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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Being Vs. Doing

March 11, 2013 in Observations | 4 comments

Before I launch into this post, I’m going to publicly proclaim my intent to write at least 2 blog posts per month. Hopefully this will motivate me to follow through on that intention. I manage to find a little time to relax here and there, so in theory I could make the time to do it. And goodness knows I’ve got plenty of thoughts rattling around in my head that could be transformed into blog posts. So there’s that.

In the rest of this post, I’d like to discuss a distinction between being and doing that I’ve noticed, in terms of self-esteem but other things too. A post by Samantha at Not Your Mother’s Playground caught my attention and helped me articulate some of these thoughts.

Titled On Being Amazing, the post discusses why it’s tough to hear “But… you’re amazing!” in difficult times. In particular, this passage really resonated with me:

I’ve noticed that in times of despair people will often reach out to me, offering their words of comfort. These internet hugs are lovely and certainly appreciated – at least for the intentions behind them, but they can also fall flat when presented like this:

“Don’t feel sad. You’re amaaaaazing!”

I have learned how to take a compliment over the years. If you think that I have done something to warrant being told I’m amazing or awesome or insert compliment here, I will certainly take it. I will blush and I will be genuinely grateful. However when it’s used as a blanket response to “I’m sad or angry”, it’s a lot harder to digest.

I agree that this sort of statement can sometimes  feel dismissive, as though by accomplishing all this amazing stuff I somehow shouldn’t get bogged down by anxiety or depression, or I should be smart enough to think my way out of it, or something. This comes dangerously close to the “but why can’t you just choose to be happy” advice given to people dealing with mental health issues that, while often well-intentioned, is dangerous and thoroughly misunderstands what it’s like to deal with mental illness (see this fantastic blog post by Naamah_Darling for a deconstruction of this rhetoric).

I also think that this tendency to conflate being and doing (you’ve done amazing things so you are an amazing person) can be dangerous for another reason: it makes the parts of one’s identity blend together in a potentially judgmental way. For a long rant on the ways we in Western culture tend to conflate various aspects of people’s identities – especially when they pertain to sex – see my post on the adjacency effect over at MySexProfessor.com (basically, the laws of sympathetic magic plus stigma and pollution, condensed and written about in non-academese with sexuality as the primary topic). People who engage in certain acts are thought to be a certain kind of person, and those sorts of judgments often lead to hostility, stereotyping, and violence.

For these reasons, I think it’s important to uncouple the being and doing parts of people’s identities, even while recognizing that there are some links, but those links need to be put into context. I’m a firm believer in actions speaking louder than words, for example; so if someone says they’re my friend, they’d better be there when I need them (and I’ll do the same). I always try to make sure my actions are consistent with my values. Stuff like that.

Otherwise, let’s think very carefully about how we conflate being and doing when it comes to personhood. I’d love to hear about more examples of this phenomenon if people want to leave a comment!

Form and Intention

February 28, 2013 in Dance, Observations | 1 comment

Photo by Jane Bradley

Performance at Bloomington Belly Dances 2011. Photo by Jane Bradley

On a rare night out, I went to a club with a couple of friends and enjoyed some time on the dance floor as well as off it. The music was largely EDM (electronic dance music, for those not familiar with the folkspeech of its fans) and dubstep, which is both fun and difficult to dance to, because of the interesting way that the rhythm and other sounds interact in the music.

As someone with over 14 years of dance experience, I can navigate a dance floor pretty competently, no matter what the genre of music is. But I got to thinking about how we dance when in uncertain situations, like with unexpected types of music or an unfamiliar environment (maybe when a stage is uneven) or other variables.

To me, it really comes down to form and intention. By “form” I mean posture, technique, and how exactly we choose to structure our movements. At the very least, I endeavor to have excellent posture when I dance, and also when I’m not dancing. I spend a lot of time with my laptop, so I try to make sure I’m not hunching too horribly during those hours. Posture conveys confidence, and good posture is the foundation of a solid dance technique that is both safe for you as a performer and more conducive to creating compelling experiences for the audience.

Since the only style of dance I’m teaching right now is American Tribal Style® Belly Dance, I think about posture a lot in those terms. Having the proper posture is what frees up your spine and hips  to undulate, lift, and drop. It’s really amazing what adjusting your posture can do for your dancing.

So, even when I have no idea what the hell is happening with the music I’m dancing to, I check in with my posture a lot to make sure my chest is lifted, my hips are tucked, and my arms are appropriately angled, strong, and elegant. In theory, good posture is itself a thing of beauty, and a dancer could simply stand in good posture for long moments and still hold the audience’s attention, having in that moment transformed herself into a statue-like thing of beauty.

Intention is the other part of the equation. Intention means moving when you mean to move, and being still when you mean to be still. It means directing your gaze in order to direct your audience’s gaze (it always amazes me how linked the two are!). It means giving each movement your full attention so that no motion is ever wasted or extraneous. It means sometimes being minimalist, and sometimes being a whirlwind of activity…but whatever you are doing, you’re doing it on purpose, with an intensity that comes from being in the moment.

When a dancer manages to incorporate both form and intention into a performance, it can be stunning. If a dance is simple in terms of form, but fully developed in terms of intention, I’m guaranteed to love it. Doing things the other way around is more of a gamble. This is one reason I’ve always felt lukewarm about belly dancers who learn the choreographies of others to perform; I feel like it’s harder to be as fully invested in intentionally dancing when the moves aren’t originally your own, and when you’re having to remember something that came from someone else. But this could also be a symptom of the fact that I really dislike memorizing things. And there are certainly a number of talented, beautiful, compelling dancers who perform the choreographies of others, so I don’t mean to disparage them here. This is more of a “this is what works for me as a dancer” post, and I’d be curious to hear the thoughts of others.

Of course, as a folklore scholar, I’m tempted to add more terms and themes to the discussion. For instance, I frequently tell my folklore students that we can identify a genre by looking at four elements: content, context, form, and function. So in an intellectual sense, I don’t think that form and intention alone are adequate to helping us understand what’s going on in a creative performance. But as a dancer, and as someone wanting to keep it simple for my dance students, I’m going to stick with form and intention for now.

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Reframing How We View Education

February 23, 2013 in Digital Humanities, Education, Ideas | 4 comments

I’ve posted in the past about how we in America value education (or don’t, as the case more often is). I’m still concerned about this issue – not least because, having obtained a Ph.D., I’m likely going to spend at least some of my life working in the field of education. I also think of the recent image making its way around Facebook, with an American taxpayer explaining that he doesn’t mind his tax money going to education because he doesn’t want to live in a nation of idiots. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: as a supposedly democratic society, we are shooting ourselves in the collective feet if we don’t have a well-educated populace with critical thinking skills and a knowledge of history and the humanities as well as technical, informational skill sets like those offered by STEM.

Recently, a fellow blogger reached out to me about a graphic she helped create, which illustrates how the education system in Finland frames its approach differently:

Please Include Attribution to OnlineClasses.org With This Graphic Finnish Education Infographic

Since I’m into data visualization and other strategies brought to the forefront by the digital humanities movement, I thought I’d share this graphic with my readers. It dramatically illustrates what we’re doing differently in the U.S., and suggests that some of our specific behaviors (devaluing teachers and “play” time, overemphasizing standardized testing) are not working and need to be addressed.

For a striking contrast, check out this public radio discussion of higher education in California (thanks to my dad, who sent me the link). The experiences and needs of the students and teachers took a backseat to discussions of tuition and technology – which are certainly important, but I fear that continuing to commodify education will have negative effects for both teachers and students.

At this point, as a recent Ph.D. still finding my way in the world, I feel a bit powerless to make sure that positive changes are happening in our education system. At the very least, though I can blog about these issues and hope to inspire the sorts of discussions and reevaluations that might eventually lead to change.

 

Giving Up Running

January 10, 2013 in Dance | 1 comment

Most people pledge to start running for New Year’s. I’m going to stop running.

A bit of backstory: I’ve been running for most of the last decade. When I was a kid, I liked soccer but I hated running, because I was obviously one of the slowest runners on the team, and I felt embarrassed about it (and it certainly didn’t help that coaches always singled me out to yell at me during drills). But in college, I discovered the joy of running by myself, for myself, in the Berkeley hills. It was grand.

I know I’m a slow runner, but I don’t care. I’ve finished a marathon and two half-marathons, so I know I have stamina and a ton of discipline. I can go for a run by myself just to enjoy the scenery, or spend some time thinking, or, more likely, enjoy the solitude (though I should note that I’ve enjoyed partner runs too, frequently with other academics). Even hitting the treadmill during a cold winter day can make me happy as long as I have some pumpin’ tunes or the Food Network to accompany me.

But for the last few months, I haven’t been running as much… and I’ve been feeling guilty about it. My partner and I moved to a new apartment while I was simultaneously teaching and applying for academic jobs, and there was a death in the family, and I neared a nervous breakdown for various related reasons, and… yeah, I just couldn’t make much time to run. And I would feel guilty, horrendously guilty, that I let this important part of my life slide.

For 2013, I’ve decided that instead of feeling guilty about not running as much as I want to (since my schedule hasn’t really let up), I’m just not going to run. I am, however, dancing every day. Since I’m trying to build more of a local dance community, I need to be in top condition – or at the very least, have more stamina than my dance students do!

I know it might seem counter-intuitive to give up a thing that I’ve felt guilty for neglecting, but honestly, the added guilt isn’t doing me any good. I already feel guilty for not landing a sweet tenure-track job right out of grad school, despite knowing that the problem is systemic and not with me in particular. And I feel guilty for being so absorbed in my work that I neglect my relationships with those around me. And I feel guilty for not making more of an effort to solely purchase and eat local produce. The more time I spend feeling bad about myself, surprise surprise, the worse I feel about myself.

But feeling bad about not running? That I can control. I’m only planning to give up running for one month, and if I’m absolutely climbing the walls by the end of this month, I’ll find a way to fit it back into my schedule, even if it’s only 2x week. If it’s something that I really feel okay letting go of, then maybe I’ll run a couple miles occasionally on nice days, but otherwise not worry about it.

I think my identity’s malleable enough to deal with this change. I sigh longingly every time I see someone running on the icy streets – but I’m okay with not being outdoors any more than necessary during this cold season. We’ll see how I do when the weather gets warm again. For now, though, I’m kicking ass at dancing, and that’s a good feeling.

Why Religion Should Be More Like Dance

December 15, 2012 in Dance, Ideas | 3 comments

I am not a religious person. This is for many reasons, but one of those reasons is that religion is not more like dance. Allow me to elaborate.

Dance is for everyone, but no one is forced to dance.

Dance can be done alone, with a partner, or in groups. Dance is at once intensely personal and easily social.

Dance is something that makes us grateful for our bodies, but in that moment of disembodied awareness (there is an “I” that is separate from my body but also at home in my body to be grateful for it), it does not alienate us from our bodies. Dance does not make us feel ashamed about our bodies; it makes us live more fully in our bodies, which includes embracing our age, our sexuality, the ways we can and cannot move, and our pasts. Dance does not judge us for what our bodies are or are not.

Dance has the potential to be profoundly spiritual, yet it does not require it. For some people, dance is a form of exercise, and that’s okay. For others, dance is the highest form of art and communion with the divine. That’s okay too. Most of us probably fall somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, which is fine.

Exploring multiple forms of dance has the potential to make you a better dancer, to make you more self-aware. Experimenting with multiple forms of dance puts you in different postures and moves your body in different ways; you learn to experience yourself differently. You learn how people in others cultures learn to hold and move their bodies. Moving like others gives you compassion for them, and appreciation for their lives.

At the same time, not every form of dance is right for everyone. I’ve been belly dancing almost half my life, which makes me pretty good at it. But put me in a ballet class, and I feel like a cow. That doesn’t mean that I loathe ballet, or think its practitioners are terrible people. It just means that I practice it rarely (though perhaps I should practice it more – we can learn a lot from the things we’re bad at and the things we dislike). My belly-dance-honed posture and arm gestures have helped me learn flamenco faster than I might otherwise, while my naturally low center of gravity has aided me in the West African dance classroom. Some dance forms are, for reasons easily understood or not, simply better for certain people than others.

Even hardcore dancers take breaks from dance. Sometimes your body requires it. Sometimes other parts of your life demand it. Stepping back from dance or ceasing to dance doesn’t make you a bad dancer; rather, it means that you’re human, and have healthily recognized that no one practice should dominate your life.

So long as you are dancing, there is no right or wrong way to dance. For people who choose to dance professionally or full-time, there are nuances of the “right” or “wrong” way to do a move that help them refine their practice, but aren’t necessarily relevant for people who dance simply for the joy of it. So long as they’re not harming others through their dance, rules are less important than consistency and engagement.

If you reread my words, replacing “dance” with “religion” (or its appropriate equivalent verb), hopefully you’ll grasp my meaning. If religion were more like dance – more egalitarian, less judgmental – maybe I would consider practicing it. If religion embraced variation and change, rather than demanding adherence to the teachings of a single leader or text, perhaps it wouldn’t alienate as many people who see that we live in a changing and diverse world and thus we need mutable and diverse strategies to cope and adapt.

Dance does not insist that you must worship it and it alone. Dance does not judge you. Dancers do not persecute non-dancers.

Most of the religious people I choose to hang out with? Are dancers (and often scholars and athletes too). I’m not saying every dancer is automatically awesome, but I think dancing can teach us something very valuable about appreciating diversity, because dance is inherently as diverse as humanity – our bodies make it so. When religion catches up in that regard, then I’ll be game to have a serious discussion about its role in my life. Until then, I’ll learn only as much as I need to survive in a world dominated by confusingly contradictory and hostile belief systems.

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Food and Culture: I Don’t Really Care for Pork (There’s a Reason)

November 29, 2012 in Folklore, Food, Observations | 2 comments

In my Introduction to Folklore class yesterday, we talked about food, leaving me, of course, super-hungry after class. I ate a delicious vegetarian dinner, belly danced for an hour, and then had some leftover homemade butternut-squash pie from Thanksgiving.

One of the main points we discussed in class was that food preferences are both individual and cultural. Certain flavor combinations are found only in specific regions or among certain groups, and those flavors are often considered “normal” – until you run into what another culture thinks is tasty, and you’re usually in for a shock (case in point: Estonians put pickles and ketchup on their pizza; I’m normally pretty open-minded about food, but I was both disgusted and offended by this practice).

Sometimes, no matter how you’re raised, there’s just no accounting for taste. One person’s comfort food is another person’s gag-inducer. Sometimes we try other cuisines and find them more palatable than what we were raised with, but other times people don’t bother to venture far from what they grew up eating.

Here, we begin to see the interconnections between food and value systems. People express their identities through the foods they both choose and refuse to eat. Whole families and ethnic groups declare their affiliation by what (and how, and when) they eat together. The allocation of food labor – which remains thoroughly gendered, even in this day and age – tells us still more about what people value, and how they express those values through their eating preferences.

I love food, and I love talking about food, so I really tried to reign myself in while in class, so that my students could reflect on their families’ Thanksgiving traditions. I was quite pleased when my students were able to verbalize which aspects of their family meals were traditional and which were variations or innovations. A surprising number of students recounted how That One Random Dish (Like Oyster Dressing) Become Traditional Because An Elderly Male Relative Likes It Even Though He’s The Only One (again, I’m seeing gendered patterns; is it any surprise that eccentric whims are tolerated when people in positions of authority demand to have their way even if no one else likes what they want?).

I didn’t talk much about food and religion with my class, in part because it’s not my specific area of study, and I didn’t really prepare a lot of material on that topic since we had plenty to discuss anyway. Besides, I figured that they’d just had Thanksgiving, so those food traditions would be fresh in their minds.

But it turns out that despite the fact that I don’t identify as religious, religion has influenced my food preferences in one major way: I don’t really like pork.

Yes, read that sentence again: I don’t really like pork. And I can’t pinpoint any logical reason why. Except for religion. Even though I’m not religious.

Bear with me for a moment (or, ya know, a paragraph or three). My mom’s side of the family is Jewish. Not really in the religious sense, but more in the cultural sense: we celebrate the main Jewish holidays by getting together with our family and preparing the appropriate foods, but we don’t go to temple or pray much. It’s more about the communal and family aspects of the religion.

My family is also composed of serious foodies. So we never bothered keeping kosher, in part because there were just too many tasty things out there to eat. My mom and dad each traveled through Europe in their college years, and so they would eat whatever was available to them. I ended up doing the same thing, because while I feel strongly that treating animals ethically is important, it’s also important to me to be a gracious guest at dinners, to be able to try new things while traveling, and to have an easy way to get enough protein and iron and other nutrients because I live a very active lifestyle. So while I’ve dabbled in vegetarianism in the past, and I still cook many delicious meals with minimal or no meat, I consider myself an omnivore these days.

So, religion enters the equation because while we ate plenty of shellfish and other non-kosher foods, pork didn’t cross the dinner table too often. This was also a matter of personal preference, as both of my parents find that pork can easily dry out, even in the hands of an experienced cook. So it just wasn’t something we ate very often. It became a habit to substitute other meats, and this even extended to (dare I utter the holy word?) bacon. Yes, BACON. I grew up eating turkey bacon. Most everyone who learns this about me pities me. I don’t think I had much in the way of real bacon til I was an adult, adrift in the world on my own.

Since leaving home, I’ve experimented with cooking with pork products, and I find that while I tend to enjoy bacon (duh) and other cured pork products like prosciutto and sausages (especially from Smoking Goose!), plain ol’ pork doesn’t do it for me. Loins, chops, you name it, I’ve tried it. Once in a blue moon I enjoy ribs or pork belly. But my poor partner (who’s from Texas if that tells you anything) keeps asking me to cook pork and I keep responding with things like, “I’ll think about it… ooh, look, wild-caught salmon is on sale!”

To the friends who have fed me pork in the past (especially my Philly friends, who fed me pork from a local pig that was raised sustainably!): don’t worry, I’m sure I enjoyed that meal (yes, especially that one). It’s just that I don’t seek out pork as a main course unless I’m in a very particular mood.

What I really mean to say in this long-winded excursion through my personal and family life is that our food preferences are acquired largely unconsciously, through means not of our own making. A religion that I do not identify with except in terms of cultural practices caused me to not be exposed to a certain food, which I do not really care for still today. The texture/taste preferences of my parents – who exposed me and my sister to a TON of food, both domestic and exotic – influenced my own feelings about how food should taste, look, feel, and smell. These factors, so far out of my control yet so essential in shaping my identity, have indelibly marked me, even as I, a fully-grown individual, can consciously make changes to and adapt to new environments.

This is what we study when we study food: the role of culture in molding individuals, who do their best to mold culture right back. Many of the forces shaping our lives are out of our control, if we’re even conscious enough of them to think of them in those terms. And yet, as the study of folklore shows constantly, individuals creatively draw upon cultural traditions as resources in the struggle for self-determination, self-expression, and even survival.

When I say that I don’t really care for pork, I’m making a statement about myself that is larger than myself. Analyzing food is an entry point to humanity through the lenses of the individual, the society, the family, religion, ethics, gender, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and much, much more. It’s kind of amazing that what we put into our mouths yields so much rich information.

And now I’m hungry again.

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Being Busy & Being Ungrateful

October 31, 2012 in Feminism | 1 comment

Ack, I’d meant to post more this month. But this month turned into moving (which involved a multi-state roadtrip to accomplish family and furniture goals all in one go), plus facing the academic job market, plus traveling to New Orleans for the American Folklore Society’s annual meeting (which was a blast, as expected).

So I’ve been busy.

But I’ve also been thinking about where we stop, where we set our goals, where we declare ourselves complacent. For me, as a feminist, that’s a touchy issue; I don’t know if we’ll ever satisfactorily determine the extent to which men and women are different or the same. Nature and nurture are notoriously difficult to entangle. So part of the issue is: when should feminists stop demanding equal rights for women? What if we find out that there are, in fact, ways in which men and women are substantially different so we can’t really aspire to equality in certain sectors to begin with?

I don’t tend to take that argument very far, as I think we can aspire to a ton of equal rights sorts of things while core similarities/differences remain unresolved. Such as, ya know, eliminating sexual violence and rape and lack of access to contraceptive rights. Basic stuff.

However, Laurie Penny’s post on feminism and gratitude really resonated with me. She writes about how

Women have made enormous strides in the past hundred years, yes, of course we have, but let’s get beyond this idea that we’re supposed to be grateful that some of us are now permitted a warped sort of equality in a fundamentally unequal labour market. We have no reason to be grateful. We have every right to want more. We have a right to want everything, including not being morally and financially attacked by bigots in government with a business agenda every time they want to distract attention from their own fuckups. We have every right to demand more than this.

Yes, yes, and yes. Being told to be grateful for how far we’ve come is a derailing tactic, as well as an implicit threat. I am cheerfully ungrateful in the face of everything we have left to accomplish.

This, I suppose, is a nice lead-in to the harvest holiday season. I spent most of yesterday talking about Halloween with my folklore class, but we also discussed the wheel of the year and how seasonal change affected (and continues to affect) agricultural societies. Harvest holidays are especially prominent and widespread, because people use them to mark the time of the year when they have enough to eat, and have to work hard to pull in the last of the crops before the winter comes.

So gratitude has been very much on my mind lately, between folklore topics and personal ones (we live in a nice place; we have food; we have supportive friends and family).

But I refuse to be bullied into being “grateful” for how far women have come. The day when someone can legitimately pull that is a long way off in my view, unfortunately.

In the meantime… yay for autumn and colored leaves and pumpkins!

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Fairy Tale Story Time with Auntie Jeana

September 6, 2012 in Academia, Fairy Tales, Folklore | 5 comments

I am only okay at telling stories.

However, I’m actually really good at telling stories about stories.

Me dressed in traditional Manipuri clothing for the banquet at ICFA 2012.

(seriously, ask any of my intro-to-folklore students: I try to tell jokes as examples of the genre, and usually muck up the punchline; really, ask any of my friends or family – I am not so good at telling jokes or stories, but I am fantastic at interpreting and analyzing them)

So there I was at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts this past March. This is where, incidentally, I’d had a life-changing conversation with China Miéville, a writer I adore beyond words. It’s also where I presented on my dissertation on gender and the body in European fairy tales, focusing on monstrous masculinity within my subset of tales. Some of my favorite people in the whole world attend this conference, so I love catching up with them. But I also get to meet new people, which is quite awesome in its own right.

One evening, after panel sessions were over, I found myself at the poolside bar with two young conference attendees who were both studying some permutation of library science and/or children’s literature/YA. They were really interested in learning more about the connections between fairy tales and fantasy, and I was more than happy to oblige them. After a drink or three, I was telling them, basically, how to not screw up this kind of scholarship. I might’ve also been referring to myself in the third person as Auntie Jeana… I can rock a donor figure role, okay?

If you wanna know how to do good scholarship on fairy tales and fantasy, I figure it helps to know what bad scholarship looks like. And oh boy, do I have some gems for you!

Earlier at this conference, I was attending a panel on, you guessed it, fairy tales and fantasy. There were two solid papers, one on illustrations in children’s books based on fairy tales, and one on a certain rather violent tale type. The third paper was… well… when I was feeling charitable before the Q&A session, I decided that it was ill-informed and poorly executed.

Despite the paper being on a folkloric topic – Cinderella – it veered off and ignored all folklore scholarship on the tale type. It tried to prove the origin of motifs from a single version of the tale based on shared historical associations which was, hm, misguided at best. I mean, searching for origins is so nineteenth-century. Contemporary folklorists don’t bother much with the quest for origins since unless someone writes it down, oral tradition is, well, oral. You’re not going to find what’s never been documented. That way lies madness (or inaccurate assumptions, or poorly-done history). However, I was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

But in the Q&A session, when I politely tried to point out that the author might want to read what some folklorists have to say on the matter, I was repeatedly cut off. I mean, the author got really defensive. And I even started my comment with a compliment on one connection she’d made that had caught my interest!

So, kids, before you present a paper at a conference (or encourage your students to do so), make sure you’ve done some basic reading in the discipline that whichever topic it is happens to fall in. Also? Be open to criticism, especially when it’s politely phrased and well-intentioned.

This paper wasn’t as bad as other stuff I’ve seen, though. And by other stuff, I mean the work of Jonathan Gottschall. He’s a literary Darwinist who thinks folktales provide wonderful grist for the mill of analysis. It’s so convenient that you don’t even have to read them in order to analyze them! The computer does all the work for you! So you can prove that tales from every culture reflect basic evolutionary mating patterns!

I cannot make this shit up (though I say so in more polite terms in my dissertation).

Donald Haase (an awesome-sauce folklorist) has already done a great job of debunking Gottschall’s work on fairy tales, so I needn’t repeat it here. Though you can bet I repeated it for the benefit of my young audience at ICFA on that balmy March evening at the pool bar.

Basically, if you are going to do research on a folklore topic (which includes folktales and fairy tales), do us all the favor of reading some up-to-date scholarship from our discipline. Also, read the texts themselves (which Gottschall apparently couldn’t be bothered to do). Also, make sure you’re working with a good translation. How do you know which translations are good? See our scholarship, as indicated above. If it’s older than 50-80 years, be skeptical, since people’s morals (especially during the Victorian era) prevented them from doing authentic translations especially if the material was sexual or scatalogical in nature. Which, ya know, happens a lot in folklore.

I believe I taught my young charges a lot that night by the poolside bar. Certainly, I taught them a lot about vodka shots. But I also think that in my rambling, tipsy state, I also delivered an impassioned address about how the discipline of folklore has much to offer the study of children’s literature, YA, and fantasy. We study people doing creative things. We study storytelling in all its forms. We’ve been doing it for centuries now. Why on earth would you ignore us?!

And that, my friends, is how fairy tale story time with Auntie Jeana goes.

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Why I’m an Angry Feminist

August 31, 2012 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | 3 comments

I’ve been turning this post over in my head for a few months, and now seems like a good time to make it.

I am not accused too often of being an “angry feminist,” but it still happens from time to time. As though that is such a terrible thing to be; worse than a greedy capitalist, or a dishonest politician, or an unapologetic rapist. As though it would be better for me to not be angry or not be feminist, but be something else instead, even if that something else is also a negative trait.

This Tiger Beatdown post on angry-feminist-shaming really resonated with me. In it, Flavia writes: I refuse to be boxed in the simplified category of “ranter” because I am angry. Because this anger makes me “difficult”, it makes me “alienating”, it makes me “impossible to deal with” and I should just accept that certain things just are.

Anger drives us to action; anger keeps us from being complacent. Yet it is a really charged thing for women to be angry, since in many cultures, women are not supposed to get angry. There is no safe way for us to unleash our passions. In folklore, literature, and history, we see the dire consequences of women getting angry: Medea, Snow White’s (step)mother, the doomed Amazons, the Maenads. There is little cultural space for women’s anger. We are supposed to swallow it and, I don’t know, transform it into milk chocolate hearts and rainbow bird’s nests. Or better yet, not feel it at all.

This excellent (but potentially triggering) post at Fugitivus talks about the conditioning women undergo to be pleasant and agreeable in every.single.interaction of their lives, and how given that context, it’s unsurprising that “if you accept those social interactions as normal and appropriate in your day to day life, there is absolutely no reason you should be shocked that rape occurs without screaming, without fighting, without bruising, without provocation, and without prosecution. Behavior exists on a continuum.”

One reason I chafe at the negative connotations of the “angry feminist” label is that it’s meant to police women’s behavior. Because if being an angry woman is clearly unacceptable in our society, being an angry feminist must be a billion times worse.

Another reason I dislike the stigma is that I don’t actually see being an angry feminist as a bad thing depending on what you are doing with that anger. I totally do not mean this to turn into a judgment of how those feminists are doing it wrong but these feminists are doing it right; rather, I mean that anger can be an intensely destructive emotion, and that shit will consume you if you let it. Which is not helpful for anyone, really, unless self-destruction does something unique or desirable for you.

But here is the thing: when feminists are angry, we are angry about oppression. We are angry about women’s (and indeed, men’s) options and identities being limited and defined by patriarchy, religion, laws, culture. We are pissed off that being born with a certain set of genitals means you are far more likely to experience sexual assault, to be denied health care coverage, to take a pay cut for the same work.

And our anger is frequently tempered with empathy. Feminism is a collective movement. You gain empathy by realizing that yeah, it also sucks for people who are both like you and unlike you. That opens you up to awareness that oppression happens on many axes, not just gender/sexuality, but also ethnicity, religious identity, immigrant status, nationality, class, and so on.

When you start to think about oppression and you start to realize how much it sucks to be oppressed, you generally don’t want to inflict those same feelings on others. This is where I’m going with the empathy thing. And while bell hooks has said this way more eloquently than I ever will, this is why feminism can and should intersect with multiple anti-oppression stances, and why all forms of oppression are related.

I think this, ultimately, is why the idea of the angry feminist is so threatening in a contemporary mainstream American/Western context: because the oppressors can’t understand a way of being angry that does not involve doing violence to others. Since that is how they work, by keeping others in check through fear and control. It’s power-over rather than power-with, to borrow a term from Starhawk.

But many feminists (and again, it’s such a broad movement that it’s hard to generalize about) understand that being oppressed–for gender or anything else–really blows, so we channel our anger into challenging oppression, not redirecting it onto whoever’s lower on the totem pole than us. We comprehend the destructive effects of displaced abusive anger and instead strive for transformative passionate anger.

Not that we’re perfect and get it right every time; I still feel helpless, and I still fight losing battles on the internet with people who are turned off by my anger so I really should adopt another tactic but I don’t because this shit is so raw, this being told I am less than human and don’t deserve sovereignty over my body. I am trying to do it better, to be more compassionate, to channel my anger into something useful and not wallow in rageful depression or lash out at potential allies.

This is why I don’t back away from the term angry feminist: I think it can teach us many things. It can be used to start conversations, or to end them, if the idea of an angry woman is so alien as to point out irreconciliable differences that it’s not worth bashing your head against. We do need some amount of self-preservation instincts to keep up this fight while life goes on around us, after all.

I hope that someday we won’t even need the term anymore: that women will have socially acceptable access to the same range of emotions as men, and that the idea of feminism will be something taught in history classes since it’ll no longer be necessary once gender-based oppression is banished forever. Yeah, I can keep dreaming. But I like my anger with a dash of optimism.

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