

Again and again, I return to the feminist slogan “the personal is political.” And yet I long for a day when it will no longer be useful. Perhaps documenting lives, even to the point of oversharing, is a step that will help us imagine that future.

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Process, Revision, Meaning, and Fairy Tales

June 28, 2013 in Academia, Fairy Tales | 1 comment

"Donkeyskin" by Nadezhda IllarionovaI recently had occasion to celebrate a new article being published, my “Sorting Out Donkey Skin (ATU 510B): Toward an Integrative Literal-Symbolic Analysis of Fairy Tales” (which you can read on the Cultural Analysis website for free). That project has been in the works for a while, over a decade at this point. I thought I’d share not only the link to the article, but also a piece that I wrote to accompany my MA thesis (also on this topic) which I submitted in 2007 as part of my coursework in folklore at Indiana University. It’s more personal and process-oriented than most of my scholarship, so I thought it might be an interesting read. Certainly some of my views have evolved since then, but such is life.

So sit back, relax, and get ready for some vintage 2007 writing.

My involvement with ATU 510B, “Donkeyskin,” began in 2002, when I enrolled in Alan Dundes’s “Folk Narrative” class at UC Berkeley, where I was working toward a bachelor’s in folklore (technically, my degree would be in “Interdisciplinary Studies Field” with a concentration in folklore, as there was no undergraduate degree in folklore at Berkeley, just a master’s degree). Professor Dundes gave a lecture midway through the semester about the Electra complex in “Donkeyskin,” which thoroughly infuriated me. Where he saw a psychological attachment between father and daughter in the tale, I saw incestuous abuse. I resolved to write a research paper on the topic, and Professor Dundes heartily encouraged me to do so when I visited him in office hours. Despite my feminist leanings, in that first paper on ATU 510B, “The Problematic Electra Complex vs. Realities of Abuse: Psychoanalytic and Literal Approaches to ‘Donkeyskin’ (AT 510B),” I concluded that psychological and literal approaches to the tale were complementary. In fact, it seemed odd to me that most scholars tended to view the tale from only the one angle or the other, when both approaches had powerful explanatory appeal. This paper is included in Appendix A.

I revisited my research on ATU 510B in 2004. That spring, among the last classes I took at Berkeley were Alan Dundes’s “Psychological Approaches to Folklore” and Andreas Johns’s class on the fairy tale. I expanded my work on ATU 510B, the result being a paper double the length of the first one, titled “If the Interpretation Fits: Psychoanalytic and Literal Approaches to Father-Daughter Incest in AT 510B” (see Appendix B). I referred to more versions of the tale in my analysis, and brought in more theoretical references as well. I also presented my research on ATU 510B at two conferences that year, one version of the paper at the California Folklore Society meeting in Northridge, California in the spring, and the other version at the American Folklore Society meeting at Salt Lake City. I include the latter paper, “If the Interpretation Fits: Symbolic and Literal Approaches to Father-Daughter Incest Fairy Tales,” here as well (see Appendix C).

Those three prior versions of my work on ATU 510B represent different phases of my thinking about not only the tale itself, but also the interpretation process. I started out with the aim to demonstrate that a feminist perspective was necessary to supplement the lacks of a psychoanalytic perspective, but I was unable to completely discard the insights of psychoanalysis, despite its sexist biases. When I began to revise my research, I wanted to explore the spectrum of meanings available within different versions of the tale. I was still interested in the gap between psychological and feminist interpretations, but I wanted to expand the frame of the paper. Hence the shift in the title from psychoanalytic and feminist terms to symbolic and literal terms. The readings I’ve done in psychoanalysis have thoroughly influenced me here, for I first encountered the terms “manifest” and “latent” in psychoanalytic literature. That fairy tales should have both manifest and latent levels of meaning is evident; but how to access these multiple meanings?

Influenced by my classes at Indiana University in folklore as well as gender studies, I began to think about how texts “mean.” Intertextuality, performativity, and other postmodern concepts inspired me to explore the polysemous nature of texts (and also to put more things in the plural and in parentheses than possibly ought to be). I realized that there never was and never would be only one meaning for anything, so why should ATU 510B be treated as a homogenous phenomenon? I also had the opportunity to write articles for The Encyclopedia of Folk and Fairy Tales (forthcoming from Greenwood Press), which, particularly the ones on psychological approaches to folklore, gender, and incest, got me thinking about the frames through which we approach fairy tales.

Like any type of cultural performance or art form with historical ties as well as symbolic content, traditional elements as well as innovative ones, fairy tales fulfill multiple functions, ranging from entertainment and education to political instrumentalization. Fairy tales also provide flexible discursive spaces in which prevailing norms can be debated and alternative identities can be explored. However, fairy tales are also mirrors, to put it simply. I discuss this oft-used metaphor in the “Interpretive Methodologies” section of my thesis paper, for it continues to fascinate me and be useful for thinking. The interesting thing about the mirror metaphor is that it is visually oriented, like much of Western culture, and also that it implies that an objective reality exists, or at least that viewer and viewed, subject and object, are separate. I believe that the prevalence of the mirror metaphor in scholarship is one reason why fairy-tale scholarship has been so one-dimensional, focusing only on one version of a tale, or only on one interpretive frame, and so on. While the mirror metaphor is poetic and can be helpful in explaining why the interpreter or listener or reader of a fairy tale continually sees in the tale what she desires to see, I believe that fairy tales must be approached as more complex than mirrors. Moreover, interpreters must become aware of the perspectives that they bring with them to the interpretive act, for these perspectives may impose a frame upon the materials. This framing process is not necessarily artificial, for fairy tales are multiply framed texts to begin with, but it means that extra caution must be taken if one intends to make theoretical statements about fairy tales.

The purpose of this paper, then, is not only to revise my prior writings on ATU 510B into some publishable form in order to bolster my academic career, but also to get my ideas out there and start some dialogue about how we look at fairy tales (and texts in general). I am excited to get to talk about one of my favorite fairy tales at length, for I take genuine pleasure in working with these materials, but I’m also thrilled at the idea of proposing a syncretic approach to fairy tales that might be interesting and useful to other scholars. This dual purpose—to provide an interpretation of ATU 510B as well as provide a theoretical framework for interpretation in general—was my goal from the inception of this project. However, I have trouble with the revision process, so this project took me longer than I’d anticipated. The theoretical framing of the first few sections was the most difficult; once I got into the interpretation, I was able to coast. A good chunk of this paper is simply interpretation of ATU 510B. I believe that this is as it should be with folkloristic scholarship, for theories without data are just about as unsatisfying as data without theories (channeling Dundes with that statement, perhaps).

Throughout the revision process, I learned about my style of scholarship in an archaeological fashion. The earliest version of this paper was too heavy in quotes and clunky passages, indicating my insecurities as a younger scholar. I sought validation by letting others speak for me, and I hadn’t really found my voice yet. Then, in the second version of this paper, I let my own voice appear more in the text, but I still quoted other scholars quite extensively. I looked for everything that had ever been written on ATU 510B, in part because Professor Dundes had trained us to do exhaustive research on a topic before writing about it in order to avoid repeating what’s already been said, and in part because I wanted to write something authoritative on ATU 510B. Now, I look back and wonder why in order for a paper to be authoritative it must reference everything else on the subject. How much must we demonstrate familiarity with texts within a discipline in order to achieve competence, and by whose standards? Is this an issue of respect towards one’s elders, or is it fueled by a tradition of learning by example? I’m not saying that I regret doing all the reading and synthesizing that I did, nor that scholars should write about a topic without thoroughly researching it first. Rather, I’m wondering why that approach was so thoroughly ingrained in me, and why I clung so fervently to it for so long. I wonder, too, why it was so important to me to write something “authoritative” on a given tale. What baggage comes with the notion of authoritative writing? The attractive position of being an author, surely, as well as being an authority on a subject. But with authority comes the danger of silencing and excluding other perspectives.

This is what I struggle with in regard to fairy tales, and folklore in general: the desire to say something true and important about these texts and phenomena, weighed against the knowledge that truth is relative, everything is subjective, and Western epistemologies for learning and meaning-making are very skewed. I seek validation as an academic—hence my earlier phase of excessive quotation, which I still catch myself doing sometimes—even as I recognize that academic thought is based upon concepts that are grounded in and create historical inequalities, such as Cartesian mind-body dualism, sexism and essentialism, and Judeo-Christian hierarchies. So my work is, in part, about challenging and changing the system from within.

Another aspect of my engagement with fairy tales within academia is the attempt to understand culture and the human condition from one particular angle. As ambitious as I am, I have to accept that I have limits, and I cannot possibly hope to study everything about culture. Instead, I can limit my scope and go deeper into meanings. Fairy tales resonate very deeply with me, and also with the myriad others who read them, write them, and write about them. These transforming and transformative narratives may only comprise one tiny part of culture, a felicitous conjunction of oral and literary traditions and innovations, yet they are also sites where cultural change and conflict, gender issues, and means of production and privilege interact. Fairy tales are artistic expressions of communal and individual concerns, using fictional and formulaic structures, with flexible vocabularies and conventions. For all that they are currently regarded as entertainment in Western cultures, fairy tales are not any less stories about culture and people, with insights into culture and people. What I am trying to express here is my dual frustration at the trivialization of fairy tales and their importance, as well as the trivialization within the study of fairy tales of the significance of certain themes. For example: “What, a story about incest? No, that’s certainly too horrible, it must be a metaphor for something else…” While I’m not certain whether this line actually goes through people’s heads, I suspect that some kind of similar rationalization is put forth for the metaphorization of fairy-tale content. And this question—on which level to understand the content of fairy tales—is one of the central issues I address in this paper.

The fact that fairy tales are generally about individuals within families, whether these families are perceived as real or as symbols for ego-complexes, continues to intrigue me and be relevant to my research. A close friend and I were once discussing why we were drawn to our somewhat bizarre research topics: she to prostitution, and I to father-daughter incest fairy tales. These things were not part of our life experiences, and yet we got something meaningful out of their study. My friend hypothesized that I was so fascinated by the father-daughter dynamic because within a nuclear family unit in a patriarchal culture, the father-daughter relationship is the most asymmetrical. That is, the father has the most power within the family (itself a model for society), and the daughter has the least power. This relationship, then, reflects a tension that resonates with larger power imbalances within societies. And because I am drawn to patterns, to stark illuminations, this relationship entrances me, and compels me to try to explain its presence in stories that have gone through many redactions and guises.

This explanation works, partially. So does the reason that I am drawn to these tales because they were once ostensibly common in the oral traditions of cultures that speak Indo-European and Semitic languages, yet these tales now have been subsumed under their sister tale, ATU 510A, “Cinderella,” in popularity (a topic I address in the paper I will deliver at the American Folklore Society meeting this year). What is going on with father-daughter incest stories, that they ceased to appear in collections of fairy tales and children’s books and movies, but only recently made a resurgence in retellings by modern American feminist writers of fantasy? This reason is the one I give most often to family members and non-academic friends, because I can use a concrete example, “Cinderella,” to discuss the divergences of “Donkeyskin” in oral tradition and literary retellings. Nevertheless, I can only rely on such explanations for a certain amount of validation. It is rather more difficult to provide a satisfactory account of my interest in the tale when my family takes an active interest in my folklore career, and shows up to hear one of my conference papers. This happened at the California Folklore Society meeting in 2004, which was held at Cal State Northridge, of which both my parents are alumni. Since my parents still live in the area, they not only hosted a bunch of Berkeley folklore students for the weekend, but they also showed up to hear my paper on ATU 510B. That was an interesting experience. I felt that I had to act in a scholarly manner, analyzing my material from as detached a distance as possible, in order not to upset anybody or arouse undue suspicion about my attachment to this tale. My parents were, to their credit, not too alienated either by the topic of my paper or by the overly academic, discipline-specific, and jargon-filled approach I took. The processes of meaning-making and revision, then, had different ramifications for this one conference presentation, as I was concerned about how this paper about relationships would impact my own relationships.

Revising my work on ATU 510B for conference presentation was challenging largely because I had so much to say about the tale, it was difficult to fit it into ten pages or twenty minutes, whichever came first. At the same time, that process helped me to cut out unnecessary quotations and synthesize my thoughts in digestible segments. It is difficult to know where to be brief, and where to expand; it is also interesting for those of us who study artistic communication to think about how we communicate insights about said communication. In sum, this project, born of a fascination with a particular story and revised numerous times, represents various phases in my scholarly development but is also marked by my personal life. There are myriad connections between my academic work and the rest of my life, and this is evident in how and why I study fairy tales, particularly how I am drawn to investigate the ways in which multiple meanings can be understood through attention to different layers of the texts.

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The Critical Gaze

June 19, 2013 in Academia, Art, Dance | No comments

“Something” illustrated by Oscar Klever

As both an academic and an artist (wow, how many blog posts have I written/will I write that start off like this?), I’ve noticed that having a fine-tuned critical gaze is very important and useful, but it also has its downsides.

On the academic side, my ability to critique works and ideas has been a great help. Having a critical gaze helps me sift through scholarship when I’m doing background research for a new project or syllabus. I’m a thorough editor, and I actually enjoy proof-reading papers (excepting my own). While I’m not a specialist in rhetoric, I’ve gotten better at identifying the various types of arguments that one can make in an academic paper or book, as well as the sorts of evidence that are appropriate and compelling to present.

In terms of the arts, I’ve become excellent at identifying technical flaws in dance performances. I suspect this is partly because I’ve taught dance for a number of years so I’m proficient at picking out typical beginner mistakes (such as not having proper posture, which is the foundation of everything we do in American Tribal Style® belly dance), and partly because I’ve simply watched a ton of dance performances. I mean, I’ve been dancing for almost half my life, and most of that at a semi-professional if not professional level. I’d be a little worried if my eyes weren’t catching mistakes and spotting places where a dancer could improve.

But being good at critiquing someone or something, and then actually implementing the critique, are two separate things. Few people like to be told that they’re doing something wrong, and those that do, tend to need to be in the right context to hear it. If someone sets foot in a dance classroom or a conference presentation, then yes, they’re probably open to hearing what could be improved. But even then, it’s a bit of a gamble as to how a critique will be received. Even well-intention critiques (and I like to think that mine always are) can feel devastating.

And then there’s this issue: critiquing something is not the same as creating something. The latter is frequently more involved and time-consuming, and one tends to put pieces of one’s heart or oneself into a creation, whether a choreography for a performance or an academic article.

I’ve written about Hans Christian Andersen’s views on art here, and I’d like to return to Andersen to explore his views on critics. As you might guess about an egotistical artist who was also largely unhappy with his life, he wasn’t a fan of critics. He made his views known in his stories, including two that I’ll mention here.

In a story titled “‘Something,'” five brothers set out to do something useful in the world. One becomes a builder, another an architect, and so on. However, the fifth brother declares: “I see that none of you will ever become something, even though you all think you will….I want to stand apart. I will contemplate and criticize what you do. There is always something wrong with anything man makes. I shall point it out so all can see it. That is something!” (Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard, 540).

And indeed, people began to praise the fifth brother: “He is really something. He has got a good head on his shoulders and can make something into nothing.” (ibid 540). However, when the fifth brother tries to get into heaven, he can’t produce evidence that he’s done a single good deed in his lifetime. In fact, the best thing he can do is keep his mouth shut instead of offering his opinion – and that, we’re told, is “something.”

In another story, “A Question of Imagination,” a young man who wants to be a writer goes to ask an old woman for help coming up with ideas for what to write about (because everything has already been written about – and goodness, if people were thinking that in the 1800s, imagine how dire the situation must be now!). However, no matter how much inspiration the old woman tries to feed the boy, he remains oblivious to the wonders of the world around him. Finally, the woman tells him to become a critic. He “followed her advice. He became an expert at looking down his nose at poets because he couldn’t become one himself.” (Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard, 974).

There’s something tragic, Andersen implies, about the person who cannot create but can only critique. However, I’d argue instead that critique doesn’t in and of itself signal a lack; instead, I think it’s critique without compassion that’s the problem. If the critic is also a creator, then hopefully she will have some understanding what goes on in the artistic process, and won’t be snide or cruel in her critique. I’d hope that critics who aren’t also creators, but are simply quite good at what they do, would also have some compassion for artists and not be unduly destructive or negative.

I’m not implying that we’d suddenly live in a utopian world without hurtful negative feedback if everyone made an effort to be a little more compassionate. Haters gonna hate, and all that. I do think, however, the critics should evaluate their relationships with the materials they critique, and be honest with themselves (and the world) about their reasons for doing so. That’d be a start, anyway.

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All Or Nothing

May 31, 2013 in Academia, Art, Dance | No comments

I frequently fall prey to an all-or-nothing mindset in both my creative and my academic pursuits, and I doubt that I’m the only one with this problem. Those of us who are academics are often driven to achieve perfection by both internal and external motivations, and thus we hold ourselves to incredibly high standards, leading to a lot of self-criticism about works-in-process that we don’t think are “good enough” to show other people. This Chronicle article about getting feedback on your writing, even when it’s incomplete or in rough shape, describes precisely this phenomenon (and it’s what inspired me to make this blog post, though this topic’s on my mind fairly often).

Those of us who are artists face many of the same obstacles: the pressure to have polished pieces to perform or sell can be enormous. These pieces help us attract students, pay rent, and exhibit our styles to our communities, involving us in dialogue about our creative and critical choices.

In both communities, it can be difficult to ask for guidance or help in the creative process. I tend to assume that most of my colleagues (in both dance and academia) are at least as busy as I am, and why would I ask them to give up their precious time? Further, it can be difficult to find someone who’s enough within my specialty to offer useful advice, unless of course I’m just out for the “lend this another set of eyes to make sure this makes sense” sort of critique.

I’ve noticed this brand of perfectionism spilling into other areas of my life, too. If I can’t find a whole hour to devote to yoga and stretching in order to further my dance, I feel myself getting stressed and wondering why I bother at all and how I’m ever going to improve. Recently, I’ve been reminding myself that 15-20 minutes of yoga will always be better than no yoga. If I can start to identify when an “all or nothing” mindset has gotten a hold of me, hopefully I can do a better job of combating it in order to grow as a scholar and artist. If I can work on, for example, taking advantages of those tiny cracks and crevices in my schedule to accomplish a few things here and there, rather than fretting about not having “enough” time to really make a dent in a given task, that’d probably be helpful overall.

With any luck, I can leave the all-or-nothing mentality to occasions where it doesn’t hinder me. I’m curious to hear about other people’s strategies for dealing with this issue.

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Hans Christian Andersen on Art

May 26, 2013 in Art, Fairy Tales | No comments

Mayken González Backlund’s illustration for “The Nightingale”

I’ve been doing some reading on Hans Christian Andersen lately, and it’s really spurred me to think about my own interactions with art. In addition to reading Andersen’s tales, I’ve been reading Jack Zipes’s book Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller, which (in my opinion) does a great job of using contextual information from Andersen’s life to illuminate his fairy tales and stories.

Fun fact: Andersen never married, and is believed to have never had sex (despite apparently visiting brothels a couple of times in his life). Contemporary scholars debate whether he was gay, bisexual, or “spiritually androgynous” yet asexual in practice. Based on the fact that he proposed to two women, and yet in numerous letters and diary entries described his passionate feelings for men, it seems likely that he wasn’t 100% heterosexual (as much as that category existed in 19th century Denmark or anywhere else for that matter). Either way you slice it, he felt like he didn’t fit in and was thus lonely and misunderstood.

Perhaps related to his loneliness was his drive to create. He was amazingly prolific, penning not just the tales we know and love him for, but also poetry, essays, novels, plays, travel books, and memoirs. Zipes gives us a quote from one of his diaries:

What could become of me, and what will become of me? My powerful fantasy will drive me into the insane asylum, my violent temper will make a suicide of me! Before, the two of these together would have made a great writer. (7)

Other quotes reveal that Andersen believed he was guided by God to become a great artist, that he had a gift to share with the world. In Andersen’s tales, too, we see notions of inner nobility (such as in “The Ugly Duckling”) and ruminations on the nature of art (“The Nightingale”)… and those are just from some of his better-known works! There are tons more.

All this has me thinking, as an artist, about what makes me similar to and different from Andersen. I also feel driven, perhaps to the point of narcissism and solitude. I don’t, however, believe that I have a God-given destiny to become an artist… though I do feel like I have talents and skills that I ought to use, if only because I have them and don’t want them to get rusty. When it comes down to it, what’s the difference between the two? If I believe I have a gift and ought to use it to create art, does it really matter whether I believe it came from God or is just a part of my personality and makeup?

One of Andersen’s tales, “The Pen and the Inkwell,” shows the two titular objects arguing over which of them has agency and is thus responsible for creating the masterpieces they write. The poet who wields them ends up writing a parable about how the bow and violin that create marvelous music are not, however, the creators of their art:

“How absurd it would seem if the bow and the violin should be proud and haughty about their accomplishments. Yet we, human beings, often are: the poets, the artists, the scientists, and even the generals often boast in vain pride. Yet they are all but instruments that God plays upon. To Him alone belongs all honor. We have nothing to pride ourselves upon!” (Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard, 640)

I believe that artistic inspiration comes from somewhere, but that “somewhere” doesn’t need to have a religious explanation tacked on to it in order to be meaningful. The important thing about art is that it moves us, not where it comes from. To be sure, many artists use art therapeutically, to resolve feelings and address struggles – so in that sense, yes, it matters where art comes from. But I don’t think that the only rational or valid origin for art lies in religion.

To me, a more powerful account of art can be seen in “The Nightingale.” A nightingale that sings miraculously beautiful songs agrees to come and sing for the emperor, but it’s banished after a mechanical bird arrives and sings flawless, perfect (but ultimately boring and unchanging) music. After all this, the nightingale returns and sings for Death before Death can claim the emperor’s life. Art is so moving that is can persuade Death to leave – and it almost teaches the emperor a valuable lesson about de-commodifying art. Almost. The emperor still wants art on his terms, but relents and agrees to let the nightingale come and go as it pleases.

Perhaps there are people who will never understand how artists and art work, but as long they’re able to enjoy its beauty from time to time, this tale suggests, then our worlds will intersect and enlighten one another. Perhaps art doesn’t always provoke lasting social change, but moments of reflection are still worthwhile.

One of the enduring gifts that Andersen gave the world was his meta-art, or his art that reflects on art. I appreciate this as both an artist and a scholar, and I continue to seek it out in my engagements with others. If nothing else, connecting with others (such as collaborating) prevents me from going to the extreme of hermiting myself up all the time or becoming too proud. Encounters with others always have the potential to be humbling, and if we read into and across Andersen’s tales, we find the encouragement to engage, encounter, and transform.

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A Workaholic, Or Just Different?

April 30, 2013 in Academia, Art | No comments

There are times when I think I’m a workaholic, and other times when I think that no, I’m just different than other people, and my preference for spending a lot of time alone working is simply a reflection of that difference.

Maybe I’m just one of those people who’s really driven to accomplish stuff. I tend to be happiest when I have goals – and when I’m on my way to meeting them. I’ve run a marathon, finished a PhD, traveled to Europe and India, organized conferences and dance events… I’ve accomplished a lot, and I think those accomplishments are generally linked with my self-esteem and contentment. While that may set me apart from a lot of other people, that’s not too terribly weird… or is it?

I know a lot of introverts who prefer curling up with a book to social interactions. The difference is that for me, that book is for pleasure reading only part of the time. The rest of the time, I’m reading something that’s goal-directed: an academic book to write a book review of for publication, or the latest in a series on fairy-tale scholarship, or a new issue of a folklore journal that I subscribe to. For me, though, the goal-directed reading often is pleasurable. I mean, I wouldn’t have picked life goals that I didn’t also enjoy pursuing (some people apparently do this; it makes no sense to me. I don’t doubt that I could’ve been a kick-ass lawyer or doctor if I’d put my mind to it, but I would’ve hated almost every part of getting there).

So, most of the time I just try to accept that I’m a little strange and that I spend a little too much time working. I only start to worry when nothing feels like fun anymore, or when friends invite me to something that should be fun but only registers as “ugh, something that takes me away from my work.” Or when I think to myself, “hm, I should take a break,” and then nothing sounds appealing. That’s probably a bad sign… or is it? Usually these periods of apathy-toward-everything-but-work only last a short time. I know that different people have different working habits, which is one of the reasons I like to write about my own process and read about other people’s processes.

This issue is very much on my mind lately because as the weather gets nicer, various friends of mine are inviting me to take weekend trips hither and yon. Among the other factors in my decision (such as the fact that camping and I do not get along), I find myself thinking that I don’t want to give up a weekend when I could be working. Which strikes me as a little strange… but it’s not like I intend to do nothing but work the whole weekend. I mean, surely I won’t work for more than 8 hours per day. It’s normal – or at least not unhealthy – to want to do that, right? Kinda? I hope?

I know that the people close to me worry about me working too much, but I always assure them that I make time for the other things that are important to me, such as cooking, dancing, exercising, and spending time with loved ones. I’m curious, though: how do other over-achievers find a balance? Or how do you get people who are less driven to understand that, yes, we actually like working this much?

Why Creative Collaboration Is Essential (for me, at least)

April 18, 2013 in Art, Dance | 2 comments

As an introvert and an intellectual, I spend a lot of time in my head. I mean, A LOT. My friends gently mock me by calling me a hermit (when they can get a hold of me, that is).

As an artist, I figure that solitude is just part of the package: in order to create, you need to establish your vision by spending time working on projects, ideas, and so on.

However, as a folklorist, I’m keenly aware that artists are always in dialogue with their cultures. The artists we tend to be interested in are tethered to culture even as they innovate within it, whereas in other disciplines, like musicology or art history, you might find a greater emphasis on the lone genius.

So while a lot of the art I make requires me to be alone to refine my technique and assemble ideas into whole pieces and performances, I relish the time I get to spend with other artists. Whether it’s teaching a dance class or attending a jam session, or simply talking about artistic concepts with people who work in different media, I’m glad for every opportunity to compare notes and hang out. This is also a major reason why I do a group improvisational form of dance (American Tribal Style®) in addition to performing as a soloist.

I know that some of this impulse is selfish, since, as noted above, I spend a lot of time working alone. Connecting with other people is sometimes difficult for me. Having art to facilitate the connection makes it easier; it’s less about me talking about my feelings than dancing them, and having someone to dance with and thus share in the conversation.

Part of it, doubtless, also has to do with how American society doesn’t generally value the arts these days. So simply being around other artists is affirming. It reinforces the existence of other people like me, who believe that it’s important to interpret human experience through creative media.

I’m curious about why other people choose to collaborate, too. Feel free to share your perspectives in the comments!

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Everyone Knows About Folklore! (except for when you don’t)

March 31, 2013 in Academia, Fairy Tales, Folklore | 5 comments

As promised, here’s my second post of the month. Hopefully I can continue to publish two posts per month, and perhaps even increase the number as time goes on.

Since I’ve spent the last few days revising a chapter of my dissertation into an article to submit for publication – which involved changing all the citations from MLA to Chicago style, and multiple other tedious rearrangements – I’m going to just write this pots in prose. No citations. Feel free to ask for them in comments if you’re curious.

While I was having a fabulous time at this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, I noticed a trend: people tend to discuss folklore (the topic) as though they know as much about it as someone who has academic training in folklore (the discipline). One of the most obvious manifestations of this was people who mixed up the names of folk narrative genres, like legend and fairy tale and myth, without regard to how they’re used in our discipline. And trust me, we use them quite precisely, distinguishing between their content, contexts, forms, and functions (among other characteristics).

I get that some of these genre terms have entered English vernacular with various meanings (“myth” being one of the most pernicious examples of this phenomenon), but I’d expect scholars to do a bit more research, and use their terminology with more intention and precision. And I get that folkloristics is a small, less-known discipline, so people don’t immediately think to look up our scholarship as examples of how to use genre terms with utmost precision. These are all factors, to be sure.

However, I think there’s something else going on too: I think that we folklorists, in our efforts to reach out to students and colleagues and the general public, have mistakenly placed an emphasis on how folklore is for everyone. If we all know folklore – which we all do, even if we don’t think of it in those terms – then we’re all, in some sense, folklore experts. We’re all the folk after all, right? (to quote my beloved mentor, Alan Dundes) So if we’re all the folk, we all know about folklore, and we all have the right to talk and write about it, right?

Sorta.

On the one hand, I’ve found emphasizing that everyone knows and performs folklore to be an incredibly useful strategy while  teaching folklore classes. Once my students know that folklore encompasses all the expressive culture and artistic communication of a given group, and that it’s not just myths and fairy tales, they respond enthusiastically to my in-class discussion prompts. They can rattle off jokes, folkspeech/slang, holiday customs, family stories, personal narratives, folk medicine, and more. All of which is wonderful to witness.

But on the other hand, perhaps we as professional folklorists are mistakenly giving the impression that once a person can identify folklore in her life, she automatically knows enough about it to present or publish about it. Perhaps this is related to the ethnographic impulse in our discipline, where we urge people to describe texts of folklore and  relate them to their life and cultural contexts. That’s definitely part of what we want out of folklore scholarship, and if laypeople can get that far, that’s worthwhile, right? But there’s a line between description and analysis, and perhaps that line is getting muddled somewhere.

I’m not sure how we can rectify this misunderstanding, and I suspect that there are deeper cultural forces at work here (such as the dichotomous relationship between orality and literacy and attendant values). I don’t know whether I’m willing to give up the powerful teaching tool that “everyone knows folklore!” has turned out to be, though I’m thoroughly annoyed by every instance where someone (whether a layperson or academic) doesn’t bother to look up our field’s research when referring to our field’s topics.

Suggestions or comments welcome, from folklorists as well as everyone else.

(for what it’s worth, I don’t intend this post to send a negative message to scholars who don’t have a folklore background but are actively interested in working on folklore topics… please just keep in mind that our discipline has a long history – the American Folklore Society was founded before the American Anthropological Association, for instance – and if you really want to do a good job of working with folklore materials, your research must include folkloristic approaches to the topic… and feel free to ask your local folklorist for research suggestions, most of us are happy to help!)

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