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.

Pauline Greenhill is professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Winnipeg. She was co-editor with Liz Locke and Theresa Vaughan of the Encyclopedia of Women’s Folklore and Folklife. Her newest book is Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television (co-edited with Jill Terry Rudy). Her work has appeared in Signs, Marvels & Tales, Resources for Feminist Research, Journal of American Folklore, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, and parallax, among others. Diane Tye is professor of folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is author of Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes and co-editor with Pauline Greenhill of Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada. Her articles have been published in Cuizine, Ethnologies, Women’s Studies International Forum, and Food, Culture & Society among other journals.