Unsettling Assumptions: Tradition, Gender, Drag
260
Unsettling Assumptions: Tradition, Gender, Drag
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780874218985 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 260 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
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.
Read an Excerpt
Unsettling Assumptions
Tradition, Gender, Drag
By Pauline Greenhill, Diane Tye
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2014 University Press of ColoradoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-898-5
CHAPTER 1
Three Dark-Brown Maidens and the Brommtopp
De)Constructing Masculinities in Southern Manitoba Mennonite Mumming
MARCIE FEHR AND PAULINE GREENHILL
For most adult Euro North Americans, the season from Christmas to New Year's has some (often vestigial) religious significance but remains characterized primarily by formal ritual obligations of feasting, gift giving and receiving, and visiting (see, e.g., Bella 1992; Caplow 1982, 1984; Cheal 1988). Periodic moments of play and socializing (sometimes involving alcohol!) may break up the structure, but for the most part drinking (sometimes to excess) offers the only relief from the often socially and financially expensive obligations. Yet in the past and to some extent the present, various Euro — North American and other cultural groups marked the period from Christmas Eve on December 24 to Twelfth Night on January 6 with rowdy, disguised playful/ludic (see Huizinga 1950) or carnivalesque (see Bakhtin 1968) behavior that mainstream Euro North Americans associate more with Halloween than with this holiday season (see Santino 1994).
Many such customs, termed the "informal house visit" (see Halpert and Story 1969; Lovelace 1980; and Pettitt 1995), involve a group (usually composed of young men) perambulating from one location to another within a community, to the households of socially and culturally proximate families and individuals. The visits include performative aspects — often dancing and singing — as well as the expectation of a reward — usually food and/or drink — and some sociability with the visited household. The cultural and social surround of one such form, Newfoundland Christmas mumming, has been well documented. Also called mummering or janneying, it has been variously explained as a ritualization of social relations and solidarity, an expression of otherwise repressed hostilities, an indication of fear of strangers, and a dramatization of socioeconomic relations or sex/gender roles. We find aspects of all these motivations in the Brommtopp.
A seasonal informal house visit custom performed well into the twentieth century by young men, almost always on New Year's Eve, in rural Manitoba Mennonite villages where the church tolerated it, Brommtopp is named after the musical instrument, a friction drum, used during the performance (see figure 1.1). The Brommtopp, constructed from calfskin, a barrel, and horsetail, sounds when its player pulls and rubs rhythmically on the horsetail, producing a difficult to describe thrumming sound: "The player, by situating the drum against a wall, could cause sympathetic vibrations which sometimes shook the china from the shelves. The singers had to shout their song in order to be heard over the racket of the brummtupp" (Petkau and Petkau 1981, 92). Writing in a local history, Jake Bergen remembered, "If everything was made real well this strange instrument would make the dishes in the kitchen cupboard rattle" (2005, 189). Traditionally, a group of some dozen teenage boys and young married men would drive (originally in a horse-drawn sleigh or buggy; later by car) and/or walk from house to house within their own village and sometimes beyond. At each residence, the group would sing the traditional song, which could vary from one location to another but generally asked for money in return for good wishes (Toews 1977, 303–304).
As social historian Ervin Beck comments, the "'Brummtopp Song' must have many variant stanzas, since the young people who sing it while performing the New Year's mummers' play typically compose or alter stanzas to make the song fit the household in which they are performing" (1989, 774–775). As the lyrics imply, players could receive money, liquor and/or food, often the traditional Portzeltje (New Year's fritters) (see, e.g., Beck 1989; Epp-Tiessen 1982) in exchange for their performance. Their rowdy behavior contrasted with the usual expectations of decorum for house visits, as we'll detail below.
Costume varied from place to place. As local historians describe, Blumenfeld performers had elaborately specified roles:
(a) Policeman: His role was to keep order in the group that tended to become unruly in their merrymaking. He would knock on the door to say that a group of people wanted to present a New Year's Wish. If the group was welcomed, he ushered in his troupe. He was the steward of the evening's collection. The policeman was uniformed and wore a red stripe on his trousers.
(b) Clown: The clown's attempts to add humour to the performance were hilarious and ridiculous. But everyone loves a clown! His costume can be imagined.
(c) The Couple: The man and woman tried to pose as a hen-pecked husband and a nagging wife. They were dressed in styles typical of that year.
(d) The Singers: The group of approximately 15 young men sang the song of New Year's wishes. They were dressed in white costumes sewn from flour sacks. They had black stripes on their trouser legs and wore white flathats. All were masked.
(e) The Brummtupp Player: He was dressed like the singers. Upon entering the house, he would find a place in the room that was close to an inside wall or near a china cupboard. (Petkau and Petkau 1981, 91; see also Bergen 2005)
At other locations, costumes seem more improvised, using blackface and whiteface instead of masks (see also V. C. Friesen 1988; Schroeder 1999; Toews 1977) (see figure 1.2). Photographs of Brommtopp players indicate that many employed both gender drag — some men dressing as women — and ethnic drag (Sieg 2002) — representation as othered ethnoracial groups like Jewish, Chinese, and First Nations peoples (see figure 1.1). The performance, singing and sometimes dancing followed by socializing, rarely lasted longer than ten to fifteen minutes before the group moved on to the next household.
Most participants assume the tradition has roots in Prussia, predating Mennonite immigration to Russia in the 1780s and then to Manitoba in the 1870s (Petkau and Petkau 1981, 82–92). Interviewees told us that active local performances stopped in some locations as early as before the end of the Second World War, and in others as late as the 1950s or early 1960s (see also Epp-Tiessen 1982; Petkau and Petkau 1981). As writer Armin Wiebe told us:
Something happened in the era that I was growing up, in the '50s ... and probably happened well before that. But there seemed to be an attempt to distance the church from ... the folk traditions ... And even in my experience, I remember one church that I spent my teenage years in, it seemed like the church went from having guitars used to accompany singing to singing cantatas. And the guitars — more sort of country gospel kinds of singing — got pushed out. A real shift occurred in the late '50s and '60s when the Low German language became less used. In my own experience as a teenager, my generation still spoke Low German socially, but my oldest sibling, six years younger, never became quite fluent. They could speak it to some extent and understand it but weren't fluent. And I think that's also around the time when television became [laughs] accessible with the arrival of KCND, and the transmitter was there and the signal was strong enough. And the school system had been really working hard to improve English skills, and churches started switching from German to English. All those kinds of things happened around that time. And along with that, a lot of other traditions became not cool [laughs]. (KM2008-1, 2)
Folkloric revival (see Rosenberg 1993) of the practice may have begun at the Sunflower Festival in 1977 in Altona, when a group of then middle-aged men did a Brommtopp performance. But from the first decade of the twenty-first century, a group has regularly performed on the afternoon of New Years' Eve at seniors' homes like Eastview Place in Altona. These performers have also appeared at events in Neubergthal village, a designated Manitoba Historic Site reflecting the early years of Mennonite settlement. Organizers incorporated Brommtopp performances into a series of concerts sponsored by the Mennonite Heritage Village in Steinbach in 2010 (see figure 1.3). All these events included performers dressed in gender drag but not ethnic drag. The presentation incorporates mimicking actions from the song. Thus, for example, when the lyrics refer to fried fish, one man places plastic fish on all four corners of a table on the stage. At the verse about silver coins, another rattles a Folger's coffee can containing money at the audience. All perform the final stanza together, using their arms to describe a golden band and jumping as the "dark brown maidens" rush out of the house.
Several research consultants, including one who withdrew his name and information, vehemently deny that cross-dressing and ethnic drag were ever part of the Brommtopp. Many of those who acknowledge the presence of such practices disagree with our interpretation, arguing that Brommtopp is an entertainment only, and can have no other meaning. While we respect their right to hold such opinions, we do not share them. We deconstruct masculinities and their relation to the cross-ethnic, cross-racial, and cross-gender costuming in the traditional and revival manifestations of Brommtopp. In working through this material, we experienced the anxiety of trying to balance a fair account of the practice with our recognition that, historically and currently, it risks invoking profoundly sexist and racist stereotypes. Our exploration of the tradition seeks to address such anxieties and discomforts head-on. By employing feminist, queer, trans, and postcolonial lenses and theories, our analysis of the Brommtopp explores how the opportunities it once gave young men — and now gives older men — for transgender, transethnic, and/or transracial identity exploration offer insight into the fragmentation of hegemonic masculinity in Mennonite societies. This research is primarily based on seventeen interviews by Pauline Greenhill, six by Marcie Fehr, and one by Kendra Magnus-Johnston conducted between spring 2009 and winter 2010, with folks who participated in or otherwise experienced the practice in the south-central Manitoba communities of Altona, Blumenfeld, Hochfeld, Neubergthal, Plum Coulee, and others on the so-called West Reserve of Manitoba Mennonite settlement (see figure 1.4).
Mennonites and Low German in Manitoba
Until as recently as the last thirty to forty years, Mennonites in rural Manitoba communities were somewhat culturally detached from the Euro–North American mainstream. Villages offered socioreligious islands in a sea of greater diversity. As Armin Wiebe noted:
Long after I had left home it dawned on me one day that where I had lived was in reasonable biking distance from a French community but there was never really any interaction with them ... I think I was in grade four when we had moved to town and the teacher asked, "What do you call people who live in Manitoba?" and I was going to shoot up my hand and say, "Mennonites!" and luckily something stopped me [laughs]. Because up until that time I was under the impression that that was what it meant, you know: that Mennonites were people who lived in Manitoba [laughs]. (KM2009-1, 2)
Southern Manitoba Mennonite communities and cultural expressions weave elements of displacement, dissent, pacifism, and conscientious objection with self-sufficiency informed by religion. Mennonites trace their history to the sixteenth century and the Reformation era in Switzerland and the Netherlands, and then to migrant communities in Prussia (Poland) and Russia. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Prussia dictated that Mennonite churches be plain, with no bell, towers, or pointed windows. Such concepts of "modesty" permeated forms of (in)visibility including gendered and uniform dress codes, nonmaterialism, and Luddite ideals (J. Friesen 2001, 4–6) (see figures 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7). In Russia, by 1870, the government introduced a universal military service policy but granted Mennonites the so-called Forsteidiensts, alternative service in forestry. The government also pressed them to teach Russian in their schools alongside High German, but left them free to speak Low German (a North German dialect with some Dutch influence) in everyday communication (Staliûnas 2007; Thiessen 2003, x-xiii). Some 17,000 conservative Mennonites migrated in the 1870s to North America (J. Friesen 2001, 6–8), seeking more extensive rights and privileges.
Most Mennonites who came then to Manitoba settled southeast and southwest of the city of Winnipeg, in rural areas known as the East and West Reserves. The first immigrants arrived in 1874 from the Bergthal and Borosenko colonies in South Russia and laid out their farm villages on the eight-township East Reserve (Reimer 1983). Those who came in 1875, finding the East Reserve unsuitable for farming, occupied land further west, between the Red River and the Pembina Hills (Francis 1955; Reimer 1983; Warkentin 2000). Relatively quickly, Mennonites lost the autonomy to establish their own social and economic systems, including for land tenure and education. The Manitoba School Attendance Act (1916) enforced "attendance in public schools where English was the primary language of instruction mandatory for all children between the ages of seven and fourteen" (Sawatzky 1971, 13). This policy established a hierarchical system of linguistic spaces, specifically: English for school; High German for church; and Low German for home and everyday life. Recalling his personal experience as a first generation Mennonite-Canadian, Jac Schroeder notes: "All the children spoke 'Low German' ... at home. The Provincial Government gave to the School Board the privilege of also teaching German as a second language. But this had to be done outside of the regular school hours of 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. when only the English language could be spoken. The School Board decided to add half an hour from 8:30 A.M. to 9:00 A.M. for instruction" (1999, 153).
The government-sanctioned compartmentalization of High German in institutionalized education both supported the class superiority that came from its association with Church activities and limited its use to those two locations. Without an established writing system, Low German lacked the central tool to facilitate skills on the North American wage market (Francis 1955; Loewen 1983, 1999; Warkentin 2000). Some resisting Mennonites guarded their traditions in the private sphere. But many folk practices disappeared as the language central to them became obsolete, ousted by the capitalist system that flooded Mennonite subjectivity and culture. As sociolinguist Suzanne Romaine indicates, "Schooling and literacy create a division between those whose credentials give them access to town as opposed to those who have no negotiable skills on the wage market. English is a kind of cultural capital with a value in the linguistic market place" (1994, 93).
Mennonite Masculinities
Brommtopp does not mesh well with outsiders' views of historical or current Mennonite culture and tradition. The hegemonic, historical, exoteric image for rural Mennonite men presents stoic and sober (both literally and figuratively) business owners and farmers. However, as historian Royden Loewen (2006) suggests, Mennonite masculinity changed drastically after the Second World War in response to economic crisis. Mennonites began to commercialize their farms, specializing in wheat, poultry, and beef. Men's move to commercial poultry farming in particular represented gender transgression. Collecting eggs and slaughtering chickens, with their everyday physical and social relationship to cooking and kitchen work, were traditionally women's work. Thus men who commercialized poultry doubly transgressed gender roles, first by linking their identities to a feminine domain, and second by masculinizing traditionally female work for the sake of capitalism. The pressure to adapt and re-form commercial farming led to a masculinity crisis. Indeed, traditional gender roles and expectations for both women and men shifted to sustain economic security in a time of cultural strife.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unsettling Assumptions by Pauline Greenhill, Diane Tye. Copyright © 2014 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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