psychezready

This was originally published on Tiny Donkey, a blog of the Fairy Tale Review, in 2017, but TD is no longer available online.

I have always loved stories of cross-dressing heroines. It’s a familiar trope in literature, legends, and fairytales: a woman dresses as a man to solve some problem, or to save the day. In her male guise, she is strong, brave, skillful, and clever¹. At the end of the tale, however, when the conflict is resolved, she usually puts back on her apron and returns home. In many variants, home is a controlling father, a bullying brother, or a drunken husband. In my search for variants, I found another tale type that ends differently. In “The Shift of Sex,” or ATU 514², the heroine does not go home after her adventures, but stays in her male disguise and eventually becomes a man. Most variants follow this narrative (I’ve used the gendered pronouns given in most sources): 

An elderly father is asked by the king to enter military service. Because he is old and has no sons, his daughter dresses in his clothes, borrows his horse, and joins for him. With the help of her magical horse, she excels at all she does. She quickly becomes the king’s favorite soldier, and his daughter falls in love with her. When the community begins to doubt that she is a man, they set her on impossible quests that she completes easily. Her final battle is with a demon or witch, who curses her with their dying breath: “If you are a man, be now a woman! If you are a woman, be now a man.” The hero returns home to his castle where he is celebrated, his wife rejoices, and they all live happily ever after.

“The Shift of Sex” is a very old and widespread tale: it has been told for at least two, possibly three thousand years³, across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. There are at least twenty-six variants in English today, and I have spent the last year researching them. In my academic work on the subject, I argue that this tale type was historically a space to express frustrations at the limitations of the female gender. Today, however, this tale has the potential to hold space for a broader expression of gender identity. 

An issue that some modern readers have with this tale is that, while it begins as a queer romance between two women, it ends with what feels like a return to heteronormativity. When the protagonist changes gender, the couple becomes heterosexual. Some readers interpret the story as a narrative message that says a happy ending for two women in love is impossible. The story is read as a condemnation of queer love. I read this story, however, not as a queer romance gone hetero, but as a trans love story with a happy ending. I would not argue that audiences thousands of years ago saw the protagonist in this tale as transgender⁴, but present-day audiences certainly can.

In the many variants of this tale type, there are differences in narrative structure, tone, and detail, but the one element that is present in each is the happy ending: the princess is overjoyed that her partner has changed gender, and she and the royal family accept him, and they live happily ever after. Historically, our literary and popular narratives are lousy with stories of characters who transgress gender roles or heteronormativity and suffer for it; even contemporary stories with queer and non-binary characters kill them off, or depict them as monsters. The message spoken by these narratives is clear: any transgression of traditional gender and sexuality will be punished.

While we as a culture continue the struggle to create happy endings for transgressive and transgender characters in our own popular literature, we can take heart that there is a folktale that has been told and retold for thousands of years with a transgressive, cross-dressing, sex-changing protagonist who is not punished, but rewarded for their bravery, skill, and strength with wealth, marriage, and a happy life. 

1. Examples: Tale type ATU 884 (“The Forsaken Fiancée”), ATU 884B (“The Girl as Soldier”), and ATU 884B* (“Girl Dressed as a Man Deceives the King”). ↩︎
2.  The Aarne-Thompson-Uther index is a classification system for folktales, grouped by similar motifs. Folklorists Pauline Greenhill and Emilie Anderson-Grégoire discuss ATU 514 at length in Unsettling Assumptions: Tradition, Gender, Drag. ↩︎
3. A variant appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which dates to 8 CE; another in the Indian Mahabarata, which originates in the 7^th or 8^th century BCE; and also “Alimbeglanya” in the Ossetian Nart Sagas, which were compiled around 2,000 BCE.  ↩︎
4. These tales were told long ago and in disparate regions with notions of sex, gender, and gender identity unquestionably different from our own; to apply a contemporary understanding of gender identity to these cultures is a form of conceptual colonialism.
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Read my review of Disfigured on the DSQ blog here! A truly lovely book and a wonderful overlap of my research interests (Folklore and Disability Studies).

It took me a few months, but here they are. I struggled to pull these lists together, until my friends and colleagues began to share their own exam reading lists with me and it was a massive, massive help. So I promised myself I’d post mine online so that other grad students could benefit from them.

Below are the rationales and reading lists for my Comprehensive Exams in Rhetoric/Composition and Disability Studies. I’m currently in my third year of a PhD program at the University of Connecticut. At UConn, the number of texts we are expected to include in our reading lists is, in my limited experience, significantly higher than it is in other English or Rhet/Comp programs.

If you find something I’ve neglected to include–especially if it combines the two disciplines–feel free to comment or email me!

Continue reading “Rhetoric/Composition & Disability Studies Comprehensive Exams Reading List”

I’m working in Disability Studies in my current grad program, and one of the loudest themes to emerge from 21st century disabled communities is the importance of VISIBILITY. Disability visibility–narratives of the lived experiences of disabled people–is crucial in combatting the stigma, misconceptions, and marginalization of people with disabilities, mental illness, and chronic illness, for a lot of reasons that I won’t go into here, because I’m writing about particular misconceptions about a specific mental illness.

I want to right these misconceptions not because I love being right (which I do), but because misconceptions lead to misdiagnosis, lack of diagnosis, and in some cases, worsening of symptoms, incarceration, institutionalization, and suicide. Visibility is not just beneficial, it’s essential for the surviving and thriving of disabled people. As I read and learn, the more I have begun to realize that I myself am not living visibly as a person with a disabling mental illness. I haven’t told most people in my life, because of my own internalized ableism–I’m afraid of the resulting stigma, that I won’t be believed, that I’ll be treated differently, a whole bunch of stuff. 

Anyway, I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I will write about my personal experiences with it elsewhere, as it’s a long and interesting story that’s not super relevant here. I was diagnosed in my thirties, but I have had it since childhood. Everyone that knows me well knows that I’ve struggled with debilitating anxiety since I was a child. I have had a lot of really difficult years. When my first psychiatrist diagnosed me, she was surprised I’d made it till my thirties without institutionalization or worse. I was strong, I was lucky, but mostly, I was privileged enough to stay well that long without any professional support. She also warned me that I needed treatment, and I didn’t take that seriously until my forties. 

Continue reading “Disclosure: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder”

I’ve been busy with grad school, so I have a few updates:

I’ve been hard at work co-coordinating a conference here at UConn, Racism in the Margins, to be held Friday February 19 & 26, 2021, along with Kathleen Tonry, Gabe Morrison, and Kyle Barron. I had the great pleasure of interviewing UConn Writing Center tutors for our video, and it was a profound and humbling experience.

I’ll be participating on a panel at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (my favorite conference!!!) in March, 2021, “Dark Forests of the Imagination: Fairy Tales and Ecological Thinking,” with Theodora Goss, Brittany Warman, and Sara Cleto.

I participated in the Project Narrative Summer Institute 2020, “Narrative, Medicine, and Disability,” with Jim Phelan and Amy Shuman. This was such an amazing experience, I recommend it to anyone interested in Narrative Theory.

Several of my students have asked for advice about how to stay on task while working from home, how to cope with the pressure of school during quarantine, how to complete college coursework when most of us are far away from campus and its resources, our peers, and our professors. So I’ve made a list of personal advice. But before I get into it, I want to remind you of one thing:

Go easy on yourself. This is the most important piece of advice here. It’s very hard to do, but crucial. This COVID-19 situation is not normal. Don’t expect yourself to operate at 100% efficiency right now. Some things are not going to get done, and that’s OK. The most important thing—seriously—is your physical and mental health, and that of your loved ones.

Believe it—because it’s true. Of course, you may be saying to yourself, “that’s great Ms. Ready, but I still have shit to do—I have profs demanding papers and exams and zoom meetings and I have to clean my house and go to the store for my mom and babysit my little brother and walk the dog.”

Because there is a lot we still have to accomplish here is my list of advice on working from home and staying on task.

Continue reading “Working from Home Advice from a Very Disorganized and Lazy Person”

I wrote a review for The Future Fire on a new collection of Baba Yaga retellings. You can read it here! I love Baba Yaga stories. Here’s an older thing I wrote about one of the lessons I learned from her.

It’s Easy AF to Read More Books by People of Color

For the last few years, I’ve set myself a Goodreads challenge. I set the number of books higher each year, pushing myself to do more of my favorite thing—reading. Last year’s felt pretty easy, and at the end of the year, I sat down and did the math to see how many of the (34) books I’d read were by women (24), how many by men (9), and how many by people of color (4!!!). I was stunned by the numbers. I’ve always favored books by women, and I’m OK with that, but I’d never consciously chosen to read books mostly by white people, had I?

Continue reading “It’s Easy AF to Read More Books by People of Color”

I’ve been working as the Lead Designer for a new, peer-reviewed publication through George Mason University. It’s called the English 302 OER Collection, and it’s been an absolute pleasure to work with my colleagues on developing this during 2018.

Our purpose is to create an online compendium of resources for faculty who teach English 302, George Mason’s required third-year writing and research course. I’ve been teaching 302 for two and a half years, and I was happy to contribute a Writing Assignment prompt to the inaugural issue, a Literature Review Assignment.

Check it out, and please check out the other excellent submissions in the first issue! We hope to have the second issue out in January 2019.

I wrote a book review for The Future Fire that was published a few months ago, and I forgot to share it. You can find the review here.

I strongly recommend Bashe’s work!