Preface to MFSJ Volume 42 (2020):
Let’s Talk About Sex…ism in Video Games
(the link to the main text appears at the end of this preface)
The Missouri Folklore Society was founded “to encourage the collection, preservation and study of folklore in the widest sense, including customs, institutions, beliefs, signs, legends, language, literature, musical arts, and folk arts and crafts of all ethnic groups throughout the State of Missouri.”
Things looked different in 1906. Over the years, the field has grown in its recognition that a “folk” isn’t a single group, nor can “folk groups” be restricted to ethnic, regional, occupational or religious affiliation, the pigeonholes standard in Dorson’s day. But even in that era, the limitations of such a view were recognized, and resisted. For example, Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics had obvious overlap, but also differences that ran considerably deeper than staging the parish parade on St. Patrick’s or Columbus Day. And just sticking with the Irish, by the beginning of the last century, it was clear enough that “shanty” and “lace curtain” populations were different. And thus two individuals might find themselves part of the same “folk,” but simultaneously members of mutually exclusive sub-groups with nonpermeable cell walls. Or, leaving behind those bounded groups that specialize in lore with border-patrolling functions (e.g., shibboleths and clothing-ways), two coreligionists might each belong to sundry groups with no particular relation to one another, perhaps overlapping, perhaps not: quilters, pipesmokers, golfers, hunters, beekeepers … all with their own lingo and traditions. Folk with their lore.
Things had become more complicated.
During my own life in folklore, as awareness of the multiplicity and complexity of folkgroup membership increased, so too did an equally but differently layered attention to something a bit more binary: folk culture as opposed to a cluster of not-entirely-identical categories called “popular culture,” and “mass culture.” Some practitioners found it productive to elide these domains, while others found illumination in keeping them separate. For the former, continuities included mass participation, and for the latter, the key distinction was elite production: everybody watches the Wizard of Oz, and it is an essential element of my granddaughter’s experience — as it was part of my mother’s childhood — but the 1939 movie was made by a vanishingly small group of people (who also controlled it as a product, for their own profit, and did not look kindly on unauthorized exploitation of what they had commodified).
But then, there were groups that made some aspects of that film their own, and in quite distinctive ways. This further problematized neat classifications of folklore and popular culture. Gay men found in Dorothy and Oz something resonant, adaptable, adoptable, in richly ironic forms — “camp” emerged. So did something we might now recognize as ancestral to contemporary folkforms such as cosplay and fanfic.
In folkloristics, at this point there comes an awareness that folk culture has always been separate from, alternate to, and quite often defiant, subversive, and critical of dominant culture. That understanding transformed the field (or arguably, brought it back to its roots in resistance to the destruction of communities and their lifeways by the Industrial Revolution). A posture of scientific detachment becomes less common than a tone of participation, solidarity and advocacy.
There remains of course a role, an audience, a market for the kind field-studies common in the folklore yearbooks of old: for instance, jump-rope rhymes as remembered by women in senior care facilities — though students of mine who have done such work are alert to themes of sexual anxiety and protofeminist resistance that weren’t noted by scholars who collected the same rhymes from the same people — when these elder women were little girls — a lifetime ago. This chant just looked different in 2020 from the way it did in 1940:
Cinderella
Dresssed in yella
Went upstairs to kiss a fella,
Made a mistake
Kissed a snake —
How many doctors did it take?
We’re not just looking at different people; we’re also looking at the same people differently, and so seeing different things in the lore.
Van Tegtmeier represents that newer student, ready to see not only different kinds of folkgroups, but to notice and document very different internal dynamics. This work, prepared as a master’s thesis at Truman State University, under the able direction of Dr. Priscilla Riggle, charts out genuinely contemporary topics in folklore. In its stance and the questions it poses, it’s right where the cutting edge cuts: issues of gender and justice and the role of folk communities. It’s also got some really appealing features in its by-the-way portions — the introductory note on academic gatekeeping speaks for a coming generation of scholars who are profoundly aware of university culture itself as a folk community, and not always, necessarily or completely benign, certainly with an agenda of its own that shapes the scholarship. As has always been the case, but this is the cadre that recognizes it.
Tegtmeier studies a kind of lore and a folk, with its own tectonics, that could only emerge in a technological environment my own era could not imagine — and thus does away too with the old doctrine that folklore exists only in face-to-face relationships; the internet as a fertile field for lore is now entirely noncontroversial. Which takes us back to our starting point: folklore pays no mind to “latitude thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes north;” didn’t then, doesn’t now. It is a conversation we had long ago: we are a folklore society located in Missouri, and our hearts will always be here, but our interests reach beyond.
In ways we have tried to sketch here, Tegtmeier’s work represents a radical departure from traditional folklore studies, their emphases and scope — and in its determination to speak for what is silenced in a mass culture, entirely within the most honorable tradition.
ABD
Van Tegtmeier (they/them) graduated from Truman State University with their master’s degrees in English and Education. Drawing on a lifelong love of the medium, they used their studies to examine how video games could be treated as literature in academia and in the ELA classroom.
“My thesis delves into how toxic masculinity affects popular video games and their communities. In particular, I explore the extreme sexualization and objectification of women and young girls in video games and how that often manifests itself as violence. Part of my discussion also looks into how these toxic attitudes impact the attitudes that a vocal minority of gamers express within video gaming communities and how abuse in the industry reinforces that behavior. It’s not all doom and gloom though! I bring it all back around to the positive representations we see in video games (especially in the indie gaming space).”
https://missourifolkloresociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Tegtmeier-thesis.pdf