Advancing Folkloristics

Jesse A. Fivecoate, Kristina Downs, Meredith A. E. McGriff, Jesse A. Fivecoate, Kristina Downs, Meredith A. E. McGriff

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780253057112
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Politica culturale

An unprecedented number of folklorists are addressing issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality in academic and public spaces in the US, raising the question: How can folklorists contribute to these contemporary political affairs? Since the nature of folkloristics transcends binaries, can it help others develop critical personal narratives?

Advancing Folkloristics covers topics such as queer, feminist, and postcolonial scholarship in folkloristics. Contributors investigate how to apply folkloristic approaches in nonfolklore classrooms, how to maintain a folklorist identity without a "folklorist" job title, and how to use folkloristic knowledge to interact with others outside of the discipline. The chapters, which range from theoretical reorientations to personal experiences of folklore work, all demonstrate the kinds of work folklorists are well-suited to and promote the areas in which folkloristics is poised to expand and excel.

Advancing Folkloristics presents a clear picture of folklore studies today and articulates how it must adapt in the future.

1 | Deep Folklore/Queer Folkloristics

Kay Turner

This essay had its first life as a keynote address given at the Future of American Folkloristics Conference (FOAF) in May 2017.¹ The delivery was rousing, interactive, and live-tweeted. I ended with an all-group sing-along of “Cruising Utopia,” a song I wrote based on lyrics taken word-for word from a book of the same title by the late queer scholar José Esteban Muñoz (2009). The chorus encourages us to “cruise utopia,” “to vacate the here and now for the then and there,” to discover “a queer time that is not yet here” (185). Those in attendance eagerly accommodated my invitation to sing our future queerly. I hold the final note of that singing here.

Thinking back to that moment of song, I realize how unique the entire FOAF experience was for me and, I am sure, for others. Participating in panels, talks, workshops, and parties, all in attendance gave and took a great deal of inspiration. Communitas held sway. And that’s important because advancing folkloristics in the twenty-first century needs some sweet inspiration as we take the risks required to move forward.

At FOAF my contribution took the form of a rumination about what I called “deep folklore.” At the time, Trump’s recent election in November 2016 had prompted widespread concern about the “deep state,” defined as a kind of “shadow government” conspiracy effort aimed at disrupting democratic practices. Other “deeps” were also in the air—deep mind, deep work.² I presented “deep folklore” in a conspiratorial mood, inviting my colleagues to a kind of disciplinary disruption.

Here I once again invoke deep folklore as a conceit for authorizing new, radically intersectional ways of presenting and interpreting folklore. As a first exercise, let’s get into the gesunkenes groove.

Consider the difference between gesunkenes Kulturgut and its opposite gehobenes—sunken versus upscale. Dress styles, for example, sank down from elite to peasant—or conversely rose. We won’t be returning to these outmoded, falsely determinist, and mechanical descriptors, but they do mark early recognition of a certain dynamism of folklore forms moving up and down from one status position to the next.³ They give us a palpable sense of folklore’s restless fascinations and fulfillments of need, its imitations of royal dress or theft of cream from the king’s cake to butter a scrap of bread.

In its descending onomatopoeia, a repurposed gesunkenes registers a desirable sunken feeling, bringing us down to a place where the usefulness of tradition today is being reshaped in various and strange, also estranged, subterranean cultural worlds. We drop down to explore “deep folklore” as unbounded, penetrative, absorbed tradition that cannot be defined as much as it must be felt, sensed, traced, alluded to. I’ll try to convey the feel of it—a feeling a folklorist might recognize already. Let’s seek out deep folklore, where gesunkenes meets rasquache meets queer. Turn on location services. Ask heart and mind—not Siri—where deep folklore is hanging out right now. Deep folklore dwells in many places and can mean many things. I’ll provide some clues, but as you read along, please add your own, and I hope you will.

Deep folklore is a riff, a refrain, a gut feeling and a gut reaction, a theory of sensing and sensation, of movement across space and through time. Deep folklore lives at the intersections and in the intersectional. Deep folklore knows both meta and meme. Deep folklore opposes the deep state. Deep folklore is a “lavender menace.” Deep folklore is found in what remains. Deep folklore knows the deep shit. It’s heavy, man. Deep folklore wears a pussy hat. Deep folklore is rasquache (bringing the underdog’s perspective). Deep folklore is straight as an arrow and as queer as the fork in the road. Deep folklore promotes infinite pluralisms. Deep folklore is as old as the hills and likes it that way, most of the time. Deep folklore is fierce. Deep folklore loves local learning. Deep folklore takes pride in being esoteric. Deep folklore is evasive. Deep folklore prefers its own meanings. Deep folklore is full of surprises. Deep folklore lives in a shotgun shack. Deep folklore tells a good story. Deep folklore ontologizes and rhapsodizes and decolonizes. Still waters run deep. Deep calleth unto deep. Deep folklore mines the mysteries of tradition. Deep folklore is the forms themselves. Deep folklore is a beautiful necessity. Deep folklore dances late into the night. Deep folklore feeds on excess and enchantment. Deep folklore lives at the bottom of the well. Deep folklore comforts the angel of history. Deep folklore escapes down the rabbit hole. Deep folklore embraces historical materialism. Deep folklore is in all of the people, all of the time. Deep folklore is rarely the fairest, but it is always the queerest of them all.

I take the last line as instruction for the remainder of this essay. Here’s one way to advance folkloristics: claim folklore’s central queerness and get on with it, not only through ethnography but also through ontology. Queer lives and queer being, queer things and queer ways are sedimented in folklore, layered in the deep, waiting to be unearthed by a folkloristics committed to all the excesses and ecstasies of social and cultural flow. Long overdue, a “queer” folkloristics plumbs hidden, unknown, ignored, uncategorized, and ephemeral facets of deep folklore. Condemning stigma as it unlocks deeper meanings of difference, exposing the pains as it upholds the advantages of marginality, a queer turn demystifies the purities and dangers associated with social-sexual transgression at the same time it raids social barricades, investigates the margins, and advocates for the marginalized who live outside the gate, either by prescription or proscription.

Lesbian and Gay Legacies/Queer Possibilities

Aiming my remarks at future folkloristics and future folklorists (especially the legions of LGBTQIA+ scholars and scholars of color who we hope will fill our ranks) obliges praise for what we have accomplished thus far and admonishment for what we have not. So few of us folklorists have investigated gay, lesbian, queer, and trans sensibilities and sexualities, nor have we enlisted our considerable ethnographic and interpretive skills to address homophobia and transphobia. This is being amended now, and earlier there were exceptions, which I catalog below, but this does not eliminate long years of erasure, nor does it make up for the losses incurred to our discipline by a failure of encouragement to recognize queer culture as a truthful expression of human needs, desires, and aspirations. The sex-and-pleasure stigmatized are tradition bearers too, carrying our own customs of identity, self-worth, and survival. We have been shadowed by heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions and causes throughout history, including that of our discipline.

Feminism’s wide-ranging transformation of folklore studies beginning in the 1970s found no parallel response to gay and lesbian liberation activism of that era.⁴ Thankfully, the times did change. In 1982 Marta Weigle released “Spiders and Spinsters,” her lesbian-leaning feminist study of women and mythology, and in 1986 British folklorist Venetia Newall published “Folklore and Male Homosexuality.” That same year Janet Langlois gave us one of the first investigations of legends spawned by the AIDS crisis, followed by Gary Alan Fine in 1987. Ultimately, Diane E. Goldstein’s extensive scholarly and activist work on AIDS served as a model for folkloristic intervention in understanding social ramifications of the disease. In 1989, Joseph P. Goodwin launched his groundbreaking study More Man Than You’ll Ever Be: Gay Folklore and Acculturation in Middle America. A few years later, in 1993, the New York Folklore Society brought out a special issue of New York Folklore called “Prejudice and Pride: Lesbian and Gay Traditions in America,” with articles by folklorists Goodwin, Jan Laude, Leonard Primiano, and me.⁵ Introducing the issue, the prescient Goodwin insisted on a future folkloristics with more gay, lesbian, and bisexual research framed by intersectional aims: “We need studies of the folklore of multiply oppressed peoples: African-American gays, Jewish lesbians, bisexual people with disabilities” (23). Goodwin was asking us to do what we should be good at doing.

So was Gerald L. “Gerry” Davis in his shattering, regenerating address delivered at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society (AFS) in 1995, titled “‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ . . . Judy Garland in Neverland.” That year AFS’s theme was creolization, and Davis provided a way into the topic through what he called “queer thoughts and colored readings.” At intervals singing snippets of Judy Garland’s “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” he sweetly summoned the gay icon as he worried aloud:

Clearly my presence here is intended to mean something, perhaps to signal a move from one space, perhaps one time to another . . . [given] our overarching concern . . . with creolization. What is the nature of the topical challenge with which we are being confronted at this meeting of AFS, at this point in our organizational history, in this region [of the country] where racial and cultural admixtures are both celebrated and kept invisible, in the closet, under the rug? Is our requirement a continuation of the relatively benign consideration of our study of artistic expression in communities of people? Are we being invited to “foster understanding” among peoples. . . . Or is there a fuller, more knowing, teasingly cynical opportunity here? (118–19)

Davis, of course, takes the knowing, teasingly cynical opportunity to demand a creolized, hybridized, inclusive, diverse folklore discipline. He was out to trouble our waters, force us down into the deep of racial bias within our discipline, all the while tripping the light fantastic in his oh-so-gay ruby-red slippers, assuring us that our queer day would come “somewhere over the rainbow.” Gerry Davis died before he could join us in crossing the rainbow threshold representing a fully intersectional folkloristics.

Twenty-five years later we are not there yet, but we are ever approaching a queer folkloristics that sparkles like those slippers and brings a shine to all we undertake in attempting to understand and share the queer ways art manifests subaltern cultural desires. Ethnographic descriptions of gay, lesbian, trans, and genderqueer and genderfluid community expressions, especially as these pertain to esoteric strategies of identity, affinity, and survival, have been and will continue to be written. Folklore field methodology encourages deep community engagement, and folkloristics recommends the means for decoding queer subcultural traditions. This is a great strength of the folkloristic approach, as outstanding full-length works by Goodwin, Mickey Weems, and Lisa Higgins demonstrate.⁶ Recently these scholars have been joined by Solimar Otero, Cory Thorne, Guillermo De Los Reyes, and others who are building a queer, intersectional Latinx folkloristics.⁷ Otero’s growing catalog of work on queer aspects of Cuban Santería enriches our understanding of gender and sexuality as paradigms of cultural fluidity. Where sex and gender are in flux, the naturalization of patriarchy and homophobia looks trumped up. Moving through multiple genres of expression—from ritual acts to poetry to material culture—Otero shows this in close readings of ritual, art, and oration related to orishas (deities) such as the watery Yemoja.⁸

On the folk narrative side, for over twenty-five years, Pauline Greenhill’s discerning queer eye on the supposed “straight” ballad or fairy tale has offered persuasive arguments on behalf of homoambiguous possibility.⁹ Together Greenhill and I edited Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms, a collection poised discursively between fairy-tale studies and queer theory. Recent fairy-tale scholarship continues to offer provocative queer historicizing and interpretation of a genre that Marina Warner once described as “deeply concerned with undoing prejudice” (1994, 24).¹⁰ Some older scholars and many more up-and-coming folklorists—the editors of this volume, for example—already promote a queerer folkloristics by incorporating and cross-referencing feminist, critical race, intersectional, postcolonial, and queer theory ideas into folklore studies. Such an integrated approach is key to our analysis of folklore in a changing world—a changing world noted in public folklore projects such as countryqueers.com and in folklorist Aaron Paige’s public programs on chosen families at ArtsWestchester. His “Performing Families: The Art of Runway and Step” explores the historical, social, and cultural importance of alternative and nontraditional families to New York’s African American and LGBTQIA+ Black and Latinx communities.

As we continue advancing a queer folkloristics, queer theory, hammered to a fine edge in other disciplines such as performance studies and Latinx studies, is a basic tool for us. This should come as no surprise.¹¹ Queer theory problematizes all forms of gender, sex, and sexuality, addressing “the political ramifications, the advantages and dangers, of culturally ‘fixed’ categories of sexual identities and the ways in which they may . . . be performed, transgressed and queered” (Goldman 1999, 525). In questioning all forms of dominant social and political relationships, queer theory looks to—as folkloristics looks to—the disidentificatory performance through art and other means of unorthodox views that “disavow that which majoritarian culture has decreed as the ‘real’” (Muñoz 1999, 196). Influenced by Raymond Williams (1977) on “structures of feeling,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Challenges and Possibilities across Boundaries
• Acknowledgments
• Envisioning a Future Folkloristics
• 1. Deep Folklore/Queer Folkloristics
• 2. “An Epidemic of Meanings”: The Tenuous Nature of Public Intellectualism, Reflexivity, and Belief Scholarship
• 3. Expanding the Territory
• 4. The Politics of Trivialization
• 5. The Folklorization of Queer Theory: Public Spaces, Pride, and Gay Neoliberalism
• 6. Yemayá’s Fury: Residual Flows, Ecological Disaster, and Folklore Futures
• 7. Infusing Public Folklore Work into Academe: Experiencing the In-Between
• 8. Folklorists as Curators: Exploring the Four Cs
• 9. Culturally Conscious Collaborations at the Nexus of Folklore, Education, and Social Justice: Lessons and Questions for Folkloristic Praxis
• 10. The Power of Folkloristics at the Intersection of Affect, Narrative, and Performance in the College Classroom
• 11. The Folkloristic Diaspora: On Being a Folklorist in a Black Studies Department
• 12. Standing with Others: Folklorists in the Midst of Home
• 13. Disruptive Folklore
• 14. Talking Folklore: Getting Others to Take the Discipline Seriously while Remaining a Serious Folklorist
• Afterword: Advancing Folkloristics
• Index