Diane Tye

A unique work that is both profoundly personal and intellectually informed, Baking as Biography reminds us of the unwritten social and material ingredients behind even the most straightforward recipes for cookies and squares."--pub. desc.

A Life Story in Recipes

Baking as Biography

Pauline Greenhill

In Unsettling Assumptions, editors Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye link gender studies with traditional and popular culture studies to examine how tradition and gender can intersect to unsettle assumptions about culture and its study. Contributors explore the intersections of traditional expressive culture and sex/gender systems by challenging their conventional constructions, using sex/gender as a lens to question, investigate, or upset concepts like family, ethics, and authenticity. Individual essays consider myriad topics such as Thanksgiving turkeys, rockabilly and bar fights, Chinese tales of female ghosts, selkie stories, a noisy Mennonite New Year's celebration, the Distaff Gospels, Kentucky tobacco farmers, international adoptions, and more. In Unsettling Assumptions, expressive culture emerges as fundamental both to our sense of belonging to a family, an occupation, or friendship group and, most notably, to identity performativity. Within larger contexts, these works offer a better understanding of cultural attitudes like misogyny, homophobia, and racism as well as the construction and negotiation of power.

Tradition, Gender, Drag

Unsettling Assumptions

In Unsettling Assumptions, editors Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye examine how tradition and gender come together to unsettle assumptions about culture and its study. Contributors explore the intersections of traditional expressive culture and sex/gender systems to question, investigate, or upset concepts like family, ethics, and authenticity. Individual essays consider myriad topics such as Thanksgiving turkeys, rockabilly and bar fights, Chinese tales of female ghosts, selkie stories, a noisy Mennonite New Year’s celebration, the Distaff Gospels, Kentucky tobacco farmers, international adoptions, and more. In Unsettling Assumptions, folkloric forms express but also counteract negative aspects of culture like misogyny, homophobia, and racism. But expressive culture also emerges as fundamental to our sense of belonging to a family, an occupation, or friendship group and, most notably, to identity performativity and the construction and negotiation of power.

Contributors demonstrate that informal traditional and popular expressive cultural forms continue to be central to Canadians' gender constructions and clearly display the creation and re-creation of women's often subordinate position in society. They not only explore positive and negative images of women - the witch, the Icelandic Mountain Woman, and the Hollywood "killer dyke" - but also examine how actual women - taxi drivers, quilters, spiritual healers, and storytellers - negotiate and remake these images in their lives and work. Contributors also propose models for facilitating feminist dialogue on traditional and popular culture in Canada. Drawing on perspectives from women's studies, folklore, anthropology, sociology, art history, literature, and religious studies, Undisciplined Women is an insightful exploration of the multiplicity of women's experiences and the importance of reclaiming women's cultures and traditions.

Tradition and Culture in Canada

Undisciplined Women

Redressing a neglect of women's traditions and feminist perspectives in Canadian folklore studies, 20 contributions discuss female experiences of traditional culture from feminist viewpoints. The authors look at the effect of gender on the collecting and interpreting of women's folklore, negative and positive images of women in traditional and popular culture, and women's use of creativity in their everyday lives. Some contributors are nonacademics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Diane Tye

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