Natural and Unnatural Bodies: Contemporary Folklore and Embodied Female Experience

通过我在博士期间的批评和创作实践，我将发现一种新兴的趋势，即对当代女性写作中的神话和民俗进行激进的重新创作，并探索民俗学的女权主义潜力。关键部分将把理论方法和文本分析与田野调查、访谈和档案研究结合起来。这样的研究也将成为我的创作项目的灵感来源，这是一部质疑将女性身体等同于自然身体的民俗话语的故事集。相对于现有的学术，我的论文将身体女权主义和身体本体论领域与现代民俗学理论相结合，以解决苏格兰和英格兰神话传统中关于自然的和非自然的女性身体的概念，并研究当代女性民俗作家如何援引和解构民间习俗来突出体现的女性主体性。现代民俗学家艾伦·邓德斯将民俗学定义为“表达产生焦虑的关键问题的社会认可框架”(1980)。我采用邓德斯的定义是为了表明，作为沟通返祖和集体理解的有力媒介，这个“社会认可的框架”可能会被重新配置，以表达那些与居住在女性或被边缘化的身体--一个不受“社会制裁”的身体--的经历有关的具体的“关键焦虑产生问题”，因此可能被视为文化批评的工具。通过审视当代女性民俗作家作品中的社会批评，以及通过我的创作实践进行自己的女权主义干预，我假定民俗不是作为分析的对象，而是作为分析工具本身，即喉舌。在弗朗西丝·列维斯顿和凯·米切尔的共同监督下工作，对于我将写作生涯与学术研究相结合的目标至关重要。弗朗西斯是《我耳朵里的声音》(The Voice in My Ear，2020)的作者，这是一部关于女性经历的短篇小说集，其中包含了思辨和幻想的元素，是磨练我的创造性方法和思维的理想人选。同时，Kaye在我的研究领域编辑了领先的国际学术期刊(当代女性写作，牛津大学出版社)，并发表了许多关于性别体现的工作，包括她的著作《写作羞耻：当代文学，性别和负面影响》(2020)。我的博士研究项目将从Sarah R.Wakefield的民俗命名概念(2006)的角度来研究民俗叙事的性别动态。根据韦克菲尔德的说法，占主导地位的、通常是男性的名字者通过将女性姓名指定为他者来控制她们--在民间传说中，姓名被神话化到了否认主观性的地步。我使用韦克菲尔德的命名和叙事概念作为分析工具，来研究女性身体的民间编码--特别是那些将女性身体与自然身体混为一谈的编码--是如何通过投射男性恐惧和欲望的神话结构来削弱女性主体性的。正如都铎·巴里尼斯泰努在苏格兰和爱尔兰的作品(2005)中写到的关于女性特质的社会神话一样，在男性产生的寓言联想中，女性和自然的难以驾驭的躯体被弄得“卑鄙”--它们被变性了，变成了另一种。相反，在戴西·约翰逊的当代英国民间短篇小说中，佐伊·吉尔伯特和基尔斯蒂·洛根(主要对话者，我的论文将放在更长的民俗写作和该领域经典作家如安吉拉·卡特的女权主义解释的传统中)，字面上和寓言中的女性身体从迷信中恢复过来，通过一种询问和破坏自身的复杂的民俗命名行为成为一个经验的主体。

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.