Unsettling Assumptions: Tradition, Gender, Drag - Tapa blanda

"This broad-ranging collection makes a significant and welcome contribution to the study and teaching of folklore; it also has an interdisciplinary reach into masculinity studies, queer theory, transgender studies, and cultural studies; and it succeeds in troubling certain assumptions in the discipline of folklore/ethnology as well as in gender studies and cultural studies."
--Cristina Bacchilega, University of Hawai'i

In Unsettling Assumptions, editors Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye examine how tradition and gender come together to unsettle assumptions about culture and its study.

Contributors explore the intersections of traditional expressive culture and sex/gender systems to question, investigate, or upset concepts like family, ethics, and authenticity. Individual essays consider myriad topics such as Thanksgiving turkeys, rockabilly and bar fights, Chinese tales of female ghosts, selkie stories, a noisy Mennonite New Year’s celebration, the Distaff Gospels, Kentucky tobacco farmers, international adoptions, and more.

In Unsettling Assumptions, folkloric forms express but also counteract negative aspects of culture like misogyny, homophobia, and racism. But expressive culture also emerges as fundamental to our sense of belonging to a family, an occupation, or friendship group and, most notably, to identity performativity and the construction and negotiation of power.