Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye (eds.). Unsettling Assumptions: Tradition, Gender, Drag. (Boulder, CO: 2014, University Press of Colorado and Utah State University Press. Pg. 260. ISBN: 978-0-87421-897-8)

Each chapter examines intersections of tradition and gender, and some also address drag and cross-gender behaviour, to problematize dominant understanding of each category and demonstrate how hegemonic cultural understandings of heterosexism, heteronormativity, and patriarchal systems are simultaneously encoded and resisted in folkloric contexts. The book’s ethnographic and archival examinations of tangible and intangible cultural heritage engage feminist and queer theory, masculinity studies, transgender studies, and cultural studies to multiply address the intersection of folklore with sex, gender, and sexuality. The chapters transcend and thus decenter genre as a primary classificatory tool of folklore, opening up a space for interdisciplinary examinations of folkloristic practices in non-traditional contexts. Four chapters engage masculinities. Ferrell’s chapter on male tobacco farmers in Kentucky examines how such men negotiate their contemporary, and thus inferior, masculinities in relation to the more valued and authentic masculinity embodied by their fathers and grandfathers. Contemporary farmers’ masculinities are threatened by feminization, as women become tobacco farmers, and their crop’s loss of sociopolitical and economic value. Mullen explores how male homosociality arises at the nexus of class, race, gender, and sexual representation in rockabilly songs about fighting, adding auto-ethnographic reflection to a textual analysis of song lyrics. Magnus-Johnston shows how American filmic representations of the Brothers Grimm elide the two men’s contributions to German folklore and scholarship by playing on the homosociality, failed masculinity, and latent queer potential of their travels together. In his chapter on French folklorist Jean-François Bladé, Pooley suggests Bladé experienced “combative masculinity” with one of his primary male informants, whose masculinity the folklorist purposefully constructed as more authentic, and valued, than his own. Vaughan engages constructions of femininity and women’s voices in her chapter on The Distaff Gospels, a fifteenth century French text that places women’s folklore into male-authored narrative frame. Though the text intentionally makes fun of women and their knowledge, it also makes space for women’s voices and views, and thus decenters the maleness of the narrative. Gender as it relates to international adoption features in Sawin’s narrative analysis exploring the construction of parenthood and family through a lens combining folkloristic and feminist paradigms. She questions the universality of concepts like parenthood and family, and shows how gender, especially the female identity of adoptive mothers, birth mothers, and some adopted children, impacts the adoption process and the experience of participants. Xie explores sexual and gender relations between human and non-human entities in her chapter on the Chinese folktale genre zhiguai. She examines the reification of patriarchal systems through these tales’ depictions of sex between male humans and female ghosts, revealing gender relations that position women as non-human others. This chapter represents the book’s sole alternative to European and North American cultural conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Two chapters investigate transbiological narratives encompassing the transformation of animals into humans (and back), and human-animal relationships. Roth demonstrates the sexualization of the Thanksgiving turkey as object of desire and icon for projections of predatory sexuality and consumption in the highly proscribed human-animal relationships, both queer and straight, which accrue around the holiday object. Møllegaard shows how filmic and novelized stories of selkies (seal-women) open up a postcolonial space to explore how traditional transbiological narratives can be repurposed to describe contact zones between national groups; in such modern adaptations, cultural differences replace the biological differences of traditional selkie tales. In several chapters, drag is expanded to define performances of ethnicity, as well as gender identity. Wallen discusses ethnic drag in performances of Dutch identity on the Danish island Amager. This voluntary ethnic drag allows Dutch residents to pass in mainstream society, a social benefit that Denmark’s …