Elizabeth Tucker

Unsettling Assumptions: Tradition, Gender, Drag

work, in this text she asks ‘what Demy’s cinema can tell us about the fairy tale and what the fairy tale can tell us about Demy’s cinema’ (1). Duggan believes that Demy’s films are particularly suited to showcase the subversive potential of the fairy tale and that he ‘unsettles conceptions of gender, sexuality, and class’ as a way of both exploring those issues and ‘broaden[ing] the possibilities of the genre’ (1). It is this ‘unsettling’ that Duggan identifies as the queerness of Demy’s films and thus the subject of her study, examining the ways in which these ‘“queer enchantments” destabilize binary oppositions . . . that uphold a heterosexist, bourgeois order’ (7). The book consists of four chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. There are also notes and a useful filmography at the end. After a concise and clear introduction, Duggan’s first chapter examines the films Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with the fairy tales ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, arguing for a dialectic between the ‘heteronormative fairy-tale genre’ and ‘queer melodrama’ (37). Chapter Two looks at Donkey Skin and gay aesthetics, particularly camp, alongside the film’s depiction of incest as a code for queerness. Chapter Three examines The Pied Piper in relation to the specifically French tradition of that story, bohemians and artistic freedom, and grotesque satire. While this section deals with somewhat different topics from the rest of the book, Duggan defends its inclusion based on the fact that ‘it does deal with a film by a queer director who is interested in Otherness generally, whether it is in relation to sexual, social, ethnic, or political Others’ (73). This, along with a few additional observations about the film itself that advocate for its queerness in the broad sense of the term, convincingly allows for its inclusion. The last chapter argues for a ‘queering of the French revolution’ via the film Lady Oscar and the tradition of the maiden warrior, drawing from a rich history from ancient China to the contemporary Japanese manga on which Demy’s film is based. Duggan’s epilogue chiefly reiterates her points and makes her case for Demy’s films as ‘postmodern fairy tales’ that ‘imitate and undermine, revel in and subvert the classical tale’, a process that ‘reshap[es] them to speak to economic and social injustices and alternative sexualities’ (143–44). Despite the complex issues each chapter grapples with, Duggan’s writing is always easy to follow and thoughtfully presented. Duggan’s text is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing from fairy-tale studies, film studies, folklore studies, queer studies, and more. Far from being overwhelmed by having so many different areas in play, however, she beautifully weaves these disparate disciplines together to create a rich and compelling text. Even those unfamiliar with the majority of Demy’s work will find themselves captivated by Duggan’s descriptions and enthusiasm for her subject. Folklore scholars will appreciate Duggan’s complex and well-informed approach to the fairy tale and folklore more broadly—a quality that unfortunately not all studies of this kind share. Her text further makes the important point that studying items like Demy’s films ‘provide[s] important insights into the genre of the fairy tale by shedding light on the ways in which gender, sexuality, and class can play out in the classical tale and by suggesting new ways the genre can represent different types of relations and worlds that go beyond heteronormativity and middle-class ideals’ (146). This text is highly recommended for its accomplished blending of both the fairy tale and film and the fairy tale and queer studies.

Folklore Rules: A Fun, Quick, and Useful Introduction to the Field of Academic Folklore Studies

This concise introduction to the study of folklore offers an appealing alternative to existing folklore textbooks. Lynne McNeill’s talent for teaching undergraduates is clear in this eloquently written text, which presents the fundamentals of folklore study in a uniquely engaging way. Folklore Rules will be an excellent text for college folklore courses, especially those in which students explore specific forms of folklore and would benefit from learning the basics. Last year, while co-editing New York State Folklife: A Reader with Ellen McHale, I considered the importance of making a book’s language accessible. One of the New York Folklore Society’s goals has always been to give folklore back to the people, using easily understandable terms. Similarly, it makes sense for university professors to give undergraduates who are just beginning to study folklore a textbook that makes the field understandable and enjoyable. If these students get ‘hooked’ on folklore, as many of us have, they can move on to more elaborate texts and issues. Folklore Rules has a clear, consistent structure that will work very well for student readers. Following a short preface and an explanation for instructors, there are four chapters—‘What is Folklore?’, ‘What Do Folklorists Do?’, ‘Types of Folklore’, and ‘Types of Folk Groups’—as well as a conclusion, ‘What Do I Do Now?’ Each chapter includes a ‘So What?’ section that clarifies meaning and relevance, as well as bibliographic citations and notes. In ‘For the Instructor’, McNeill addresses a key question: is it alright for a folklore class to be fun? Students may, after hearing long, dry explanations, ‘find themselves looking around, going, “Hey, I thought this was a folklore class! Isn’t it supposed to be fun and easy?”’ (xv). Her answer to this question is that

Introduction: Emerging Legends in Contemporary Society

This JAF special issue is based on a double forum, “Present State and Future of the Contemporary Legend and its Research,” held at the 2002 annual meetings of the American Folklore Society in Rochester, New York. The forum, chaired by Linda Dégh, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, featured fourteen speakers (not “twelve disciples” as the folklore of this forum has since asserted!) who were asked to participate because we had been, as Dégh reminded us, among “the first” to work with her on legend study. We had all been graduate students who had taken a seminar with Dégh at some point in what we might fondly call the “Golden Age” of legend study at Indiana in the 1960s through the 1980s. Some of us had served as editorial assistants on the journal Indiana Folklore, founded by Dégh in 1968 for the publication of field research data and critical discussion of the genre that ran until 1984, and all of us had pursued legend research individually in one way or another over the intervening years as academic folklorists.1 On that October day in the fall of 2002, we came together in a mood that was both somber and joyful. Five weeks before, Americans had observed the first anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001. Because the previous year’s AFS meetings in Anchorage, Alaska, had been disrupted by the attacks, those of us involved in the forum were especially happy to see each other and to celebrate the publication of Dégh’s magnum opus, Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Genre (2001), an important synthesis of years of ground-breaking scholarship that would be the springboard for our presentations that day and would receive the University of Chicago Folklore Prize for that year. In deciding to put together the special issue, we coeditors shared a double goal with the other three contributors who developed articles from their forum discussions. First, we wished to honor Dégh, whose legend scholarship has fused European and American approaches to narrative analysis in ways that have influenced, and will continue to influence, our own research. Second, we wished to do her the higher honor of moving in other directions as well that reflect both the diversity of our own research interests and the scholarship of others in the field. We agree with her that legend study, like the legend itself, is a dynamic, evolving process.