Natural and Unnatural Bodies: Contemporary Folklore and Embodied Female Experience

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Through my critical-creative practice during the PhD, I will be identifying a burgeoning trend of radical re-workingsof the mythic and folkloric within contemporary women's writing and exploring the feminist potential of folklore. Thecritical element will combine theoretical approaches and textual analysis with fieldwork, interviews and archivalresearch. Such research will also inform my creative project, a collection of stories interrogating the folkloric tropeof equating the body of woman with the body of nature.In relation to existing scholarship, my thesis combines the fields of corporeal feminism and bodily ontologywith modern folklore theory to address notions of the 'natural' and 'unnatural' female body in Scottish and Englishmythic tradition and to examine how contemporary women folklore writers both invoke and deconstruct folkloricconvention to foreground embodied female subjectivities. Modern folklorist Alan Dundes defines folklore as a'socially sanctioned framework for the expression of critical anxiety-producing problems' (1980). I employ Dundes'definition to suggest that this 'socially sanctioned framework', as a potent medium for communicating atavistic andcollective understanding, might be reconfigured to express those specific 'critical anxiety-producing problems'related to the experience of inhabiting a female or marginalised body - a body not 'socially sanctioned' - and mighttherefore be considered a tool of cultural criticism. By looking at social criticism in the work of contemporary femalefolklore writers, as well as conducting my own feminist intervention through my creative writing practice, I ampositing folklore not as the object of analysis but as the analytic tool itself, the mouthpiece.Working under the co-supervision of Frances Leviston and Kaye Mitchell is essential to my aim of mergingmy writerly career with my scholastic research. Frances, the author of The Voice in My Ear (2020), a collection ofshort stories on women's experience which includes speculative, fantastical elements, is ideally placed to hone mycreative methodologies and thinking. Meanwhile Kaye edits the leading international academic journal in my areaof research (Contemporary Women's Writing, Oxford University Press), and has published much work on genderedembodiment, including her book Writing Shame: Contemporary Literature, Gender, and Negative Affect (2020).My PhD research project will consider the gendered dynamics of folklore narration in terms of Sarah R.Wakefield's notion of 'folklore-naming' (2006). According to Wakefield, the dominant, typically masculine namerwields control over the feminine namee by designating them as other - in the folkloric act, the namee ismythologised to the point of a denial of subjectivity. I use Wakefield's concepts of naming and narration as analytictools for investigating how folkloric codings of women's bodies - particularly those that conflate the body of womanwith the body of nature - undermine female subjectivity by projecting mythic constructions of male fear and desire.As Tudor Balinisteanu writes on social myths of femininity in Scottish and Irish writing (2005), 'the ungovernablebodies of women and nature' are made 'abject' in male-generated lore by their allegorical association - they aredenaturalised, made other.Conversely, in contemporary British folkloric short fiction by Daisy Johnson, Zoe Gilbert and Kirsty Logan(primary interlocutors whose work my thesis will situate in longer traditions of folkloric writing and feministinterpretations by canonic authors in the field such as Angela Carter), the literal and allegorical female body isreclaimed from superstition and becomes an experiencing subject via a complex act of 'folklore-naming' thatinterrogates and undermines itself.