Pauline Greenhill
Biographic Data
| ID | 170352 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pauline Greenhill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pauline |
| FAMILY NAME | Greenhill |
| SIGNATURE | GREENHILL P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Winnipeg |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9610-6173 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Misogynoir and Origins: Disney’s Snow White, Toxic Speech, and the Fairy-Tale Public Sphere
Feminist scholar Allison Craven recently coined the term ‘fairy-tale public sphere’ to explore how characters, images, and concepts from traditional culture, popular children’s literature, and wonder narratives come to play roles in civil discourse as referent, sign, trope, and/or invocation. When such representations enter mediated discourse, the fairy-tale public sphere transforms into a location for debates around race, gender, and other matte…
Disrupting Mainstream Girl Power through Intersectional Feminism in The Wilds
In Western society, girlhood and girl power are constructed largely in terms of white heteronormativity. Correspondingly, American television neglects to portray diverse girlhoods and modes of empowerment realistically, privileging white, cis-hetero representations. However, the teen drama series The Wilds offers a somewhat nuanced portrayal of girls, racial diversity, and queerness. We apply intersectional feminist critiques of girlhood and girl…
Inviting people into our experience in a powerful way: Indigenous Representation in the Television Series Burden of Truth and Midnattssol
Introducing diversity into the white-dominated media business is part of mainstreaming social justice movements. This article addresses Indigenous themes’ and talents’ inclusion in two television series by mainstream production companies from the perspectives of organic representation, inclusivity, and justice. The analysis focuses on Canadian legal drama Burden of Truth (2018–2021) and French-Swedish Nordic Noir Midnattssol ( Midnight Sun , 2016…
Introduction: Representing In/Justice in Canadian Film
Blood-Red Relations In and Out of Place: Women’s Self-Harm and Supernatural Crime in The Moth Diaries
In Canadian filmmaker Mary Harron’s The Moth Diaries (a Canadian/American/Irish co-production), exploring adolescent girls’ friendships and self-harm in a boarding school setting, blood is out of place. It drips from the protagonist’s father’s wrist artery, willingly shed in suicide; involuntarily tarnishes her nightgown as menstrual blood; falls on the school director’s china figurines as nosebleed; and pours in the school library as a vampire-i…
Something’s Not Right in Silverhöjd’: Nordic Supernatural and Environmental and Species Justice in Jordskott
In the Swedish/Finnish/British/Norwegian television series Jordskott (2015–17) child victims’ mysterious disappearances signal that ‘something’s not right’ in Silverhöjd, a Swedish town. Three detectives uncover a conflict between the locals who depend on a local industry and preternatural human-like but non-human forest creatures familiar from Nordic tradition and fairylore. Both humans and semi/non-humans are ambivalent, but what sets the latte…
Double Trouble: Gender Fluid Heroism in American Children’s Television
Gender fluidity makes only rare appearances on North American television, and remains almost completely absent from programming for children. In contrast, transgender characters are making inroads into mainstream North American TV for adults. Still, media depictions of transgender people in the late 1990s and early 2000s have largely shown them as aberrations, having illegible and/or unstable identities, joining mainstream Euro North American soc…
“Hansel and Gretel” Films: Crimes, Harms, and Children
A brutal narrative of child abandonment, murder, and cannibalism may not seem the conventional stuff of fairy tales to those trained for a Disney-eyed view. Yet that is exactly what “Hansel and Gretel” offers. Film versions across genres, including drama, noir, horror, slasher, thriller, comedy, and adventure, deal seriously with crimes against and harms to children. Many practices and behaviours that endanger and damage people of various ages in…
Introduction: Transcultural and Intermedial Fairy Tales and Television
Introduction to the special issue, "Transcultural and Intermedial Fairy Tales and Television," by the guest editors
Racism and Denial of Racism: Dealing with the Academy and the Field
We discuss our experiences of both racism and its denial in the context of our interactions with research participants, research teams, and academic communities. Greenhill questions scholarly traditions that insist upon objectivist methods and, in the process, side with researchers and research participants who refuse to acknowledge and expose White-identified, privileged social actions. Reflecting on decades of responses to her own research on t…
Le piège d’Issoudun: Motherhood in Crisis
J'ai vecu des moments tres noirs avec mes propres enfants, non cause d'eux mais de moi, que j'ai vecu des moments tres, tres, tres difficiles, tres epuisants d'etre rendu un bout de dire-de me dire moi-meme-y quelqu'un qui pourra m'enlever des gens? [I lived very dark moments with my own children, not because of them but because of me. I had very, very, very difficult, exhausting times, even to the point of saying-to myself-can someone take these…
“Our Brommtopp is of Our Own Design”: (De)Constructing Masculinities in Southern Manitoba Mennonite Mumming
In the past and to some extent the present, various Euro North American and other cultural groups marked the period from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Night with rowdy, disguised, playful/ludic or carnivalesque behaviour that mainstream Euro North Americans associate more with Halloween than with this holiday season. Many such customs, termed the “informal house visit” involve a group (usually young men) who perambulate from one location to another wi…
Hoodwinked! and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade : Animated “Little Red Riding Hood” Films and the Rashômon Effect
Two otherwise diverse films, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1999), a Japanese anime reflection on an apocalyptic past and present intended for adults, and Hoodwinked! (2005), a child-friendly film featuring Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother as cookie capitalists, share thematic connections to ATU 333 and crime and an animated format. Both also narrate different characters’ stories about criminal acts, invoking Kurosawa’s Rashômon (1950). Thi…
J. Estelle Reddin, 1923-2010
Little Red Riding Hood Crime Films: Critical Variations on Criminal Themes
European and North American crime films since the 1990s reflect changing cinematic styles but also hardening political discourses around criminal responsibility and growing public fears of random violence and predatory strangers. The narrative structure and imagery of “Little Red Riding Hood” conventionally warns about the latter dangers, but can also offer a lesson in self-reliance and the necessity for private action to forestall them. The fami…
Pedophile crime films as popular criminology: A problem of justice
This article responds to Nicole Rafter’s recent call to develop a popular criminology using cultural representations of crime and criminal justice to supplement and extend mainstream criminological knowledge. Using representations of child sexual abuse in film, we begin to build a popular criminology of the pedophile. In cinema, this figure opens up a cultural space to interrogate key criminological dilemmas about the nature and shape of justice.…
Make the Night Hideous: Discourses of Four Canadian Charivaris, 1881-1940
Make the Night Hideous explores mysterious transformation of the charivari using four detailed case studies from different time periods and locations across English Canada, as well as first-person accounts of more recent charivari participants
The Most Ambiguous Gift: Cash and the Presentation Wedding Tradition in Manitoba
Little Red Riding Hood and the Pedophile in Film: Freeway, Hard Candy and The Woodsman
“Little Red Riding Hood” is one of very few well-known fairy tales that have not come under what Jack Zipes calls “the Disney spell,” which has ossified and Americanized so many others. Creators using various artistic genres have thus felt free to rewrite and reconceptualize it. The three “Little Red Riding Hood” films that we discuss explore, as a significant theme, adult-child sexual relationships. We argue that the “Little Red Riding Hood” sto…
In Honour of Counterhegemony Man
Traditional Ambivalence and Heterosexual Marriage in Canada: Transgressing Ritual or Ritualising Transgression?1
Queer moments abound in traditional rituals associated with marriages and weddings, not only in some regions of English Canada but in most European and European-colonised locations. In the Prairie provinces and Ontario, mock weddings (folk dramatic travesties of the Christian/majoritarian wedding ceremony, usually performed cross dressed) can interrupt wedding showers or milestone anniversary parties. And from Prince Edward Island to British Colu…
A Feminist Perspective on Bioterror: From Anthrax to Critical Art Ensemble
Wedding Realities: The Rules Have Changed… and They Haven’t
Wedding Realities : the Rules Have Changed... and They Haven’t... / Les noces en vrai : les règles changent... et restent les mêmes. Un article de la revue Ethnologies (Les noces en vrai) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
The Lancashire Pace-Egg Play: A Social History
Lancashire Pace-Egg Play: A Social History. By Eddie Cass. (London: FLS Books, n.d. [2001]. Pp. xiv + 257, preface, introduction, photographs, illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index. L13.95 paper) In the best of all possible folklore scholarship worlds, every traditional practice would be the subject of a book like this one. In the preface, Eddie Cass confesses that he saw his first pace-egg play in 1968 under the influence of T.S. Eliot …
Introduction: Folklore in Canada
Introduction:Folklore in Canada Pauline Greenhill (bio) and Peter Narváez (bio) In the introduction and afterword to this special issue of the Journal of American Folklore on Canada, we refer to several kinds of "stories we tell about ourselves" (see Geertz 1973:448). There are stories that Canadian folklorists have told about ourselves-and an indication of what new versions of those stories might look like. There are stories that American folklo…
Pedophile crime films as popular criminology: A problem of justice
This article responds to Nicole Rafter’s recent call to develop a popular criminology using cultural representations of crime and criminal justice to supplement and extend mainstream criminological knowledge. Using representations of child sexual abuse in film, we begin to build a popular criminology of the pedophile. In cinema, this figure opens up a cultural space to interrogate key criminological dilemmas about the nature and shape of justice.…
The Lancashire Pace-Egg Play: A Social History
Lancashire Pace-Egg Play: A Social History. By Eddie Cass. (London: FLS Books, n.d. [2001]. Pp. xiv + 257, preface, introduction, photographs, illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index. L13.95 paper) In the best of all possible folklore scholarship worlds, every traditional practice would be the subject of a book like this one. In the preface, Eddie Cass confesses that he saw his first pace-egg play in 1968 under the influence of T.S. Eliot …
Racism and Denial of Racism: Dealing with the Academy and the Field
We discuss our experiences of both racism and its denial in the context of our interactions with research participants, research teams, and academic communities. Greenhill questions scholarly traditions that insist upon objectivist methods and, in the process, side with researchers and research participants who refuse to acknowledge and expose White-identified, privileged social actions. Reflecting on decades of responses to her own research on t…
A Feminist Perspective on Bioterror: From Anthrax to Critical Art Ensemble
Something’s Not Right in Silverhöjd’: Nordic Supernatural and Environmental and Species Justice in Jordskott
In the Swedish/Finnish/British/Norwegian television series Jordskott (2015–17) child victims’ mysterious disappearances signal that ‘something’s not right’ in Silverhöjd, a Swedish town. Three detectives uncover a conflict between the locals who depend on a local industry and preternatural human-like but non-human forest creatures familiar from Nordic tradition and fairylore. Both humans and semi/non-humans are ambivalent, but what sets the latte…
Folk and Academic Racism: Concepts from Morris and Folklore
This article explores the intersections between concepts of racism presented in the context of Morris a purportedly "English" dance practice that has limited circulation, and that remains primarily white and in the context of the Morris Dance Discussion Group an e-mail listserv group. I use these as reference points for a critique of some concepts common in the practices of academic folklore scholarship and offer suggestions for more progressive,…
Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada
Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada. Edited by Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 306, photographs, drawings, editors' concluding statement, references, index. $45.00 cloth) The aim of the editors of Undisciplined Women was to redress Canadian folklore studies' tendency to both neglect women's traditions and ignore feminist perspectives (x). This is an important project, a…
Little Red Riding Hood Crime Films: Critical Variations on Criminal Themes
European and North American crime films since the 1990s reflect changing cinematic styles but also hardening political discourses around criminal responsibility and growing public fears of random violence and predatory strangers. The narrative structure and imagery of “Little Red Riding Hood” conventionally warns about the latter dangers, but can also offer a lesson in self-reliance and the necessity for private action to forestall them. The fami…
The Most Ambiguous Gift: Cash and the Presentation Wedding Tradition in Manitoba
Afterword: TheJournal of American Folkloreand Americanist versus Canadianist Traditions
Neither a Man nor a Maid: Sexualities and Gendered Meanings in Cross-Dressing Ballads
Most folklorists' readings of transvestite, female-warrior, or cross-dressing ballads have assumed that these songs were about men and their experiences. Recent feminist readings have asserted that they are also about women. However, both assume that the ballads focus upon heterosexual relationships. This perverse reading of ten cross-dressing ballads from Peacock's Newfoundland collection suggests that these songs may explore a range of sexual o…
English immigrants' narratives of linguistic and cultural confusion: Examples of ethnic expression from Ontario
Ethnicity is viewed from the perspective of folkloristics as an invented cultural construct rather than as an objective fact. The English are not usually seen as 'ethnics' in Canada. Yet personal experience and generalization narratives of English immigrants to Ontario focus on experiences of cultural and linguistic distinctions between themselves and other Canadians. Immigrants, through these stories, develop a concept of English ethnicity which…
Folk Dynamics in Popular Poetry: "Somebody's Mother" and What Happened to Her in Ontario
Les petites images devotes
"The Family Album": A Newfoundland Women's Recitation
Le monologue, comme genre de la littérature orale, est sexiste. Non seulement il est dit en général par des hommes mais il célèbre en plus la masculinité, la plupart du temps au détriment de la féminité elle-même. En contrepartie à cette tendance, l'auteur examine ici le contenu d'un monologue écrit par Dulsie Spracklin et récité par sa soeur Greta Hussey, toutes deux de Terre-Neuve
Folk Dynamics in Popular Poetry: "Somebody's Mother" and What Happened to Her in Ontario
Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France 1400-1750
English immigrants' narratives of linguistic and cultural confusion: Examples of ethnic expression from Ontario
Ethnicity is viewed from the perspective of folkloristics as an invented cultural construct rather than as an objective fact. The English are not usually seen as 'ethnics' in Canada. Yet personal experience and generalization narratives of English immigrants to Ontario focus on experiences of cultural and linguistic distinctions between themselves and other Canadians. Immigrants, through these stories, develop a concept of English ethnicity which…
References Cited
Shakespoke: Selves, Others, and Folk Poetry
This essay introduces the six papers in this special issue by comparing the writers’ construction of analytical and rhetorical distance from their subjets — folk poetry and folk poets — in terms of concepts of self and other. It focuses upon folklorists as the (re)producers of cultural texts, not only as their disengaged audience
Good Reasons Why Beer is Better than Women and Other Qualities of the Female: Gender and the Non-Seriousness of Jokes
Tellings of blonde jokes examined using a discourse analysis sensitive to power dynamics between women and men provide an illustration of patriarchal strategy which parallels that of the xerox-lore “25 Good Reasons Why Beer is Better Than Women”; the advocacy of mutual contradictions in which you must take this seriously, yet you must take this as a joke. Our discussion places discourse analysis in the service of feminist theory by showing how in…
Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario
Greenhill presents three studies from the perspective of a folklorist and within the framework of feminist analysis. Loosely linked by the theme of power and discussion of carnivalesque elements of traditional and popular culture, these studies examine immigrants' narratives about adjusting to life in Canada; Morris dancing as practised by Forest City Morris of London, Ontario; and actions and responses of promoters and residents to the developme…
Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario
Neither a Man nor a Maid: Sexualities and Gendered Meanings in Cross-Dressing Ballads
Most folklorists' readings of transvestite, female-warrior, or cross-dressing ballads have assumed that these songs were about men and their experiences. Recent feminist readings have asserted that they are also about women. However, both assume that the ballads focus upon heterosexual relationships. This perverse reading of ten cross-dressing ballads from Peacock's Newfoundland collection suggests that these songs may explore a range of sexual o…
Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada
Making Morris (Fe)Male: Gender and Dancing Bodies
Morris dancing has historically been viewed by its scholars as an “English male dance tradition.” Each of these descriptors can be deconstructed, but this article focuses primarily upon understanding how Morris has been gendered male, and the effects such gendering has upon actual dancers and how they understand their practice
Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada
Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada. Edited by Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 306, photographs, drawings, editors' concluding statement, references, index. $45.00 cloth) The aim of the editors of Undisciplined Women was to redress Canadian folklore studies' tendency to both neglect women's traditions and ignore feminist perspectives (x). This is an important project, a…
Here We Go Again: Ethnicities and Regionalisms
Let me tell you a story. It is a true story about me, but it is also a familiar too familiaracademie story. It is, perhaps most wonderfully, a short story
Magnùs Einarsson, (Folklorist)
Pauline Greenhill, University of Winnipeg On January 11, 1999, friends and colleagues gathered at the Canadian Museum of Civilisation (CMC) in Hull, Quebec to honour and enjoy our memories of Magnus Einarsson. Magnus had worked at the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies (CCFCS), the folklore division of CMC, since 1969. He had taken early retirement from his position just over a year before his death on December 7, 1998, at age 57, of Wegene…
Streams of Cultural Capital
Well, I have to confess it took me a while to get over the title of this collection. I am afraid it brought out the brat in me; I tried rhyming alternatives (Creams of Cultural Capital) and water metaphor alternatives (Swamps of Cultural Capital) to exercise/exorcise my annoyance, with limited success in each area. However, the title, which I found off-putting in its naturalizing and reifying of the concept of cultural capital, provides my only r…
Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada
Festival, Anti Festival, Counter Festival, Non-Festival
colleague recently reported on a study she read which indicated that people who spend at least an hour per day alone were more productive both personally and professionally than those constantly in the presence of others. I surmise that this fact might puzzle the former colleagues with whom I worked as Dean of Residence at a small college of the University of Waterloo in the late 1980s. At our annual retreat for residence assistants, a substantia…
Putting a Price on Culture: Ethnic Organisations, Volunteers, and the Marketing of Multicultural Festivals
The literature from anthropology and from other disciplines which have approached tourism and cultural tourism suggests a perennial problem; these practices tend to destroy their own object. This danger is particularly acute where tourism relies upon experiences of “unspoiled” nature or “non-Westernised” culture. Tourists often degrade or even destroy the environment they are there to appreciate, and their expectations for exotic cultural experie…
Regards vers l’avenir
Looking Forward
The Lancashire Pace-Egg Play: A Social History
Lancashire Pace-Egg Play: A Social History. By Eddie Cass. (London: FLS Books, n.d. [2001]. Pp. xiv + 257, preface, introduction, photographs, illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index. L13.95 paper) In the best of all possible folklore scholarship worlds, every traditional practice would be the subject of a book like this one. In the preface, Eddie Cass confesses that he saw his first pace-egg play in 1968 under the influence of T.S. Eliot …
Introduction: Folklore in Canada
Introduction:Folklore in Canada Pauline Greenhill (bio) and Peter Narváez (bio) In the introduction and afterword to this special issue of the Journal of American Folklore on Canada, we refer to several kinds of "stories we tell about ourselves" (see Geertz 1973:448). There are stories that Canadian folklorists have told about ourselves-and an indication of what new versions of those stories might look like. There are stories that American folklo…
Afterword: The Journal of American Folklore and Americanist versus Canadianist Traditions
IT SEEMS REMARKABLE, GIVEN THEIR relative paucity in recent issues of JAF, that Canadian materials, and to an extent Canadian or Canadian-based researchers, were pivotal to the American Folklore Society's early years. Cross-border intellectual activity has al- ways been significant both in American folkloristics and Canadian folklore/ethnology. The work of Edward D. Ives in the northeast exemplifies this tendency among Ameri- can scholars. Howeve…
Sociology (35 works) · Art (26 works) · History (22 works) · Political science (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies (17 works) · Anthropology (15 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Canadian Identity and History (12 works) · Psychology (12 works)