Essay on Folklore and Power

June 27, 2012 in Folklore | 6 comments

In order to give y’all a glimpse into what it is that I do as a folklorist, I thought I’d share an essay that I wrote for a specific purpose (an application I’m very optimistic about) and have since revised a little. In it, I had to convey what we do in my field and some avenues of research I would like to pursue. Since it was for an application, it’s structured a little differently than my normal writing style, but as I was also trying to describe my scholarship to non-folklorists, I’m hoping it will be interesting and intelligible to my readers out there on the internet. Here goes.

Introduction

The concept of folklore as traditional and expressive culture is fundamentally intertwined with the notion of power. Folklore has been defined as artistic communication in small groups and as creativity in everyday life. As an academic discipline, folkloristics shares boundaries with anthropology, sociology, linguistics, literature, ethnomusicology, religious studies, and gender studies, among other fields that share our orientation towards group behavior, artistry, language, belief systems, social life, and narrative. Power weaves in and out of each of these ideas, for social life is structured by hierarchies dictating who has access to which resources and roles. Narratives depict the process of gaining the power to control one’s life. Artists have historically thrived under the patronage of the powerful—but artists also subvert dominant paradigms by illustrating inequalities.

My scholarship seeks to illuminate the ways in which folklore and power interact in social life and art, utilizing concepts of identity, belief, creativity, and access (strategies of gaining power) to guide the research process. These connections have not been properly investigated, due in part to the perception of folkloristics as a discipline with primarily festive and joyful topics. This could not be farther from the truth: there is folklore mourning death and dying, just as there is folklore celebrating birth and life. Sick joke cycles and urban legends mock current events and thus provide insights into a society’s collective anxieties, while traumatized refugees and rape survivors work through their experiences narratively.

However, another reason that the intersections of folklore and politics have been underexplored is that folklore and politics do indeed sometimes mesh well, too well, creating discomfort in both scholars and laypeople. For instance, the Nazi regime sanitized folklore in order to indoctrinate their followers, and this has contributed to the cautiousness with which German folklorists must proceed today. Alternately, oppressed nations have used their folklore as a rallying cry, as proof of shared identity and political legitimacy. Examples include the importance of the epic Kalevala to Finnish national identity, and the significance of folksong, folk dance, and national dress to the Estonian nationalist movement (Valk 2010). On top of all of this, scholars are not “supposed” to be political; we are not supposed to be activists, but rather, detached observers and analysts. The reality is, however, that merely choosing to turn one’s attention upon a topic is a political choice.

Much of the scholarship on folklore and power is indebted to the feminist movement. Feminist theory began to trickle into folkloristic research in the 1960s and 1970s (Jorgensen 2010). Feminist folklorists affirmed that the generations of mainly male folklorists primarily documenting men’s folklore rather than women’s folklore resulted in a skewed picture of the discipline (Young and Turner 1993). The study of women’s folklore is thus a corrective endeavor, to address the imbalances of power on an academic level.

Feminist folklorists also recognize that the exercise of power shapes folklore on multiple levels. For instance, an entire scholarly volume was devoted to the practice of “coding,” whereby a non-dominant social group must hide and subvert their messages in order to escape detection and punishment. Examples of women’s coding in folklore range from domestic disrepair to subversive quilting (Radner and Lanser 1993). Coding occurs in other contexts, and is but one instance of the ways in which power and folklore inform one another.

Theoretical Background

Power was, indirectly, a concern of early folklorists such as the Grimm brothers, who collected German folktales in a cultural context where Germany was not yet a nation-state and where Napoleon threatened German identities and proto-nationalist agendas. However, as discussed above, folkloristic works that explicitly address power are a fairly recent phenomenon.

One of the seminal works addressing the relationship of identity and power in folklore is Richard Bauman’s “Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore.” Bauman’s examples, drawn from genres such as taunts and jokes that bridge the communicative spaces between social groups, demonstrate that folklore is a response to and is inextricably wrapped up in the relationships among groups of people with differing access to control over their circumstances (Bauman 1972). Bauman’s essay initiated a shift in folkloristics towards performance as an orienting model. Rather than focusing on the folklore text, scholars began studying the context in which the text was situated, some going so far as to claim that there is no originary text, but instead that folklore is emergent, created in performance (Bauman 1984).

The shift toward performance helped illuminate many of the ways in which power structures folklore events. Patricia Sawin is one of Bauman’s students and one of the few folklorists to apply the power-oriented gender and identity theories of Judith Butler to performance theories of folklore, arguing that comprehensive studies of folklore and power must begin “by looking for evidence of a power imbalance and ask how the esthetic event impinges on and plays out for the less powerful participants” (Sawin 2002, 55). In her work with traditional singer Bessie Eldreth, Sawin demonstrates that “esthetic performance is a central arena in which gender identities and differential social power based on gender are engaged” (48). In other words, folklore performances—which range from song-singing and story-telling sessions to kinesthetic events such as folk-dances and festivals to the creation and consumption of material culture like holiday foods or customary garments—are fraught with power. Power can be contested or reinforced within a performance, and the power at stake need not be gender relations, but could also be ethnic or national tensions.

Hypotheses

  • Beliefs about power are an inherent structuring element of folklore because of the fact that folklore is circulated amongst groups of people whose lives are shaped on a daily experiential level by power. Thus any study of folklore must begin with a contextual accounting of the types of power—economic, gendered, racial, class-based, colonial, religious, and so on—that inform the groups from whence folklore springs and wherein it circulates.
  • Every genre of folklore, from nursery rhyme to festival, is structured by power relations and will thus display some aspect of those power relations in their content, context, form, and/or function. However, since folklore does not always show a direct relationship with reality (e.g., fairy tales alter the real world by adding magic), the nature of the relationship with the power sources of the society may be artistically distorted. Therefore, one aim of this project is to note the differing relationships between folklore genres in how they address the distribution of power in society.
  • Genres of folklore that explicitly address power relations will be particularly charged and creative in how they deal with the roles and rituals associated with power. For instance, folklore about gender roles, such as courtship rituals or jokes about sex, will be especially emphatic in their framing of identity. The more a genre is infused with roles of power, the more I expect to find creative strategies making it socially acceptable to address the topic of power, which is frequently taboo as power obscures its own discursive workings (Foucault 1972).
  • The connections between beliefs about and access to power, as well as the creative strategies for debating and displaying power, will thus be visible to the analyst of folklore and identity, even if these relationships take different forms among different groups and between different genres.

Methodology

Historically, folkloristics has incorporated methods from both the social sciences and the humanities. Our discipline’s concern with the expressive aspects of social life makes it necessary to consider the quantitative and qualitative methods available. Culture is patterned—hence involves numbers and the relationships between them—but culture is also subjective, something that is experienced and felt in both conscious and unconscious ways. Thus, scholars of culture should incorporate both quantitative and qualitative methods where possible.

Folklore materials are generally flexible and adaptable in their forms. Unlike a literary work that is fixed in print once published, folklore materials display variation and multiple existence as part of their defining characteristics (Dundes 1999). For example, it is not uncommon to see legends and jokes that were once oral traditions now being transmitted by email and SMS, while folktales and fairy tales are transformed into films, books, poems, and games. The inherent instability of folklore makes it essential for researchers to be comfortable with a number of tools, methods, and theories.

In American folkloristics especially, there has been a divide between literary and anthropological approaches to folklore (Zumwalt 1988). As my training has been primarily in America (though I’ve benefited from the mentorship of numerous international folklorists), I have the ability to balance and negotiate these complementary research modes.

As I plan to investigate a number of genres, so must I be prepared to utilize various methods to examine them. I will use literary analysis and methodologies from the digital humanities (such as computer programs that allow for advanced text analysis) in order to study genres such as fairy tales and epics that have primarily existed in print in recent years. For those “living” folklore genres such as folk dance, belief, and gendered behavior, I shall utilize fieldwork methods (e.g., participant observation). The anthropological principles of ethical practices and reflexivity inform my fieldwork practices. I always emphasize studying folklore in its cultural context and treating the materials as respectfully as possible.

Conclusion

As my introduction and literature review demonstrate, my project addresses a gap in existing scholarship and thus makes a new and significant contribution to cultural knowledge production. While there are many ways to study folklore, placing power at the forefront of this investigation makes for an exciting and relevant research project. Though I am most drawn to genres such as dance and narrative, the multifaceted and timely hypotheses I propose here give me the flexibility to explore various folklore genres and folk groups depending on which avenues seem the most fruitful, as well as which topics will be conducive to collaboration.

With wars and economic crises afflicting numerous societies today, it is increasingly important to understand how power works, and how power structures both cooperate with and disrupt local traditional cultures. Understanding the dynamic interrelationship of power and folklore will help illuminate conflicts as well as the potential for their resolution in social microcosms and macrocosms.

Bibliography

Bauman, Richard. 1972. “Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore.” In Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, eds. Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 31-41.

Bauman, Richard. 1984 [1977]. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc.

Dundes, Alan. Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Foucault, Michel 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

Jorgensen, Jeana. 2010. “Political and Theoretical Feminisms in American Folkloristics: Definition Debates, Publication Histories, and the Folklore Feminists Communication.” The Folklore Historian 27: 43-73.

Radner, Joan N. and Susan S. Lanser. 1993. “Strategies of Coding in Women’s Cultures.” In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Cultures, ed. John N. Radner. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1-29.

Valk, Ülo. 2008. “Folk and the Others: Constructing Social Reality in Estonian Legends.” In Legends and Landscape: Articles Based on Plenary Papers from the 5th Celtic-Nordic-Baltic Folklore Symposium, Reykjavik 2005, ed. Terry Gunnell. University of Iceland Press: Reykjavik. Pp. 153-170.

Valk, Ülo. 2010. “Folklore and Discourse: The Authority of Scientific Rhetoric, from State Atheism to New Spirituality.” In Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science, eds. James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 847-866.

Young, M. Jane and Kay Turner. 1993. “Challenging the Canon: Folklore Theory and Reconsidered from Feminist Perspectives.” In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 9-28.

Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy. 1988. American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Be Constructive Before Destructive

June 11, 2012 in Academia, Dance, Feminism | No comments

I am a teacher, scholar, feminist and performer (among the other identities I shift in and out of). One of the common threads that runs through all these roles is the desire, and even the necessity, to critique and thus transform. But when you’re critiquing someone’s dancing, someone’s writing, or someone’s political stance, how do you go about it positively, in a way that makes people receptive to it (or at least doesn’t turn them off from the very first words you say)?

One dancer I respect told me that she always praises a dance student before going on to offer criticism (as in, “That was a beautiful shimmy! Now make sure you stay in posture and hold your arms at shoulder height”). That helps a student be ready to receive the criticism and take it to heart in the way it was meant: as a tool to aid in growth and progress, rather than as an insult or an attempt to take someone down a notch.

At conferences, if I see a paper I really don’t like because I think the scholar doesn’t know what she’s talking about, I try to open with something nice before I go on to my criticism (for instance, “I thought your connection between X and Y tale types was really clever. However, I think you may be a bit off base in focusing on the origins of motifs that we can’t verify with empirical research…”). Not that it always works; I’ve had people go into rude-defensive mode, but at least I tried.

As a feminist, I’m aware that it can take a lot of positive reinforcement to reach a woman through the layer of negativity that we tend to accrue in our culture. Sometimes it takes a while to get someone to accept a compliment—and I mean truly accept it, not just smile and nod while thinking “But I’m actually still doing the whole move wrong, and I’m fat, and I’m not as young as the other girls in the class.” This is unfortunate, and I’m hoping that creating more safe spaces for women to, for instance, take up belly dancing for the sheer joy of it will help.

I wasn’t always this way; people who have danced with me know that I tend to be extremely critical of myself and of others. But I mean it in the best possible way; I assume that everyone is as ruthlessly disciplined and intent on self-improvement as I am. I’ve since learned that this is not true, and that not everyone wants to hear about every little thing they did wrong in a choreography, or every little thing I think could’ve been better in an essay. I still think that my ability to be incisively critical is one of my strengths, since I have a highly trained eye when it comes to both intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, but I’ve learned to keep a lot of my thoughts to myself unless asked to share. I’ve seen, firsthand, how important it is to boost people up before you tear them down (or act in such a way that they perceive it like that). I’m stubborn so it took a while for me to recognize this, but I’m here now. And I also, along the same lines, try not to say anything unless I have something nice to say, which is hard since I tend to be blunt, but oh well.

So  now, because I truly believe that it’s both important and effective to offer creative, positive, or constructive comments/suggestions before moving into the negative, destructive, or super-critical stuff, I’m figuring out how to implement it in the rest of my life.

For example, as a pro-choice, sex-positive feminist, I am not thrilled with how so many American religious conservatives want to not only outlaw abortion but try to restrict access to birth control and sex education. This, when our country can’t even seem to take care of the children that already exist: malnutrition, poor literacy, and other physical and social health issues plague our young. So… why not address this issue (the constructive part) before trying to take away people’s choices and access (the destructive part)? I mean, why not throw all those resources into trying to help the needy citizens of our country instead of legislating against, shaming, and sometimes even committing acts of violence against the people who provide access to and obtain abortions and birth control?

That is the political feminist portion of this post, and I know that not everyone will agree with me here (for instance, you could argue that saving the life of a fetus is a more constructive act than trying to help an impoverished child, prisoner, or mentally ill person, though I’m not quite sure how that logic prioritizes a not-yet life over an existing life). But what I hope people get out of this post is the will to reexamine your rhetoric, intentions, and actions when you interact with people. Could you go about something more constructively or creatively at first? Could you do something to inspire confidence in someone rather than insecurity?

(fyi, I was tempted to make a bunch of jokes about constructionism vs. deconstructionism for my academic readers, since I’m a huge social constructionist and find deconstruction to be passably interesting, but I’ll spare you!)

It basically comes down to this: do you want to create or inspire, or tear things down? There’s certainly a time for both, as when tearing down harmful institutions such as slavery or fascist governments, or in times of personal metamorphosis, but I think we need to examine our motivations in which types of actions we begin with. Since I’m folklorist, I’ll remind others: you win more flies with honey than vinegar.

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Busy with Recent Projects

June 6, 2012 in Academia, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

I’ve been meaning to post about various things lately; some of my post ideas include why I’m okay with being an angry feminist, some thoughts on education, and things along those lines. I’m working on a few papers for publication, too. One is on sacred and spiritual belly dancing in America, and I’m quite excited about it. My interview material is a few years old but those dancers I’ve been in contact with recently are also really enthusiastic about participating. I hope to have more information about when and where that essay is coming out soon.

However, I’ve been really bogged down with wedding planning among other things. Yep, I’m getting married, though it’s not something I talk about a lot in public webspace for a number of reasons. For one, as I discuss in this MySexProfessor post, women tend to be judged by whether or not they’re single, and that’s something I want to avoid. For another, I feel that navigating wedding planning as a feminist is really complicated. Does it make me a bad feminist to want to get married? I mean, the institution is based on the idea that women are property, and though it’s changed a lot, it’s not perfect. I also don’t want to give the impression that wedding planning (or being married) is detracting from my ability to do research or be a good academic.

However, I do have admit it: wedding planning is tough. It takes a lot of energy, and I’m not even doing the bulk of the logistics (thank goodness for my family being so on board). I find it especially draining since I don’t buy into a lot of gender normative ideas, but that is like ALL there is to wedding advertising and crap these days. It’s really frustrating. So I can spend a few hours each day doing wedding-related stuff, and a few hours each day doing research, and then since I’m visiting my family in L.A. we also have to see relatives and go out and do stuff. And since my family is full of foodies that also means we’re spending a lot of time at farmers markets and gourmet restaurants, and in the kitchen preparing lovely meals. And since I am eating so much I’m also making sure to exercise a lot; I might as well take advantage of the beautiful hills to run in while I’m here.

All of which is to say that I’ve been on a semi-vacation, trying to relax after finishing my PhD, giving myself some space in which to work on various projects and also get my life together.

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Patronizing Forms of Religion/Sexuality

May 9, 2012 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Again, normally I save the sex posts for MySexProfessor.com … but this is a little more, hm, shall we say, political than my blogging there tends to be.

What sparked this rant? This Feministe post about an American Christian evangelical group that is sending missionaries over to Thailand to “save” the bar girls there.

I don’t even know where to begin. Go click on the link and watch the video if you have the stomach for patronizing, classist, colonialist, sexist propaganda.

First? It is beyond me how a bunch of American, privileged-enough-to-travel-to-Thailand women can claim to understand where Thai sex workers are coming from. How can they talk about morality and sin when these women are working in the sex economy in order to survive? How dare these privileged American women project their sexual norms onto women from another culture, and women who are most likely disadvantaged at that? What’s their solution – are they going to pay for the Thai women to come to the US, learn English, and learn vocational skills? Because anything less than that is bullshit. Anything less than that is a misinformed (at best) attempt to tell other people to prize morals over food. And anyone who tells you that has probably never been hungry or poor.

Next: these women are saying masturbating is a sin. NO. NO. NO. I cannot believe there are still doctrines that say that. Becoming acquainted with your body can only be a good thing. It will only benefit your future partners (or partner if you’re saving yourself for “the one”) and your children and your community. Your body is not sinful. Your body is just your body. It just is. It’s a part of you. Like, maybe you shouldn’t masturbate so much that you rub yourself raw or miss important commitments. Moderation in everything, my dears. But seriously. People who say that masturbation is wrong should be taken to fucking court as far as I’m concerned BECAUSE THEY ARE WRONG. We have empirically proven that it’s normal and healthy. Even bloody Fox News agrees on this.

(if I believed in hell, I would say that there is a special hell reserved for people who tell teens that masturbation is immoral and sinful, just as I think there should be a special hell for people who instruct schoolchildren that abstinence is the only way to go because condoms don’t work and will give you diseases anyway… but since I don’t believe in hell, I can only hope that these people become enlightened enough to realize that they’re inflicting unnecessary harm on young minds)

Finally, the “When I’m With My Daddy” song playing in the video, along with all the He/Him/Christ stuff? Is downright creepy. It is patronizing and creepy to show these young women subjugating themselves to Him and His stuff and so on as the only way to deal with sexuality. Would they make a video showing young men doing the same? Nope, that would be deemed homoerotic. It’s uncomfortable for me to watch these young women saying how pure they feel because of Him, how cleansed of sexual anything… and yet they’re in a position to “rescue” other women who are quite possibly undergoing trauma these girls have never imagined?

I’m all for the message of acceptance in the video, and that message in Christianity in general. When people fulfill the teachings of Christ, I think that’s awesome. But I find this evangelical brand of Christianity offensive, patronizing, and creepy. Like, how is this not about controlling women’s sexuality? I just… ugh. I need to go cleanse my palate now that I’ve gotten this rant out of my system.

(I’m not trying to imply that all of Christianity is creepy, and I hope I haven’t given that impression… but y’all need to reevaluate what you’re doing if some parts of your religion come off as creepy to non-Christians, especially if you’re an evangelical religion, which I gather Christianity is)

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Living in the House of Cannibals

April 24, 2012 in Fairy Tales, Feminism | No comments

This weekend, some folklore colleagues and I watched an Estonian film titled “Nukitsamees” which translates to “Little Bumpy” (the title character is a little witch child with horns). The plot begins rather like the Western fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” with a brother and sister lost in the woods, taken to the home of a witch where they live with the constant threat of being eaten. When they escape, they take the witch’s child with them, and though he is unruly, he eventually chooses to live a human life. There is much rejoicing, singing, dancing, and valorizing of the heteronormative family.

What really struck me about the film, however, was the grim terror that the children experienced while living in the witch’s house. While it was quite graphically depicted in the film, this is a feature of many related stories as well: the despondence and despair of the children upon discovering what they’ve stumbled into. The tale plot about children living in the house of cannibals – be they giants or witches – is quite widespread throughout Europe and Asia (I could go into specifics if I wanted to nerd out about the international transmission of folklore, but I’ll spare you that rant unless someone specifically asks about it).

These tales address very real fears of abandonment and child abuse, but more than that, I believe they deal with the experience of living in an environment that is experienced as harsh, hostile, and dangerous. The children are forced to work all day and night; they know that they could be punished or killed for any arbitrary reason; they know that their bodies will sustain the bodies of their captors, giving the captors life built on death.

What is this really about? I think these stories are about patriarchy, or, more broadly, a hierarchically stratified society that thrives upon the labor of the disenfranchised, literally building the lives of the empowered upon the bodies of the disempowered. In the case of women’s experiences of patriarchy, everything I wrote in the above paragraph applies: women’s labor in the domestic sphere is endless, filling each day and night; women (and men too) are policed and punished for any number of arbitrary transgressions when they step outside their gender roles; and women’s reproductive labor is the foundation of society’s continuation. Sexual assault remains astoundingly prevalent and functions as a powerful threat to keep women in their places, while cultural rhetoric places the blame on women who are raped as though they somehow asked for it.

Much of the same could be said for the working class in a capitalist society; for people of color in a racist society; for the urban poor in a classist society; for the untouchables in a caste society; and so on. These are the people whose bodies bear the brunt of mainstream society’s desires and needs. Those who live more comfortable lives are unaware that they are simply being fattened by the witch before being shoved into the oven.

Stories like “Hansel and Gretel” and “Nukitsamees” give us an emotional vocabulary with which to articulate experiences of fear, complicity, and hostility. Those of us who study culture know that most people can’t articulate the basic principles of the culture they live in, just like they can’t articulate all of the principles of the language they speak. We’re like fish who can’t tell that we’re swimming in water. Our culture is so infused with power relations that we can’t even begin to say where they begin and end.

The setting – a terrifying house that is not a home – intensifies the cultural conflicts we all experience. The hostility is coming from inside the house (sorry, couldn’t resist the temptation to make a BSG reference) when that is the very last place that should be experienced as hostile. Fairy tales as a genre make these artistic distortions, playing with significant themes like home and family, in order to critique these very institutions.

The imagery of terror in stories holds up a mirror so that we can see what our lives are like. Some of us are living comfortably in cages or cradles; some of us are breaking our backs stoking the fire; too many of us have already been eaten, rent limb from limb, or know people who have suffered terribly.

We are all living in the house of cannibals.

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Women’s Work and Academia

April 22, 2012 in Academia, Feminism | 1 comment

This Chronicle article by Emma Thornton tells a familiar story: a female academic is told she appears “too confident,” observes that a lot of the upper echelons of academia are overwhelmingly male-populated, and ruminates on the emotional labor or “women’s work” that female academics invisibly perform.

Characterizing this women’s work, which she calls “cuddle work,” the author writes:

…women were expected to do, and did do, more of what I call the “cuddle work” of academe: reassuring worried students, listening to problems, taking time outside of classroom and office hours to offer help and support. And as long as I’ve been in academe it’s seemed to me that women attend to their “school” work with a conscientiousness detrimental to their research. Too many women devote hours to committee concerns and go out of their way to make sure other people’s needs are met as soon as possible—to a degree that plays havoc with their own careers in an academic world that has forgotten that educating is its primary goal.

Women are raised to say yes, to help people, to be pleasant, so academic women must overcome a lot of social conditioning in order to turn down constant requests for help and focus on their own research. It’s really disheartening to realize, however, that a lot of labor we’re expected to do is invisible and unpaid; in addition to the nurturing we perform on campus, there’s probably unpaid domestic labor waiting at home.

As it’s become so prevalent, I forget where I first encountered the idea that academics really need a wife at home to take care of all those daily-life tasks, but the sexism inherent in many university roles is well described here. And here is an enumeration of how many advantages an academic woman loses when she has children; it’s enough to make me want to tear out my hair with frustration, and I haven’t even 100% decided whether I’m having kids yet.

However, I’m completely with Thornton when she talks about complicity and infiltration as a strategy to subvert:

I’m willing to tone down my confidence if it might get me a job, because I need to put food on my table and pay off my student loans, and because I believe infiltration is a powerful tool. But once I’m in the door I intend to be as confident as I naturally am, and as expectant, and I hope to encourage other women to be the same way.

This is one of the reasons I really want to land an academic job now that I’ve finished my PhD; I want to be a role model to women and other minorities, and I want to help open the door for others like me.

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Open Access to Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Our Scholarship

April 1, 2012 in Academia, Digital Humanities, Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

For over a month now, I have been thinking about the intersections between issues of interest to Digital Humanities (DH) scholars, feminists, and sex educators/researchers. I’m not the only one to consider these connections, but my positioning as a scholar who does DH and gender/feminist studies, while also writing for a Kinsey-affiliated sex blog, might help me see some novel patterns.

On the scholarly side, the DH community has written a lot about gender and our particular area of academia. Kicking off a large debate, Miriam Posner’s Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code acknowledges the intersectionality of identities in academia, such that yeah, it is often harder for women to get into coding than men. Bethany Nowviskie’s response Don’t Circle the Wagons cautions us not to put up gender barriers where unnecessary, and she also makes the canny move of contextualizing this whole discussion in current US politics, which are, to say the least, not very woman-friendly. Among the many responses (so many of which were really wonderful, and I wish I could go into more detail about them; Miriam links some here), A spot of mansplaining by Hugh Cayless also helps contextualize coding as an exclusionary field, one which has ingrained social dynamics ensuring that women (also the elderly, and other groups not privileged with certain kinds of education or access) will have to fight for the opportunity to learn at all.

And, of course, there’s Tanya Clement’s I am a woman and I am a mother and I do DH that heart-rendingly exposes some of the sexism at the core of our field, as well as in academia and society in general. Her “fear that someone will find out all of the ways in which my identifications as a woman, a friend, a mother, and as a DH academic do not follow the way everyone else who has identified themselves as such might define those same identities” really resonates with me, as a shy/introverted but obstinate woman determined to make my own life and my own choices even if they’re not the norm.

While I don’t intend this to be a post about gender and coding in DH – as plenty of others have already covered that ground – I will say that I view coding like any other tool in my scholarly toolbox. I’ll learn it if it’s going to help me in some concrete way, but otherwise, I’ll leave it until later. I mean, to draw a parallel, given my scholarly interests in north-east India, I should totally get on learning some of those languages ASAP, but as I haven’t narrowed down which ethnic groups I want to work with, I can’t yet make an informed decision about which language to learn. Besides, English will get you pretty far in India. And if you have colleagues who will translate for you on field excursions, leading to a fruitful collaboration… well, you see where I’m going with this. This approach tends to work in DH too.

But back to cultural context (I am a folklorist; we really like talking about context). The DH Twittersphere discussions about open access really intrigued me. As much as the DH community seems to love to debate various minutiae, open access seems to be one of the significant themes connecting our discourse and our activism. I feel very strongly that we should make as much of our research as accessible to the public as possible. I recognize that there are some constraints on how much of that we can feasibly do right now, while still retaining enough value in the eyes of our institutions. Most of us agree, however, that closing down avenues of access is generally a bad idea; it tends to be motivated by power, money, and a desire to control.

In introducing the awesome initiative Open Folklore, my colleague Jason Jackson makes some incisive remarks, situating the project “in the context of the serials crisis, the corporate enclosure of society journal programs, the erosion of the university press system, the development of open source software for scholarly communication, and the rise of the open access movement as a progressive response to these changes.” The scholarly open access movement, in short, is a multifaceted response to a whole slew of social, economic, and political issues.

Further, Jackson (among others) has contextualized the open access issues within the larger cultural framework of the Occupy Movement, which has been drawing attention to the inequalities that riddle our society. While the Occupy Movement casts a broad shadow, one notable topic it includes is health care, specifically for women. Occupy Birth Control argues: “Just like the vast majority of Americans want an economic system that is just and want banks held accountable for predatory lending and other amoral (and sometimes illegal) practices and the government held accountable for enabling these practices, the vast majority of women—and the men who care about them—believe access to birth control is a right.”

The battle for women to have, essentially, open access to their bodies is growing increasingly bitter, with women wanting birth control called sluts or pregnant women told to just carry their non-viable fetuses to term like livestock do (references here). So we’ve got links between the movement for birth control and the Occupy movement, and links between the Occupy movement and the open access movement, which is of interest to DHers… I don’t think I’m mistaken in thinking “if A equals B, and if B equals C, then A equals C.”

Since I’m trained to see larger social patterns (again, yay folklore!), here’s my argument: that the same conservative, power-oriented cultural forces that want to close off our intellectual access are the same forces wanting to close off our sexual access. No, I’m not saying it’s one Mr-Burns-like figure in some global conspiracy to make everything suck for professors and sex-positive folks (I’ve read too much Foucault for that kind of view to be believable). Rather, I’m saying that there are large trends in our culture (mostly America, but the rest of the West to a degree) that are anti-intellectual and anti-feminist and anti-progressive, and a lot of these trends overlap, perhaps sharing funding by large corporations and churches and politicians. In a similar vein, I could ask: do you know who benefits from open-access everything? Everyone does… but who benefits from closed access stuff? Only some people… but they are going to fight to retain their power over access issues.

In short, I think a lot of the same people and ideologies that don’t want our research to be freely available also don’t want us to have knowledge about our bodies and sexualities. Obtaining accurate information about pregnancy and STIs, not to mention affordable birth control, is getting harder and harder in some places. An uninformed population that is constantly occupied (deliberate word choice there) with childcare (perhaps wanted, perhaps not) and student loan bills is an easily ruled population. And this is where I think scholars and sex activists really share common ground, even if we don’t always think of it that way.

I have a friend who is fond of saying: “All forms of oppression are connected.” Perhaps the connections are subtle, or perhaps you need to don your bell hooks goggles to see them better. Either way, I hope this post was at least a little thought-provoking.

Obviously, I’d love to see more DH scholars doing gender-aware work and advocating for access to better sex education (which our country really needs; our teen pregnancy and STI transmission rates blow in comparison to much of Europe). I’d also love to see more sex researchers and educators taking advantage of our cool digital tools and progress in the fight for open access publication. But I know that everyone has time constraints and obligations and we can all only do so much. So mostly, I’m writing this post to help spread awareness.

I also want to put my money where my mouth is, of course. Since I’m now Jeana Jorgensen, Ph.D., but I’m not yet certain which distinguished institution will hire me to do awesome stuff, I don’t know what kind of funding or research time I’ll be looking at for a study that applies DH strategies to understanding (and perhaps solving) a pressing sexuality issue of our day. I’d love to hear from the feminist/sex-ed blogosphere on this and maybe find someone with whom to collaborate.

In the meantime, feel free to go read What can I do for feminism? over at the always-fabulous Feminism 101. And for sex-positive folks that wandered over from the interwebs and want to get a sense of what this DH stuff I’m talking about it, feel free to read my DH lecture notes which contain links to a bunch of other resources that explain what we’re all about. transformdh (here on Twitter) is also a movement I’d like to get more involved with now that I’m more or less done with my dissertation. I think we could all have some really awesome conversations together.

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Day of Digital Humanities: Dissertation Edition

March 27, 2012 in Digital Humanities, Folklore | No comments

I’m still in conference-recovery mode (see my post on this year’s ICFA to see part of why I was so jazzed), so this is a very brief attempt to engage in the #DayofDH conversation.

As you may know–especially if you read my personal narrative about how I found DH–I recently wrote and defended a dissertation from a traditional humanistic discipline that incorporates DH methods. Some of the tensions inherent in this enterprise were discussed at my defense.

So because my dissertation was a part of my daily life for the past, um, over a year, I’d say my daily work has usually had a DH component to it. If nothing else, I reflected on what it means to apply quantitative methods to expressive culture (fairy tales in my case), and what it means to try to combine quantitative and qualitative approaches to the same topic. I also keep up with a lot of DHers on Twitter, which has been important for my sense of the scholarly community because I’ve spent a good chunk of the past year in Estonia, where there’s not a ton of DH stuff happening as far as I can tell (though since I was so immersed in my diss, it’s entirely possible that I missed something or someone).

Other than some DH engagement through my dissertation or the internet (Twitter, blogging, reading other people’s blogs), my days tend to be filled with various things that support me in these endeavors. I love to cook and dance and run, and fortunately I’m able to fit these things in on an almost-daily basis. I revise my CV and look for jobs and counsel my friends who are also my younger folklore colleagues. Since I don’t have a family to look after, I can go on outrageous excursions–watching avant-garde dance or rock climbing or traveling to new places–that keep my mind and body fresh.

Today, however, I’m thinking about how to revise my introduction to my dissertation. During my dissertation defense, some of the more traditional humanists on my committee brought up some interesting points: newer does not equal better, everyone engages with data differently, and empirical data can help us articulate what’s at stake in research. I’ll tackle these ideas one by one.

First, my committee brought up the idea that newer is not always better. Folkloristics is a discipline obsessed with tradition; we tend to use traditionality as the measure of whether we want to study something in the first place. If you can’t prove that something is traditional, even if it’s an emergent tradition or something that is traditional to a tiny group of people, then folklorists would question why we’d want to study it. Somehow related is the fact that a lot of folklorists tend to be luddites; this is very chicken-or-egg in my mind. Is someone drawn to the study of tradition since they want to live a more traditional/old-school lifestyle, or is someone who studies tradition going to be more and more into the idea of incorporating what they study into their lifestyle? I doubt it’s as simplistic as either A or B, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed.

However, I’m one of a growing number of folklorists who think technology is great. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when we can pipe the internet straight into our heads. A lot of us are on Twitter now, and we blog, and discuss DH issues like open access and such. We don’t necessarily think new is always better than old, since our discipline is pretty concerned with the old (or new takes on the old), but I do think we have room for new things in folkloristics. My dissertation, by applying new approaches (DH and feminist/body theories) to old topics (fairy tales) participates in a dialogue on evaluating the role of the new and the old in expressive culture and scholarship thereon.

Second, one of my advisors brought up the idea that everyone engages with data differently. She liked a lot of the nifty-looking charts that I had to visually demonstrate which body parts were described the most in fairy tales, since it helped her understand what my thought process was while handling the data before writing about it. One of my other advisors, though, did not see the charts as adding much value to the reader’s experience. This conversation, we bemusedly noted at the defense, proved that different people handle data in different (and valid) ways. It may sound obvious, but it’s one of the reasons I think there’s a lot of room to do DH in folkloristics, since expressive culture is a vast field and you need to have different perspectives to understand what’s going on with these very complex materials.

Finally, we talked about the use of empirical data to reinforce the importance of the main argument or, in other words, to help us get back to what’s at stake. Yeah, pretty pictures are pretty to look at, and visualizations can help you empirically back up your claims. But when you are dealing with material that bridges the subjective and the objective–as I believe all culture does–then you need to have language for spanning these interpretive realms. So, one thing I think DH can do for a study is help scholars use empirical data to read the material differently, and to connect back to why we’re doing all this in the first place. And believe me, in a field like fairy tale studies where huge amounts of scholarship have already been done on just about every aspect of the topic, having a fresh approach is invaluable. Being able to offer an empirical perspective can help us ask questions about what really interested us in the topic in the first place.

As a folklorist, I am deeply aware that we are enmeshed in cultural forms that repeat and reiterate and vary over time and space. As someone with a lot of postmodern perspectives on things, I tend to view multiplicity as a bonus. Put these aspects of my identity together, and how could I not be in favor of DH and a multiplicity of ways to approach an interesting topic?

That’s all I have for #DayofDH ruminations. Now I need to get back to my dissertation revisions!

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China Miéville on Folklore

March 23, 2012 in Fantasy, Folklore | 6 comments

At this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (one of my all-time favorite conferences), the theme is the Monstrous. And, appropriately, one of the guest of honor writers is China Miéville. I’ve only read three of his books (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and The City and the City), but he is now one of my favorite authors. Needless to say, I was quite excited to meet him and hear him speak.

I’ve been live-tweeting some of his talks (highlights include remarks on geekery and RPGs, revolution, and irony), but since he gave a really long answer to my question about how he incorporates folklore in his writing, I thought I would make a blog post in order to explain some of the magnificent points he made.

(Yes, I am fan-girling a bit; I was grinning like an idiot after meeting him, because he is so incredibly engaging and warm and kind.)

Part of the reason I was so stunned by his reply is that it wasn’t what I expected. See, there is a large chunk of folklore studies devoted to folklore in literature, which can range from Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographically inflected fiction to rewritten fairy tales. There are dozens of papers at every folklore conference devoted to this topic, and I, too, have engaged with it. The main methodology, as elaborated by folklore greats Richard Dorson and Alan Dundes, is to 1) identify the folklore materials used in the literature, and b) interpret them. You look for where tradition (replicating the folklore) and variation (changing the folklore to suit fiction’s needs) occur, and discuss their impact on the representation of folk groups and genres, or on the literary aesthetic that is achieved, or how the folklore functions within the plot, and so on. It’s fun stuff.

So when I asked Miéville about his use of folklore, I gave an example to indicate what I was thinking of. I mentioned that I’d had a field day reading Perdido Street Station because of all the mythological beings populating the city, such as the garuda – and I hadn’t even known where they were from until I saw a colleague give a paper on Tibetan Buddhist mountain lore. I was thinking he would respond with a reflection, perhaps, on his sources: which cultures he likes to draw from, or which folklore collections he’s found particularly stimulating. That is, after all, what folklore-in-literature endeavors tend to look like from our end: we classify and locate the folklore utilized in literature, and then we talk about what it’s doing there.

Instead, Miéville addressed the politics of cultural appropriation. He said that he used to blithely borrow from other cultures because that is what cultures do all along; there is no monoculture, no monolithic one way to represent a culture’s beliefs. The men and women of a culture may experience its mythology and belief system differently, as will people in various stages of life. His choice to, for instance, write the khepri as a race of beetle-headed women, drawing upon the ancient Egyptian deity and switching the gender, is thus a recreation that acknowledges that every folkloric figure in a culture will be recreated and reformed multiple times within that culture, so why would it be wrong to do it from outside the culture?

Further, he believes that his willingness to engage with the folkloric material and take it seriously, by way of literalizing myth and metaphor, is a way of respecting the material. Perhaps he ends up with something radically different than the source material, but he thought about it and treated it like a valid partner in dialogue before going his own direction with it. His choices were deliberate, and so his engagement with folklore is a way of creatively opening a discussion with cultural materials rather than superficially skimming off the top simply because it looked interesting or sounded cool.

Clearly he’s done a bunch of research into folklore, and I totally respect that. That is, more or less, the sort of thing I was expecting to hear from an author asked about the use of folklore in writing.

However, he also said that he’s moved beyond this first perspective, to rethinking the relationship between the culture of the writer and the culture being appropriated. As an example, he said he wouldn’t even really consider writing about voodoo, because of the power relations (racism, classism, and so on) that contribute to the disempowerment and Othering of the culture (Haiti among others) that can claim that as folklore. So we’re not going to see any Baron Samedi characters appearing in his writing anytime soon.

Yet he also doesn’t want to subscribe to an essentializing and totalizing view that says, you can only write about your own culture; only your own stuff is available creatively. He gave the example of the vodyanoi, his Bas-Lag water creatures that are based on Russian folklore. Apparently, his subject positioning as a British man does not make him feel discomfort at borrowing the folklore coming from Russia, since his people aren’t currently oppressing their people. His writing about their folklore will not contribute to stereotypes about them, or enforce negative attitudes about them, and so on.

One thing I would’ve liked to hear more of (and I wish we’d had more time for this conversation during the interview panel) was whether the fantastic-ness of the folklore being borrowed matters for this argument about cultural appropriation. Because if you’re writing about stuff that people may or may not believe in (or maybe they won’t tell you if they believe in it, since belief and insider/outsider dynamics are tricky like that), does it really matter for the social reality of that group? Are we going to think poorly of real Russians if somebody writes about folkloric figures that real Russians may not believe in anymore? Anyway, it’s something to think about.

I wish I could’ve recreated his answer better, but as he answered my query, we maintained eye contact that I did not wish to break in order to scramble for my notepad. I think I’ve managed to convey the gist of what he said, and of course any errors in transmission are my own.

Also, when I met him at the author signing and told him I’d just defended my dissertation, he fist-bumped me. That was possibly one of the best moments of my life.

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Covering up Rape in a Community that Values Consent

March 9, 2012 in Gender & Sexuality | 2 comments

Normally I’d post about sex and related topics over at MySexProfessor.com but this topic has gotten me all fired up and talkative. I’m also leaving that option open to Miss Maggie Mayhem, who was one of the main sex work activists interviewed in this Salon piece on sexual assault in the BDSM community and who’s also blogged at MySexProfessor.

If you need some background to the Salon piece I’m discussing in this post, I give a brief definition of BDSM here, and explain how it can be viewed as a sexual orientation. Clarisse Thorn, who is a brilliant feminist writer who discusses BDSM among other topics, narrates her messy initial experiences with BDSM here, in case you want to read about how a really smart, independent, feminist woman comes to terms with how she enjoys pain sexually.

What you really need to know, though, is that BDSM is a subculture that values the agency of adults to make their own sexual choices, no matter how strange or counter-intuitive they might sound. Period. No judgments like “that’s too weird” or “ew how could anyone like that” or whatever. If it’s consenting adults, then it’s fine.

So what really bothers me about the Salon article is how it highlights the abuse that happens in the BDSM community and  gets swept under the rug, explained away as a desire to avoid drama. Because this is a subculture that thrives on consent, and yet some of the practitioners trample on the consent of their partners – that’s what baffles me. I think this is just further evidence that the power tensions that plague a society will permeate it at practically every level: every subculture, every genre of expression, will somehow struggle with those roles and stereotypes and inequalities.

The Salon article notes: “In many ways, the kink scene seems light-years ahead of other sexual communities when it comes to issues of consent. They have checklists that tirelessly detail personal limits and safe words meant to bring things to a screeching halt if ever someone’s boundaries are crossed.” This is why I think it’s a shame that we’re not hearing more about the models of communication as well as the assaults that happen in the BDSM scene. Like other alternative sexualities – non-straight folks, non-monogamous folks, and so on – practitioners of BDSM are learning to communicate honestly and fearlessly as they figure out what they want and how to get it… which, when you have no mainstream role models or narratives to follow, can be pretty tough.

However, I think it’s important to recognize that just because a subculture acknowledges that pain can be an interesting sexual or sensual experience does NOT mean that a practitioner invites every kind of pain. The victim-blaming rhetoric mentioned in the article – make sure you get references before “playing” with someone, make sure you have a safe word, and so on – obscure the fact that the assault is never the fault of the victim, and that it’s perfectly okay for a consenting adult to say “I’d like to explore biting, but no blood drawing, please.” Nobody invites their boundaries to be broken. Nobody asks to be violated. Insinuating otherwise is stupid.

Kitty Stryker, interviewed in the article, says of safety techniques: “But then you find out that you can do those three things and not be safe anyway, and that’s terrifying. You realize how vulnerable you are.” This is true not just for BDSM or other sexual subcultures, but for all culture in a patriarchy. This is an incredibly unpleasant truth to face. As long as we live in a hierarchical culture where some people are deemed less human than others, there will be assault. I think it’s sad that assault is occurring in a community that otherwise is really focused on consent… but I also don’t think assault will go away until we fix larger inequalities in our society.

To end on a more positive note, the bloggers at Yes Means Yes are doing a lot of constructive work evaluating rape culture and how to change it. They make the excellent point that so “what if someone is taking different risks than you? We need to get over the idea that there’s some risk-free way to be sexual, or to more generally pursue pleasure, or to do anything else in life.”

Every lifestyle, sexual or social or whatever, carries some risk with it. This is unfortunate but inevitable. I applaud anyone who acknowledges that openly and honestly, and lives their lives in a constructive and brave fashion. In my mind, any sexual community that foregrounds consent and communication does that, and I hope mainstream cultures can learn something from them.

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