What do Thanksgiving turkeys, rockabilly and bar fights, and Chinese tales of female ghosts have in common? Each offers an example of how tradition and gender can intersect—sometimes with modes of drag—to unsettle assumptions about culture and its study. These topics, along with many others—a nineteenth-century French antiquarian, selkie stories, a fairy tale, films about the Grimm Brothers, Dutch-Danish ethnicity, a noisy Mennonite New Year’s celebration,The Distaff Gospels, a kilt-wearing pipe band, Kentucky tobacco farmers, and international adoptions—are the subjects of this book. In the contributors’ hands, these topics offer opportunities to trouble all three...

For most adult Euro North Americans, the season from Christmas to New Year’s has some (often vestigial) religious significance but remains characterized primarily by formal ritual obligations of feasting, gift giving and receiving, and visiting (see, e.g., Bella 1992; Caplow 1982, 1984; Cheal 1988). Periodic moments of play and socializing (sometimes involving alcohol!) may break up the structure, but for the most part drinking (sometimes to excess) offers the only relief from the often socially and financially expensive obligations. Yet in the past and to some extent the present, various Euro—North American and other cultural groups marked the period...

In November 2000, at the second annual Kentucky Women in Agriculture conference in Louisville, I had a brief conversation with an attendee whose husband raised tobacco. She told me their future seemed increasingly uncertain; their growing quotas were being cut, and her husband now worked a full-time job off the farm while continuing to raise a small amount of tobacco. For him, she told me, it was not just a crop or a source of income; it was a way of life, and she was afraid of what it would mean to him if a time came when he could...

A transgender imagination—thinking about or expressing the idea that a person, self or other, is or could be a different sex/gender than it appears—works in several traditional genres. Here, “transgender” and “trans” disconnect conventional gender identity (social, cultural, psychological) from canonical sex identity (biological, physiological). We usetransgenderandtransas encompassing terms to include transsexuals,¹ who identify as another sex than that of their birth, who may or may not want, or enact, hormonal or surgical interventions to match their sex identity to their gender identity; intersexuals (previously “hermaphrodites”), whose biological identity includes both male and female...

“[The] god-awful, kitschy films about the Brothers Grimms’ lives and how they came to write fairy tales … ‘frame’ the Grimms in such a way that the background to their lives and the purpose of their collecting tales are totally distorted to create lively entertainment … The Grimms come off more as lovable fops than serious scholars, and history itself is mocked. Entertainment is always more important than truth. We live in realms of fiction … So, perhaps the only way we can glean some truth about the Brothers Grimm will be through fiction and popular culture” (Zipes 2002, x)....

The animal spouse is an enduring motif, not only in traditional folktales but also in contemporary film and literature. Folklorists generally agree that, traditionally, tales of animal bridegrooms have been told primarily among women (Warner 1994, 276; Tatar 1999, 27), while animal bride tales mainly have circulated among men (Sax 1998, 21; Leavy 1994, 118). Since storytellers past and present “have always told tales relevant to their lives” (Zipes 2012, 95), story worlds function metaphorically as mirrors that reflect the social and cultural registers of the tellers’ lived experience, geographical location, and historical time, thus refracting gendered points of view...

Rockabilly music originated as a blending of African American rhythm and blues and Anglo-American country music in the early to mid-1950s and was a significant factor in the development of rock ’n’ roll. A major starting point for rockabilly was Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, where producer Sam Phillips made the original records by Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and others that helped define the sound and style of rockabilly and emerging rock ’n’ roll. Some of these records became regional hits and later spread to other parts of the United States and Canada, and eventually to the...

In the writings of nineteenth-century European folklorists, gender’s influence is sometimes obvious but often obscure. In a period when male domination of the public sphere and literary writing went largely unchallenged, collectors offered far fewer gendered assessments of their male informants than of the women whose traditions they gathered. Nor did they reflect upon the fact that, with only a few exceptions, folklorists and collectors of the time were men. If it is important to think about how their own masculine identities shaped folklorists’ misogyny and myopia toward female informants (Kodish 1987), a related and more covert challenge is to...

Norman Rockwell’s classic painting,Freedom from Want(March 6, 1943), depicts the iconographic American Thanksgiving (see figure 8.1). As an apron-wearing woman sets the turkey platter down, the patriarch stands beside her at the head of the table, carving knife close at hand. The family members around the table look on with giddy anticipation. One man turns back, peering at us from the corner of the painting. Is he inviting us to the meal? Or is he hinting at something amiss about this beloved holiday? Nearly sixty years later, Gurinder Chadha’s cinematic ode to American Thanksgiving,What’s Cooking? (2000), likewise...

Parents who have adopted children internationally encounter all the usual delights and difficulties of raising a child. We can expect, additionally, to help our children mourn their lost birth family, struggle over identity formation because they are perceived as racially or ethnically different from their adoptive family, and possibly deal with aftereffects of early malnutrition, lack of medical care, or orphanage life. International adoptive parents like myself are also challenged to understand and explain our chosen path to forming a family, grappling with ethical disputes that those who bear the children they love and raise rarely encounter. Finding both popular...

One day in late 2004 my husband, Peter, a bagpiper, and I, a folklorist, opened our in-boxes to discover a photograph shared by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson at the contemporary legend website Snopes.com. Later titled “Crown Jewels” (see figure 10.1), the group shot reportedly documented Queen Elizabeth II’s November 2004 visit to the First Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Canterbury, England, to present medals to the unit commemorating its tour of duty in Iraq. The humor in the photo was supplied by Colonel Simon West, seated front and center beside a prim Queen Elizabeth. West was...

The Distaff Gospels (Les evangiles des quenouilles), a fifteenth-century French manuscript, presents a series of about 230 items of folklore—beliefs, sayings, and remedies—within a frame narrative.¹ It shares this structure, linking loosely related stories in the context of a sequence of tellings, with more famous works from the Middle Ages, including Chaucer’sThe Canterbury Talesand Boccaccio’sDecameron. In the most commonly read version ofThe Distaff Gospels, the so-called Paris Manuscript,² a clerk agrees to spend six successive nights recording the “gospels” of older women and the responses of those who gather to hear and discuss the...

In the classic Danish crime comedyThe Olsen Gang on the Track, the bumbling thief Kjeld refers to the journey from central Copenhagen across a bridge to the island of Amager as being “just like coming to a foreign country” (Olsen-banden på sporet, directed by Erik Balling, 1975). While Kjeld’s summation of Amager as somehow “foreign” is typical of Danish attitudes to the island, for many it has an even more decidedly unfavorable reputation. Known as Shit Island, northern Amager hosted the dumping site for Copenhagen’s “night soil” in the late nineteenth century (Housted 2002, 44). When I moved to...

Ghost princess/wife narratives, a group of classical Chinesezhiguaitales, offer much material for gendered analysis. The rather fluid genre of zhiguai, literally meaning writing/recording (zhi) supernatural/strange tales (guai), “appeared in the form of collections of relatively short pieces of anomalous and supernatural events, and took the factor ofguaias the basic generic feature” (Kao 1985, 4). In the Chinese context, “supernatural” refers primarily to the types of reality depicted rather than to the mode of representation employed. That is, most zhiguai creators held a strong belief that the paranormal events they detailed actually happened; they regarded their works...