Western States Folklore Society Western Folklore

Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore: A Twenty-Year Trajectory toward Theory
Author(s): Margaret Mills

Source: Western Folklore, Vol. 52, No. 2/4, Theorizing Folklore: Toward New Perspectives
on the Politics of Culture (Apr. - Oct., 1993), pp. 173-192
Published by: Western States Folklore Society
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Feminist Theory and the
Study of Folklore: A
Twenty-Year Trajectory
toward Theory
MARGARET MILLS
First of all, whose trajectory toward theory? Well, my own-and

"slouching" may be a truer depiction than "trajectory," but I will
return to the subject of disclaimers. The point is that trajectories can
be hard to generalize for projects such as feminist social documenta-
tion, which themselves seek to undermine monolithic position state-
ments and grand generalizations. How do you draw a master plan of
a critique intended to dismantle the idea of master statements?
The consolidation in recent years of the anti-essentialist, social-
constructionist strain of feminist theory across at least the historico-
ethnographic disciplines (and even psychological models show an his-
toricizing influence, e.g. Herrera-Sobek, Taggart), while trying to
save itself from the threatened postmodern wreck of universalist
theory-building, logically takes refuge in historical specificities, mod-
eling difference in "specific cultural and historical context[s]" (Nichol-
son 1990:9). Yet this move itself might imply master theories of, say,
history or culture. One finds oneself tripping over one's own discur-
sive practices, and the solution may have to be metaphorical. Can we
turn the tripping into rope-skipping, the impediments of particular
discourses being the turning rope at our feet? It may be that we can
only experience balance and stability as long as we stay in motion.
Western Folklore 52 (April 1993): 173-192
173
174 WESTERN FOLKLORE
Our "rope turners" may be conceived as occupying such distal

positions as biological determinism and radical cultural relativism, or
the equally untenable "poles" of "theory" and "data." Either pair con-
stitutes only an ideal (hence hallucinatory) polarity, but the polariza-
tion can be productive for those moving about between them. Rumor
has it that Charles Briggs told several people contributing to this
extravaganza that they should address only theory-"no data." As
with most rumor and gossip, the existence of the allegation is more
instructive than its accuracy or lack thereof. Either he didn't tell me
that, or I censored it, and perhaps for good reason. Here is why:
If you buy (as I do) Marta Weigle's idea that gossip-anecdote can
speak (constitute and articulate) cosmic order(s) just as much as cos-
motactic myths do, then our data-anecdotes, gossip, incidents where
we were present-are always already speaking "theory"--somebody's
theory, theory in the everyday-and it's our job to sort out whose
theory. Following the critique of objectivism articulated by Evelyn Fox
Keller, discussed by Miriam Camitta (1990), we might best make our
high claim be low theory, to see how "experience near" (from our
subjects' point of view) our theoretical constructions can be. That we
can be "low theory," in the sense of operating in a very close dialogue
with our research subjects, enables us to emphasize quite explicitly the
fact that they are subjects, knowers, and to answer Gayatri Spivak's
(1988) question "can the subaltern speak?" with specific, data-rich
"Yes!" answers. The very form of the question, from a low-theory,
experience-near perspective, is not "Can the subaltern speak?" but
"How, and under what circumstances, can or does the hegemonic
hear?" Spivak's question from the low-theory perspective seems more
indicative of high theory's hearing problem than of any subaltern
Philomela syndrome. In any case, even Philomela, deprived of her
tongue, knew how to use her loom. Folklife/material culture topics
offer a great deal in the way of alternative discourse detection, as we
turn our attention to such issues as exchange, commodification, and
cultural subversion and cooptation. But folklife presents a special
challenge in the "low theory" mode, where the producers may or may
not contribute verbal exegeses of what they do and make. Still, by
being a "low theory discipline" (and thus also a feminized one: Neu-
stadt 1986), we in folklore may still be intensely theoretical, in an
up-from-under sort of way, becoming virtuoso listeners who know
better than to accept any construction of listening as passive.
FEMINIST THEORY 175
So here I am, trying to re-hear, and not passively, the last twenty
years of folklore theory and feminist theory as a dialogue. The rela-
tive difficulty of detecting two sides to this dialogue is indicated, in
part, by the heroically long gestation periods and contests over the
birth of the major assemblages of position papers in feminist folklore.
Both the Journal of American Folklore special issues (1975, 88:347; and
1987, 100:398) were editorially contested (Jackson 1987:387-9 be-
tween the lines; 1988). The feminist assemblers of these collections
were second-guessed in each case by the male general editors of the
journal, perhaps claiming paternity, or at least godfatherhood, of the
ideas being delivered. The two books now emerging from the 1987
collective effort (Radner 1993; Hollis, Pershing and Young 1993) to
sum up our theoretical labors, have also gotten long and intense ed-
iting, in part because the foregrounding of theory has taken some
extra effort. Certainly all collected-paper "concept" volumes are hard
to edit for similar reasons, but it seems to me gender theory in folk-
lore offers a particularly intense case, perhaps because of the "low
theory" dynamic described above, a certain resistance in the exempla
against high-order abstraction, a not-too-latent desire to let narrativ-
izing or other vernacular construction be seen as theory building
(Ochs et al. 1992), which I think has its own critical virtues.
Concerning maps and territories, consider DeCaro's 1983 bibliog-
raphy as feminist folkloristics' first major cartographic effort. At that
point, the emphasis was on groups, genres, and topics, not yet at-
tempting to map distinctive theories or methods of folklore-oriented
women's studies. Yet (pace Clifford and Marcus 1986) it seems to me
that, as in feminist anthropological studies, the implications of the
move to create a scholarship of gender did constitute a radical depar-
ture in theory, finding difference and contest not across communal
boundaries but at the center of the smallest human groups, in the
liminalities of the heterosexual dyad and a procreative nuclear family,
a sort of discovery of subatomic forces and particles in units whose
atomistic coherency as a cultural unit had previously been assumed.
Whereas folklore studies in general have often been accused of oc-
cupying the now-vilified position of salvaging the culturally almost-
lost with an essentializing, nostalgicizing notion of the "folk group" or
"community" which generates such cultural materials, it seems as if
feminist folkloristics for some while has been noticing the not-quite-
found, the problematics of social group coherency and obscured
cultural production, in theory and method as an extension of its de-

fined objects. Feminist theory/method maps in folklore have for some
time been "almost-already." A disciplinary/theoretical map seems very
needed and somewhat elusive. The bibliography attached to this pa-
per identifies only a fraction of the highly diverse body of relevant
material.
If we take Toward New Perspectives in Folklore as a starting point for

the mapping of the feminist exploration/invasion of folklore studies,
we will be starting at the pre-contact era. What is striking about that
book for the feminist critique is its silence: (a) its strong articulation of
the operation of difference in constructing human groups, over
against (b) its total nonaddress of gender as a rather persistent and
visible cultural resource in folk and popular models of difference (e.g.
race/gender stereotyping). Bauman in Toward New Perspectives might
bear the brunt of this observation, because he was the one who there
took on differential identity as a central issue of folkloristics, but
Ben-Amos's face-to-face model of the folk group is equally implicated
in the bland erasure of gender configuration as a component of the
concept of the social group (Paredes and Bauman 1972).
Ben-Amos in Toward New Perspectives developed the concept of the
small group to mount an important critique of persistent and crucial
problems with the term "folk," adapting Homans' idea of the human
group as a face-to-face interactive assemblage, be it family, street
corner gang, factory floor, etc. What was limiting here, and continues
to limit our model, is that it lacks the notion of multiple simultaneous
memberships in group identities. Boundaries needed stressing at the
time (cf. Barth's Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 1969), and now, as
Bagg6z (personal communication, Oct. 1992), has pointed out, cross-
cutting of boundaries, not just transactions across them, has become
more salient. Feminist models were and are equipped to look at the
phenomenon of cross-cutting identifiers in such groups as the family,
the age group, the shop floor, etc. One thing gender studies can add
to the notion of social groups is the experiential decentering of social
membership. Thus group membership for any one person becomes a
Venn diagram of intersecting and superimposed circles of interac-
tion, not all of them face-to-face, as we see now, but all involving
alternative shared rules systems upon which assumed alternative
shared solidarities are played out. Had gender been included in Bau-
man's array of types of difference, perhaps this decentering effect
FEMINIST THEORY 177
would have entered our model earlier. Gender was added, without
much fanfare, to identity models such as Stahl's (1989), yet the ques-
tion of decentering was not directly addressed, and gender as a source
of examples for decentering was mysteriously excluded from some
recent work where it should have had a place. Clifford in Writing
Culture (1986:19-21) lamely defended the absence of feminist schol-
arship from that work. A selection of correctives to his view are avail-
able in Abu-Lughod (1990), di Leonardo (1991), and Gordon (1988).
As it is, folkoristics seems to have received its earliest theoretical ap-
proach to decentering (multiple consciousness) from other feminist
theory, not the other way around, despite folkloristics' obvious inter-
est in cultural pluralism and communal enactment processes (e.g.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1978). While we are attending, as Amy Shu-
man has suggested in this volume, to the inadequacies of a theory of
community which depends on co-presence, let us also attend to the
problems arising from inattention to individual subjects' simultaneous
presence on multiple notional "maps," spatial or otherwise. Recent
feminist theorists have developed themes highly useful for general
folkloristics; thus di Lauretis (1986:14): "the differences among
women may be better understood as differences within women," op-
erating a multiple cross-correlation of parameters including race,
class, ethnicity, sexuality, and, I would add, age and occupation, so
that the "female subject as a site of differences. .. remains concretely
embedded in social and power relations."
To return to the history of these issues in folkloristics: It is not that
early feminist folklore studies "got" the multiple notion of groups,
either. In the early seventies, it seemed enough just to get "female"
included in the inventory of bounded groups, for which the implica-
tions of contest and alterneity, the ambiguities of boundaries of all
sorts, were only later to be worked out. There were important excep-
tions. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan's (1972) work on signifying among
African-American women, for instance, cross-correlated gender and
ethnicity in an assessment of expressive strategies.
Looking forward from the genderless theoretical baseline estab-
lished by Toward New Perspectives to Claire Farrer's (1975) assemblage
of the folklorists' work that did open up the question of gender, we
can note that these initial feminist discussions directly problematized
not the concept of groups as such, but of genres (e.g., personal
experience narratives, in Susan Kalkik's work in that volume and
elsewhere) (see DeCaro 1983). This too pointed out the shortcomings
of our inventory-the canon, if you will, of folklore--without explic-
itly opening up the idea of genres as post-modern thinking has
since done. This diversification of cases, of objects worthy of study,
however, in retrospect might be counted as one contribution to the
then-in-progress decentering of folklore studies, off the historically
long-standing center of analytically-categorized texts, to a bilateral
configuration (often not integrated) of processes and styles of inter-
action (or performances, crucially including, with reference to female
subjects, disclaimed or explicitly non-authoritative modes of perfor-
mance), and forms of texts. Kaldik's work (in Farrer 1975) in particu-
lar injected the question of forms of authority and authorship into the
diversification project. Particularly in the topic of collaborative floor,
which Kalgik addresses, one can see now a precursor of the topic of
decentering in "femmage" as it came to be known, and pastiche, as
styles of social expression perhaps not limited to feminist writing. Just
as the concept of the decentered self had an early articulation in
women's studies, but cannot be considered unique to women, the
study of relative empowerment and disempowerment in language,
undertaken from the feminist viewpoint, went on to illuminate pro-
cesses of disempowerment and marginalization not limited to gender
forces.
The public/private debate (cf. di Leonardo 1991:13) is another

topic deserving detailed discussion in the trajectory of feminist folk-
lore. Briefly, let it be said that Stoeltje's work on female display events
in rodeo, (summarized in Stoeltje 1988; much of it orally delivered
earlier at folklore meetings), probably compromised that dichotomy
more from the start than we were able to realize, and from the heart
of the "West" where the public:private :: male:female dichotomy
seemed most at home.
Farrer's (1975) collection also initiated folklorists' in-print conver-

sations with feminists in other disciplines, but that dialogue appears to
have been predominantly one-way. We address them without their
"hearing" us, it often seems. Farrer pointed out (and DeCaro's bibli-
ography confirms) that writings on women's lore from the beginning
of AFS to the 1950s focused on beliefs, health practices, marriage
customs and birth practices, without ever articulating an explicit the-
ory of the gendered division of cultural labor. From the perspective of
performance studies, this very selectivity of representation invites ad-
dress to the question of the social-material-political base for access to
FEMINIST THEORY 179
(or credit for) expressive forms. The strongest current work in fem-
inist folklore theory thus seems to me to be the Radner and Lanser-
organized discussions of coding, of what might be called cryptic or
encrypted performances, of things expressed in deniable forms. De-
niability may include explicit denial of a particular implication of the
expression, or denial that any communication has been undertaken,
whichever seems desirable or necessary to the sender(s) of the mes-
sage. Radner explores forms of deniability in detail. This work is a
strong critique of noncontestive models of performance as a general
phenomenon, which have neglected issues of power, resistance, con-
test, and effacement, including self-effacement.
Nor was there much attention to folk theories of gender, e.g.,
gender stereotypes and their expressions (with the exception of the
bizarrely patriarchal efforts of Gershon Legman in The Rationale of the
Dirty Joke). In this line, it would seem fruitful to attempt more of a
rapprochement between feminist performance studies (e.g., Lawless'
work on female preachers and evangelists) and the phenomeno-
logically/experientially-oriented belief studies movement led by David
Hufford. We need some strong way of addressing the "feels real"
aspect of culturally constructed experiences (of gender and other
seemingly intractable categories). By what "feels real," I mean those
experiences which are taken by the experiencing subject as
incontestable -conversion experiences, miracles-but I do not wish to
label the contents of this "feels real" category as "ideological" in its
entirety. While such felt realities seem most tangibly represented not
only by religious and supernatural experiences, but also by prejudice
in the lives of both perpetrators and their victims, it would be pre-
mature to assume the coherency of the category, "feels real." In trying
to achieve a more constructive dialogue between performance-based
and phenomenological folkloristics, we probably need to reassess the
gap between the concept of performance as communication subject to
aesthetic evaluation (the theme of competence developed by Bauman,
Hymes, Briggs and others out of Jakobson), and performance in the
sense of performatives in linguistics: utterances which create social
realities, the human equivalent of the logos. Weigle's work is provoc-
ative in this regard.
Such a rapprochement by feminist folklorists in particular would
achieve a needed critique of what often seem to be unacceptable and
intractable forms of essentialism in the category-constructions of fe-
minist theory itself. Recent French feminist theories of gendered
cultural production (Irigaray, Cixous; see Fraser and Bartky, Whit-

ford, Oliver) have attempted to isolate distinctive expressive styles in
which representations are linked to phenomenologies. Thus "writing"
(or thinking) the body roots ideological differences in physiological
experiences. This attempt to address the global scale of sexist represen-
tation, of ideological constructions of difference, in physiological ex-
perience, carries with it a threat of physiological determinism, which
must be compensated, or at least challenged, by theories of the cul-
tural construction of the body and difference (di Leonardo 1991).
Physiological determinism is also the language of stereotypes--"dumb
blonde jokes" being a recent example-a connection which may ex-
plain the relative nonabsorption of some of French feminist theory
into feminist folkloristics. This particular "take" on the relationship of
words to experience may seem to us, on preliminary inspection, to be
a bit too physiologically driven to be critically useful. But the struggle
over biological and cultural models of difference in feminist studies is
by no means over. Di Leonardo (1991) and others attempt to con-
struct historical, but non-determinist interpretive procedures to pre-
serve some substructural elements of culture-production against the
overly superstructural, intellectual-constructionist trends in textual
post-structuralism. Folklorists will need to decide where they stand,
and would I think find our own ethnographic-phenomenological ru-
minations productive in formulating a distinctive contribution to the
interdisciplinary debates now in progress.
With the beginning of feminist folklore studies-and theory, the task
of tracking noncommunication becomes two-fold. While tracking the
non-meeting of folklorists with other feminisms, we must also look at
the trajectory of noninvolvement of feminist folklore's critique in
other critical models within folklore. The striking early example of
Bauman's non-inclusion of gender as a category of difference per-
haps can be illuminated by a phenomenon traced in the virtually
simultaneous work of Beverly Stoeltje. In "A 'Helpmeet for Man'
Indeed," (in Farrer 1975) Stoeltje convincingly traces the effacement
of the topic of sexuality and erotic passion in the image of successful
frontier marriage-on the 19th C. American frontier, it seems, men
gave women credit for effectiveness only as they effaced gender dif-
ferences. Thus, perhaps, Bauman's omission of gender as a criterion
of difference had to do with a (chivalrous?) self-censorship of gender
as an operant in the frontier society of folklore theorists. The problem
is, as we have come to see, that we all must find ways to be simulta-
FEMINIST THEORY 181
neously subjects and objects of gaze. Significantly, Stoeltje also did not
take as her task, at that particular time, a differential look at male and
female versions of the effacement of gender from the frontier model
of social effectiveness. Such a differential restudy would even now
move forward the study of decentered and multiple gender con-
sciousnesses in particular historical circumstances.
A less generous extension of this highly speculative and perhaps
overly metaphorized critique of the Toward New Perspectives "problem"
might suggest that the problem is with distant and proximate forms of
difference-specifically with intimate forms of difference. Thus in
Stoeltje's discussion, the bad woman/bad man dyad is the most threat-
ening to social order, and the most eroticized. The dominant, non-
feminist model of difference still seems to have an allergy to the fact
of intimate difference. Hence gender remains neglected as late as the
Marcus-Fischer-Clifford axis of cultural critique in the mid-1980s,
when critical ethnography was everywhere. Perhaps the possibility of
contest and otherness in such close proximity threatens the autonomy
of dominant maleness for specific reasons-not primarily the erotic,
where contest can be, after all, the thrill of the chase, but more likely
in the threatened lapse of maternal affection. Perhaps it is the
mother/other, female authority, intellectual or otherwise, the female
who confirms difference but forbids eroticization and draws attention
to moral issues entailed in contest and aggression, that remains a

painful threat even to males who have apparently made successful
separations, and gone on to make separations, differences, and power
itself their topics.
Moving on to the later 1980s, JAF 100:398 (Jackson 1987) provides
another benchmark of the development of folklorists' feminism to-
ward theory:
Babcock's theory map (with rich illustrations of Lady Liberty) em-
phasized process-commodity relations. Without space here to trace
this whole line, one can yet ask, in what sense or to what extent do we
solve this problem by producing texts (our commodities) about pro-
cesses? We could profitably examine self-commoditization in the tran-
sition from folk or elite to populist/mass cultural productions and
products. Examples abound, but for a feminist, Madonna and her
Boswell, Camille Paglia, seem vivid and articulate cases in point. Di
Leonardo (1991) notes the "cheerful self-commoditization" of postmo-
dernism, but folkloristics has long noted and not yet definitively ad-
dressed equally cheerful parallel phenomena, among groups who
would hardly claim title to the peculiar self-consciousness of post-

modernism. Narayan's (forthcoming) gentle criticisms of Appadurai's
(1991) equally cheerful dismissals of "folk" cultural production (in
favor of very post-mod, transcultural goings-on) contribute to this
topic.
Radner and Lanser in the same JAF volume began the work of
laying out female-centered rhetorics applicable to folklore. They dem-
onstrate the multiplicity of rhetorical means within a feminine dis-
course, using primarily literary portrayals of female communicative
strategies (including ones we include in folklore). The literary-
folklore connection with regard to discursive practices needs further
exploration, as does the potential for contests within the marginal
group or groups, over the choice of rhetorical strategies.
Weigle, in JAF 100 (398) and elsewhere (1982, 1988), had by now
established her critique of the dichotomy drawn in previously authori-
tative scholarly tropes, between the mundane and the theoretical, as
between gossip and myth, data and theory, the dubious dichotomy
with which I opened this discussion. Gossip as myth, as a fundamental
discourse form that authoritatively ensconces a social order, may be
our strongest critical example of theory up from under, much more
widely to be traced in "experience-near" feminized intellectual dis-
course. That dynamic, in its decenteredness as well as its deniability
(different from other authoritative moves in its capacity to deny,
explicitly, its activity as a means of claiming authority-yet perhaps
not entirely so), upon which we have begun to reflect, may combine
to explain why pan-disciplinary authority eludes feminist theory.
After all, the theory itself is (or should be?) busy eluding monolithic
authority.
JAF 100 (398) [1987] achieved a substantial inscription of multi-
plicity, within cases as well as between them. Thus Vera Mark could
conclude her paper thus: "The multiplicity of voices [in Gascon tall
tales]... leaves us with no ready generalizing statement" (1987:512)
Likewise Rachelle Saltzman: "The fieldwork experience is supposed
to help us apprehend the other-out there and in ourselves" (1987:
549, italics mine) over against overly "neat" models which constrain
the data. Let this not be heard as against models, or modeling, but
perhaps it encourages us toward models that are dialogic, ironic, not
just authoritative. Disclaimers thus become not strategic incompeten-
cies, far less the crippling female refusals of authority which Marina
Horner's writings in the 1970s labeled "fear of success," but ironizing
claims that point out the hallucinatory nature of the "last word."
FEMINIST THEORY 183
In favor of representation that can take account of dubious bound-

aries and decentered subjects, Miriam Camitta in Southern Folklore
Quarterly (1990) applied Evelyn Fox Keller's idea of "dynamic objec-
tivity," in favor of "the continuity and reciprocity of feeling" between
subject and object, which also "underscores the indeterminacy of the
distinctions between subject and object." Here Cixous' idea of de-
selfing was also invoked. There are many different ways to address the
fluidity of subject-representer relations, from di Leonardo's (1991)
evocation of the "moving stream" of historical positioning of the ob-
serving subject, to Irigaray's provocative, if somewhat ethnographi-
cally naive, psychological ruminations on the idea of metonymic
meaning-making in women's expressive economies (meaning-making
based on difference in contiguity, not on similarities in autonomy,
critiqued in Fraser and Bartky 1992 among others), which seem direct
precursors of Kodish's (this volume) less abstract invocation of "rela-
tionships of contiguity: proximity, contact, engagement" as desir-
able dimensions of folkloristics' current investigative and political
projects.
While we ourselves may want to internalize Craig Owens' (1983)
challenge to "learn to conceive of difference without opposition," this
too is no place of rest, for in academics as in politics, oppositions
generate contests and hierarchies, proprietary discourses (e.g., the
one being worked out by "Folklifers" in discussions at the AFS annual
meeting where this set of papers was also aired). I have discussed the
perils of facile identification of observer and subject before (in Collins
1990). Where the Other (or the self) is an oppressor, indeterminacy of
distinctions between subject and object becomes a mechanism of op-
pression (Strathern 1987).
And what about "high theory" in this postmodern environment?
Babcock in JAF 100 (398), Stoeltje (1988), Weigle in several places,
amply demonstrate that we need not lack for theoretical statements of
some elegance and utility for folklorists, working the same ground
Camitta (1990) was to explore, with different feminist theorist cita-
tions (Catherine Mackinnon in Stoeltje's case). Here we may note
Lutz's (1990) paper on citations, and the fact that the names being
cited in this paper were conspicuously absent elsewhere in the theory
panel sequence from which this paper collection derives. The process
of academic citation proves revealing as an object of critical feminist
study. For example, Clifford's (1986) bland dismissal of all feminist
ethnography as "not experimental writing," seems a disingenuously
naive maintenance of an untenable dichotomy of representational
form and content. Abu-Lughod (1990) seems to acquiesce in her re-

buttal, arguing in feminist ethnographers' defense that their sub-
ject matter was radical enough to fear marginalization if they did not
at least maintain conservatism (and thus enhance their authority
claims) in their discursive forms. But some of us took our intellectual
trajectory from that opening up of the forms of our subject matter, to
understand fully and relatively quickly, that the opening up of the
concept of an observing subjectivity had to be implied as well, even by
such an apparently empiricist move as feminist revision of kinship
theory, however cautiously expressed. Too often in critical-historical
reviews, post-modern or not, "I didn't see it" is allowed to imply "It
wasn't there."
In developing multiple-determiner models of group identity and

of individual identity within and among groups, the feminist critique
can make it less easy for "objectivist knowing" to continue to ignore
"its own perspectivity," not recognizing "what it sees as a subject like
itself, or that the way it apprehends the world is a form of its subju-
gation" (MacKinnon, quoted by Stoeltje 1988:142). Engaged in such
contemplations and critiques of modernist representational authori-
ty(s), recent feminist theorists express a good deal of anxiety about the
"fragmentation" of the subject in postmodern environments (Nichol-
son 1990, di Lauretis 1986), and perhaps it is here that folklorists can
contribute to a viable theory of intersubjectivity. The decentered self
can be conceived not as a victim of a schizophrenogenic historical
moment, but as a rather well-established phenomenon, if we incor-
porate concepts of performance, and especially of repertoire, in the
ongoing process of self-construction. Context-appropriate expression
and the situational deployment of repertoire elements are basic con-
cepts in aesthetically-oriented performance studies. We need not con-
strue such performances of self as quite so alienated and manipulative
a set of masks and facades as Goffman's work might imply, either.
The communal self, constituted (performed) in a nuanced manner in
a fairly manageable variety of intersubjective circumstances, may be
both "authentic" (because appropriate and inevitable--it's all the "self"
we have) and multiple without necessarily being fragmentary. Com-
plementarities and dynamic balances can be taken into account (but
please, not assumed or exclusively posited) in a model of self or per-
sonhood that invokes performance, repertoire, and multiplicity.
The feminist critique can and must integrate other elements be-
sides gender-such as class, historical period, community, age, occu-
pation, and especially race and ethnicity-in perceiving the partial
FEMINIST THEORY 185
visions and hegemonic tendencies of such terms as "folk" and "folk-

lore," not to mention ideas, implicit or otherwise, about who can be a
folklorist, a knower on our intellectual map. Stoeltje (1988) reminds us
of the bundling of nationalism, imperialism, and patriarchalism so as
to deny full status as knowers (actors, agents) to the female gender and
to non-Europeans. The phenomenon of subjecthood denied to cer-
tain categories of persons, in specific hegemonic discourses, has long
been traced in critiques of both racism and sexism, and very power-
fully traced when those two critiques intersect (hooks 1981, 1990).
The experience of being the object of stereotyping and marginaliza-
tion yields a potent reminder of the concrete consequences of essen-
tialist ideas, however socially constructed we see them to be. Here, too,
critical folklorists have substantial contributions to make to critical
studies, for it is through folklife studies, in particular, belief studies,

that there is some chance of conceptualizing what "feels real" (pain,
marginalization, the intransigence of prejudice both as suffered and
as thought), over against the tendency of postmodern intellectualism
to reduce all thought to situated hallucination. Deconstruction, dis-
empowering all discourses equally, disempowers none, and fails ulti-
mately to address the intransigence of the experience of the abuse of
power. Let us hope, then, for a continuing rapprochement between
feminist and other critical folklorists, and feminist theory in its politi-
cally engaged, historically situated forms, performance studies more
critically conceived but building upon existing concepts of repertoire,
appropriateness, contextualization, and the concepts belief studies
can contribute to an understanding of sociopolitical experience.
Stoeltje's, Babcock's, Weigle's, Radner's and others' "more high
theory" work is very welcome, particularly because the reciprocal of
dominant ideologies' tendencies to efface the female subject as a
knower seems to have been our own understandable tendency to
favor alternative, sometimes encrypted, styles of signification (deni-
able not only to others but to the self). In the case of modern Euro-
pean intellectual discourse, we may find ourselves avoiding the ab-
stract objectivist (i.e., the dominant high theory) models in favor of a
more anecdotal (i.e., decentered), metaphorical signifying (cf. Radner
& Lanser's "coding"). Here I think again of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan's
classic article (1972). Our notions of "direct" v. "indirect" signification
vs. signifying assign relative authority, validity, or reliability values to
ways of knowing packaged as ways of speaking, where we might in-
stead be attending both to forms of textual openness and to vernacu-
lar epistemology.
For the sake of experiment, I would like for a moment to collapse

the idea of signifying (a specifically African-American expressive
resource) with that of signification in the general linguistic sense,
purposely, in hopes that we can correlate feminist-derived under-
standings of difference and partial knowledge, and of indirect strat-
egies of expressing (articulating and making) knowledge, with the
critique of Eurocentric-patriarchal-nationalist "knowing" derived
from the experience of race-based dominance. This is not to collapse
their particularities, but to note that both subordinations (or efface-
ments) rely on culturally-constructed assertions of biological differ-
ence and hierarchy.
Nor is this move intended to collapse the experience of racism with
that of sexism, which would only mirror and enforce the Europatri-
archal project (in which the colonized are portrayed as weak, female-
like and their female members commoditized as objects and sites of
objectified difference: Alloula 1986), but to point out how critiques
derived from the experience of either or both type of marginalization
might be correlated, for example, to note how men of color are as
victimized by Eurocentric sexisms (prejudicial constructions of gen-
der) as are women of color, though oppressive sexual aggression may
take the form of different acts and representations against men and
women.
I guess I can leave it there. A high-theory feminist critique does

seem to have gotten itself born in American folkloristics, in the last
fifteen years or so. If folkloristics has almost rid itself of a concept of
the object of its study (the ever-problematic "folklore") as always "al-
most lost," and hence in need of interpretive rescue operations, it is
also time to notice that feminist folkloristics has too long languished in
the category of "almost found." The folklore discipline's long love
affair with what Don Brenneis has called the "paleoterrific" (the past
made wonderful through a mystified discourse of loss) may have lent
itself to some excesses of essentialist feminism as well, and may have
been one force muting the development of critical feminist theory
capable of looking both backward and forward, analyzing our previ-
ous discourse practices and contemplating an engaged, responsible
future. We have a number of resources to be integrated for this
project: social constructionism, folklife belief studies, ways of compli-
cating the "performance model" with concepts of deniable perfor-
mance (coding) and experiential validation as an historical process to
be observed, documented, and compared.
FEMINIST THEORY 187
The next step, the furthering of the intellectual productivity of the

feminist critique within the discipline of folklore, involves its correla-
tion with other experience-based critical modes to address the issue of
multiple identities through cases - communities, populations, and
more especially ideas of community. This address to cases can and
must also be an address to disciplines and their boundary processes-
history, anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism, epistemology; the
folklorist's task is to continue to reveal how communities of thought
and expression (including academic ones) are communities of action
(including political action). On with the theory, back to the data and
the practice-back to the future.
To conclude this exercise in hindsight, reinterpretation, and eclec-
tic assemblage, I note a response which Ilhan Ba~ggz, with his usual
brilliant common sense, made in response to a panel at AFS 1992,
part of the series of papers here published, but prior to the delivery
of this paper. He observed that the salient issues of today's theory can
usually be seen to be present in the work of former thinkers but not
recognized as salient at the time. In our tracings of the emerging
dialogues of Old Turks, New Turks, and post-Young Turks over the
last twenty years, let us be aware that there was, at the same time, a
very interesting conversation developing in the harem. And while we
are at it, perhaps we should also consider the phenomenon of
eunuchs-who makes them, and where they stand.
I did not gloss this last shot in the talk, but decided I had better do
so after Pack Carnes (personal communication) pointed out later that
men cross their legs when feminists mention eunuchs. But harem
guards are not emplaced by the harem's residents. The assumption of
the authoritative position of guard entails the sacrifice of a certain
creative potential formerly possessed. There is a price to pay for
too-assiduous boundary maintenance. Let us rather try for a symbio-
sis between phalluses and tongues.'
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1. Many persons over the years have helped me get this far. Most recently, special thanks are
due to Beverly Stoeltje, Carol Silverman, Kirin Narayan, Amy Shuman, Charles Briggs, and grad-
uate folklore students in two classes (Folk 636: Folklore, Gender, Theory, Spring, 1992, and Folk
501: Issues, Spring, 1993). Thanking Lee Haring, the reviewer of this volume, for highly construc-
tive criticism, I must nonetheless reject his admonition to "make this essay consciously the definitive
feminist critique of folkloristics." It is a critique of precisely such linear, objectivist, territory-
claiming projects, a meditation not a master statement.
Some Things to Read
In keeping with the note above, what follows is a browser's list, not a
gatekeeping exercise as to who's relevant and who's not. Only a few
recent contributions to a burgeoning case study literature in gender
and folklore are cited, ones that provided proximate examples which
contributed to my thinking on theoretical issues. Many items in turn
list essential pieces of scholarship, not cited separately, in their own
bibliographies.
Abu-Lughod, Leila. 1990. Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography? Women

and Performance 5(1):7-27.
Agosin, Marjorie. 1987. Scraps of Life: Chilean Arpilleras. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea
Press.
Alloula, Malek. 1986. The Colonial Harem. Trans. M. and W. Godzich. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Appadurai, Arjun, Frank Korom, and Margaret Mills, eds. 1991. Gender,
Genre and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions. Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press.
Bacon-Smith, Camille. 1992. Enterprising Women. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Banerjee, Sumanta. 1989. "Marginalization of Women's Popular Culture in
Nineteenth Century Bengal," in K. Sangari and S. Vaid, eds., Recasting
Women: Essays in Colonial History, Delhi: Kali for Women/Camden: Rutgers
U. Press, 127-179.
Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown and
Company
Bordo, Susan. 1990. Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Skepticism. In
Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson, pp. 133-156. New York and
London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Bowles, Gloria, and Renate D. Klein, eds. 1983. Theories of Women's Studies.
New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Brenneis, Donald. 1986. Shared Territory: Audience, Indirection and Mean-
ing. Text 6(3):339-347.
Briggs, Charles. 1992. "Since I Am a Woman, I Will Chastise My Relatives":
Gender, Reported Speech, and the (Re)production of Social Relations in
Warao Ritual Wailing. American Ethnologist 19(2):337-361.
Butler, Judith P. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York and London: Routledge.
Camitta, Miriam. 1990. Gender and Method in Folklore Fieldwork. Southern
Folklore Quarterly 47(1):21-32.
Chauduri, Nupur, and Margaret Strobel, eds. Western Women and Imperialism.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1992.
FEMINIST THEORY 189
Clifford, James, and George Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Collins, Camilla, ed., 1990. Folklore Fieldwork: Sex, Sexuality and Gender.
Southern Folklore Quarterly Special Issue 47:1.
Combs-Schilling, M. E. 1989. Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality and Sacrifice.
New York: Columbia University Press.
DeCaro, F. A. 1983. Women and Folklore: A Bibliographic Survey. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press.
de Lauretis, Teresa, ed. 1986. Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
di Leonardo, Micaela. 1991. Introduction: Gender, Culture and Political
Economy: Feminist Anthropology in Historical Perspective. In Gender at
the Crossroads of Knowledge, ed. Micaela di Leonardo, pp. 1-48. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
- , ed. 1991. Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
DuBois, Ellen Carol, et al, 1987. Feminist Scholarship. Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
Duran, Jane. 1990. Toward a Feminist Epistemology. Savage, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield.
Falk, Nancy, and Rita Gross, eds. 1989: Unspoken Worlds: Women's Religious
Lives. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Farrer, Claire R., ed. 1975. Women and Folklore. Austin: University of Texas
Press (originally special issue of Journal of American Folklore 88:347, Jan-
Mar 1975).
Felski, Rita. 1989. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.
Press.
Flax, Jane. 1987. "Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist The-

ory," SIGNS 12(4):621-643.
Fraser, Nancy, and Sandra Lee Bartky, eds. 1992. Revaluing French Feminism.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press.
Giray, Eren. 1990. Do We Learn Our Discomforts? PMS from Bobo-
Dioulasso, Burkino Faso. In New Perspectives on Gender, Race and Class in
Society, ed. A. T. McCluskey. Bloomington: Indiana University.
Gordon, Deborah, ed. 1988. Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Dis-
course. Inscriptions, special issue.
Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Instability of Analytical Categories in Feminist
Theory. SIGNS 11(4):645-664.
Hekman, Susan. 1990. Gender and Knowledge. Boston: Northeastern Univer-
sity Press.
Herrera-Sobek, Marfa. 1990. The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. Bloom-
ington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Hollis, Susan, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young. 1993. Feminist Theory and
the Study of Folklore. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. In
press.
hooks, bell. 1981. Ain't I a Woman: Blacks and Feminism. Boston: South End
Press.
.* 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.
~. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End
Press.
Hufford, David. 1982. The Terror that Comes in the Night. Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press.
Irvine, Judith. 1989. When Talk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Econ-
omy. American Ethnologist 16(2):248-267.
Jackson, Bruce, ed. 1987. Folklore and Feminism. Journal of American Folklore
special issue 100 (398).
-. 1988. From the Editor: How the Journal Is Edited.Journal of American
Folklore 101:131-139.
Jordan, Rosan, and F. A. DeCaro. 1986. Women and the Study of Folklore.
SIGNS 11(3):500-518.
Jordan, Rosan, and Susan Kalcik, eds. 1985. Women's Folklore, Women's Culture.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1978. Culture Shock and Narrative Creativ-
ity. In Folklore in the Modern World, ed. Richard Dorson, pp. 109-122. The
Hague: Mouton.
-. 1988. Mistaken Dichotomies. Journal of American Folklore 101:140-
155.
Kodish, Debra. 1987. Absent Gender, Silent Encounter. Journal of American

Folklore 100:573-578.
Lawless, Elaine J. 1988. Handmaidens of the Lord. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
, 1991. Women's Life Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography as Feminist
and Emergent. Journal of Folklore Research 28(1):35-60.
,1993. Holy Women, Wholly Women: Sharing Ministries through Life Stories
and Reciprocal Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Leland, D. 1992. Lacanian Psychoanalytic and French Feminism: Toward an
Adequate Political Psychology. In Revaluing French Feminism, ed. Nancy
Fraser and Sandra Bartky, pp. 113-136. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Lutz, Catherine. 1990. The Erasure of Women's Writing in Sociocultural

Anthropology. American Ethnologist 17(4):611-627.
Mark, Vera. 1987. Women and Text in Gascon Tall Tales. Journal of American
Folklore 100(398):504-527
Mascia-Lees, F., P. Sharpe, and C. Cohen. 1989. The Postmodernist Turn
in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective. In SIGNS
15(1):7-33.
Meyers, D. 1992. Subversion of Women's Agency in Psychoanalytic Femi-
nism: Chodorow, Flax, Kristeva. In Revaluing French Feminism, ed. Nancy
Fraser and Sandra Bartky, pp. 136-161. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia. 1972. Signifying and Marking: Two Afro-

American Speech Acts. In Directions in Sociolinguistics, ed. John Gumperz
and Dell Hymes, pp. 161-171. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
FEMINIST THEORY 191
Morgen, Sandra, ed. 1989. Gender and Anthropology. Washington, DC: Ameri-
can Anthropological Association.
Narayan, Kirin. n.d. Songs Lodged in Some Hearts: Displacement of Indian
Women's Knowledge at Home. In Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of
Identity, ed. S. Lavie and T. Swedenborg. Dunham, NC: Duke University
Press. In press.
- . n.d. Singing from Separation: Women's Voices in and about Kangra
Folk Songs. In Oral Tradition special issue, Language, Gender and Subal-
tern Identity, ed. G. Raheja. In press.
Nelson, Cary, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. 1988. Marxism and the Interpre-
tation of Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Neustadt, Kathy. 1986. The Nature of Woman and the Development of
American Folklore. Women's Studies International Forum 9(3):227-234.
Nicholson, Linda, ed. 1990. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York and London:
Routledge.
Ochs, E., C. Taylor, D. Rudolph and R. Smith. 1992. Storytelling as a Theory-
Building Activity. Discourse Processes 15:37-72.
Ochs, E., and C. Taylor. 19,92. Family Narrative as Political Activity. Discourse
and Society 3(3):301-340.
Oliver, Kelly. 1993. Reading Kristeva. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press.
Owens, C. 1983. The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism.
In H. Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press,
57-77.
Paredes, Americo, and Richard Bauman, eds. 1972. Toward New Perspectives in
Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Patai, Daphne, and Sherna Gluck, eds. 1991. Women's Words: The Feminist
Practice of Oral History. New York: Routledge.
Personal Narratives Group, eds. 1989. Interpreting Women's Lives, Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press.
Radner, Joan, ed. 1993. Feminist Messages. Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press.
Radner, Joan, and Susan Lanser. 1993. Strategies of Coding in Women's

Cultures. In Feminist Messages, ed. Joan Radner. Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
Rakow, Lana. 1992. Women Making Meaning. New York and London: Rout-
ledge.
Reuss, Richard. 1974. On Folklore and Women Folklorists. Folklore Women's
Communication 3(4):29-36.
Saltzman, Rachelle H. 1987. Folklore, Feminism, and the Folk: Whose Lore
It It? Journal of American Folklore 100(398):548-562.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping. Berkeley and Los An-
geles: University of California Press.
Showalter, Elaine. 1986. Piecingand Writing. In The Poetics of Gender, ed.
Nancy Miller. New York: Columbia University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpre-
tation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, pp. 271-313.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Stahl, Sandra Dolby. 1989. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Stoeltje, Beverly. 1975. "A Helpmeet for Man Indeed": The Image of the
Frontier Woman. In Women and Folklore, ed. Claire Farrer, pp. 25-41.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
- , ed. 1988. Feminist Revisions. Journal of Folklore Research special issue
25(3).
Stone, Kay. 1975. Things Walt Disney Never Told Us. In Women and Folklore,
ed. Claire Farrer, pp. 42-50. Austin: University of Texas Press.
- . 1985. The Misuses of Enchantment. In Women's Folklore, Women's Cul-
ture, ed. Rosan Jordan and Susan Kalcik, pp. 125-145. Austin: University
of Texas Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1987. An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism
and Anthropology, SIGNS 12(2):276-292.
Taggart, James. 1990. Enchanted Maidens. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Taylor, Peter, and Hermann Rebel. 1981. Hessian Peasant Women, Their
Families, and the Draft: A Social-Historical Interpretation of Four Tales
from the Grimm Collection. Journal of Family History 1981:347-378.
Toelken, Barre. 1979. Introduction. The Dynamics of Folklore, pp. 3-12. Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin.
Webster, S. 1986. Editorial: Women and Folklore: Performers, Characters,
Scholars. Women's Studies International Forum 9(3):219-226.
, ed. 1986. Women and Folklore. Women's Studies International Forum
9:3.
Weedon, Chris. 1987. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Oxford and
Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.
Weigle, Marta. 1982. Spiders and Spinsters. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press.
, 1988. Creation and Procreation. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press.

, ed. 1978. Women as Verbal Artists. Frontiers special issue 3(3).
Whitford, Margaret. 1991. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. London
and New York: Routledge.

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Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore: A Twenty-Year Trajectory toward Theory

Author(s): Margaret Mills

First of all, whose trajectory toward theory? Well, my own-and

Western Folklore 52 (April 1993): 173-192

Our "rope turners" may be conceived as occupying such distal

cultural production, in theory and method as an extension of its de-

If we take Toward New Perspectives in Folklore as a starting point for

The public/private debate (cf. di Leonardo 1991:13) is another

Farrer's (1975) collection also initiated folklorists' in-print conver-

cultural production (Irigaray, Cixous; see Fraser and Bartky, Whit-

to moral issues entailed in contest and aggression, that remains a

would hardly claim title to the peculiar self-consciousness of post-

In favor of representation that can take account of dubious bound-

form and content. Abu-Lughod (1990) seems to acquiesce in her re-

In developing multiple-determiner models of group identity and

visions and hegemonic tendencies of such terms as "folk" and "folk-

studies, for it is through folklife studies, in particular, belief studies,

For the sake of experiment, I would like for a moment to collapse

I guess I can leave it there. A high-theory feminist critique does

The next step, the furthering of the intellectual productivity of the

Some Things to Read

Abu-Lughod, Leila. 1990. Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography? Women

Flax, Jane. 1987. "Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist The-

Kodish, Debra. 1987. Absent Gender, Silent Encounter. Journal of American

Lutz, Catherine. 1990. The Erasure of Women's Writing in Sociocultural

Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia. 1972. Signifying and Marking: Two Afro-

Radner, Joan, and Susan Lanser. 1993. Strategies of Coding in Women's

, 1988. Creation and Procreation. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press.

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