Reading Time: 4 minutes Folk tales are filled with stories of humans marrying animals. But the consequences are very different for men and women—a difference that illuminates longstanding attitudes toward gender.
folklore
Posted inFilm/TV
Once upon a time in ‘The Elysian Kingdom’
Reading Time: 9 minutes Classic Trek series always left room for play, and sometimes did so quite literally, with beloved characters play-acting in completely different roles for many episodes. Holodeck episodes in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager allowed crew members to play-act consciously. Q-continuum, time-travel, and mirror-universe episodes invited a range of unwilling, unintended, and naturalized […]
Posted inReproductive rights
When abortion is a joke
Reading Time: 5 minutes My college folklore professor Alan Dundes, a scholar often credited with creating the modern field of folkloristics, was an energetic teacher and learner with both a love and an encyclopedic knowledge of the field. When he gave a lecture on “sick” jokes to a hall filled with hundreds of students, I was fascinated. Even though […]
Posted inMyth & Folklore
The death of a useful monster
Reading Time: 3 minutes High in the Pennines in the north of England, in the gold-brown water of the River Tees, lives a creature named Peg Powler. She’s a mermaid, kind of, but she’s no Ariel. Peg is a river hag, with green hair and skin and a row of jagged teeth. And unlike Ariel, she lives not to make children […]
Posted inMyth & Folklore
Sleep tight or die trying
Reading Time: 3 minutes Kids raised in traditional Guarani homes may forget many things about their upbringing, but they never forget Jasy Jateré.
Posted inMyth & Folklore
The Foxy Folklorist: All the folklore under the sky
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’m celebrating 10 years of blogging by…starting a new column! If you know me from my time spent at other blogs, welcome; you know what to expect in terms of the alchemy of scholarship and snark. If you’re a new reader, greetings! I chose the title “Foxy Folklorist” to cheekily indicate that I’m primarily writing […]
Posted inCulture
Folklore and disability: Insight into identity and power
Reading Time: 7 minutes Folklore and disability interact in many ways, some upholding norms & some challenging them, but I would argue that understanding representations of disability in folklore can yield many insights into identity and power.
Posted inCulture, General, Myth & Folklore
Multiplicity Decenters Authority
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’ve been thinking recently about how cultural traditions confer authority, and how in two realms – religion and dance – I see multiplicity dispersing authority (this will make sense after I explain it, I promise).
Posted inEducation, General, Myth & Folklore
What I’ve Been Up to in the Folklore World
Reading Time: 5 minutes A lot of academic work is invisible and goes unrewarded…well, somehow a bunch of rewards just dropped into my lap all at once, so I thought I’d share them here (since my blog varies in its folklore content but that’s kinda my main profession, at least for now!).
Posted inEducation, General, Myth & Folklore
Meme This Class
Reading Time: 4 minutes What do you do when you’re teaching a year-long course, First Year Seminar, and pick up some new students in the spring semester? Have students make memes to explain the previous semester!