Natural and Unnatural Bodies: Contemporary Folklore and Embodied Female Experience

通过我在博士期间的批判性创作实践，我将确定一个新兴的趋势，即在当代女性写作中对神话和民俗进行激进的重新加工，并探索民俗的女权主义潜力。关键要素将结合联合收割机理论方法和文本分析与实地考察，访谈和档案研究。这样的研究也将为我的创造性项目提供信息，这是一个故事集，它质疑将女性的身体等同于自然的身体的民俗tropeof。我的论文结合了女性主义和身体本体论与现代民俗学理论的领域，以解决苏格兰和英国神话传统中的“自然”和“非自然”女性身体的概念，并考察当代女性民俗作家如何都是通过对传统习俗的借用和解构来凸显女性的主体性。现代民俗学家艾伦·邓德斯（Alan Dundes）将民俗定义为“社会认可的表达产生批判性焦虑的问题的框架”（1980）。我采用邓德斯的定义，建议这个“社会认可的框架”，作为一个有效的媒介，沟通返祖性和集体的理解，可能会重新配置，以表达那些具体的“关键焦虑生产问题”的经验，居住在一个女性或边缘化的身体-一个身体不“社会认可”-因此可能被视为一种工具的文化批评。通过对当代女性民俗学作家作品中的社会批评的审视，以及通过我的创作实践进行我自己的女性主义干预，我将民俗学设定为分析的对象，而不是分析的工具本身，喉舌。在弗朗西斯·莱维斯顿和凯·米切尔的共同指导下工作，对我将我的写作生涯与我的学术研究相结合的目标至关重要。弗朗西斯是《我耳边的声音》（2020）的作者，这是一部关于女性经历的短篇小说集，其中包括投机，幻想的元素，是磨练我创造性方法和思维的理想场所。与此同时，Kaye编辑着我研究领域的国际领先学术期刊（Contemporary Women's Writing，Oxford University Press），并出版了许多关于性别的作品，包括她的著作《写作的羞耻》：当代文学，性别，和负面影响（2020年）。我的博士研究项目将考虑民俗叙事的性别动态方面的莎拉R.韦克菲尔德的“民俗命名”的概念（2006年）.根据韦克菲尔德的说法，占主导地位的、典型的男性名字通过将女性名字指定为他者来控制女性名字--在民俗行为中，名字被神话化到了否定主观性的地步。我使用韦克菲尔德的命名和叙述概念作为分析工具，来研究民间对女性身体的编码--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破坏女性主体性的。正如都铎·巴利尼斯泰亚努（Tudor Balinisteanu）在苏格兰和爱尔兰写作中关于女性气质的社会神话（2005年）所写的那样，在男性创造的知识中，"女人和自然的不可控制的身体“被它们的寓言联想弄得”卑贱“--它们被变性，被异化。相反，在当代英国民俗短篇小说中，黛西约翰逊，佐伊吉尔伯特和柯斯蒂洛根（主要对话者，我的论文将在更长的传统民俗写作和女权主义解释的经典作家，如安吉拉卡特），文学和寓言的女性身体从迷信中被收回，并通过一个复杂的“民间传说命名”行为成为一个经验主体，这一行为质疑并破坏了自己。

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.