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- Convenors:
-
Mircea Paduraru
(Alexandru Ioan Cuza University)
Otilia Hedeșan (West University of Timisoara)
Send message to Convenors
- Chairs:
-
Mircea Paduraru
(Alexandru Ioan Cuza University)
Otilia Hedeșan (West University of Timisoara)
- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
Popular erotica has frequently been associated with laughter and the comic. In this panel we intend to de-trivialize the category of sexual folklore by exploring its potential to reflect disturbing aspects like sexual violence, fear, shame, power relations, traditional censorship institutions etc.
Long Abstract:
Popular erotica (folklore ethically categorized as “obscene”, “pornographic “,
“unprintable” etc.) has frequently been associated with laughter, lightness and the comic. On the
contrary, building on the heritage of Friedrich S. Krauss and Sigmund Freud, the American
folklorist Gershon Legman believed that sexual jokes, erotic stories, riddles and folksongs offer
unique access into issues which are actually not funny at all, such as sexual violence, sickness,
fear, carnal economies, pleasure and pain, guilt and shame, but they also reflect power relations,
traditional institutions of censorship and their contestation, borders and regulations and the
transgression of those borders and so on. Moreover, if folklore always accommodates a historical
component, then the way popular erotica reflects the dominant ideas and crises of the time
constitutes a particular sample of sensibility, one that organizes meaning according to its themes
and concerns, indeed revealing social, cultural and historical tensions in a new, distinct light.
In this panel we intend to de-trivialize the category of sexual folklore by exploring its
potential to highlight such disturbing aspects. We welcome contextual interpretations, case studies,
relevant fieldwork experiences accounts, but also reflections on significant moments in the history
of local ethnologies as well as theoretical reflections on the matter.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
This contribution explores the tension between public sexual discourses and private realities during West Germany’s Long Sixties using oral history. Drawing on approximately 25 interviews with men and women (born between 1929 and 1973) from a broader dissertation project, the presentation focuses on select biographical narratives to analyze how individuals experienced and negotiated sexuality within moral and historical contexts. The analysis highlights the persistence of sexual conservatisms, such as the stigmatization of premarital sexuality in rural-Catholic milieus of the 1950s, alongside the ambivalent effects of the "sex wave" of the 1960s and 1970s. Grounded in Foucault’s concept of sexuality as a "dense transfer point for relations of power," this study examines how gendered norms, emotions, and moral concepts shaped the sexual lives and practices of respondents. By emphasizing the intersection of personal experience and broader societal tensions, the contribution reframes sexuality as both a deeply personal and politically charged space.
Paper Abstract:
Despite numerous studies on the sexual history of West Germany that challenge stereotypes of the "prudish" 1950s or the "libertine" 1970s, there is a surprising lack of investigation into the intersection of personal narratives, sexual practices, and the moral frameworks governing them. This contribution seeks to bridge that gap by using oral history to explore the tension between public discourses and private sexual realities. Drawing on 25 oral history interviews with men and women (born 1929–1973) from a broader dissertation project, the presentation focuses on select biographical narratives to illuminate how individuals experienced and narrated sexuality within specific moral and historical contexts.
Using the lens of sexual folklore and Foucault’s concept of sexuality as a "dense transfer point for relations of power," the study examines how gendered and era-specific moral concepts shaped the sexual practices, emotions, and narratives of respondents. Paradigmatic cases include the stigmatized yet tolerated practice of premarital sexuality in rural-Catholic milieus of the 1950s and the ambivalent effects of the media-driven "sex wave" of the 1960s and 1970s, which catalyzed liberalization without eroding entrenched conservatisms.
The analysis also delves into the emotional and narrative frameworks respondents used to navigate sexuality, particularly in relation to power dynamics between genders. By grounding these insights in subjective accounts, the study reframes sexuality not only as a deeply personal matter but also as a site where broader societal tensions—shame, censorship, and power—manifest in everyday life.
Paper Short Abstract:
Amazonian pusangas, or shamanic love potions, embody more than romantic attraction; they reflect young Amazonians' negotiations with belonging, modernity, and ancestral traditions. This paper explores the tensions of desire, affect, and urban identity through pusangas, revealing hidden power dynamics and ambivalent yearnings.
Paper Abstract:
In the urban landscapes of the Peruvian Amazon, pusangas—shamanic love potions crafted from aromatic plants and imbued with spiritual energies—serve as powerful mediators of desire, identity, and belonging. While these potions promise lust and love, they also carry deeper implications for understanding the affective and social realities of young indigenous Amazonians.
This paper examines how pusangas are not merely tools of attraction but complex affective artifacts, reflecting the aspirations and anxieties of indigenous youth as they navigate urban modernity. Rooted in ancestral knowledge, these potions illuminate the paradoxical space of the city: a realm of freedom and possibility but also of alienation and precarity. In their search for love and connection, young people use pusangas to reimagine traditional practices, crafting new cultural meanings that both contest and sustain power dynamics, gender relations, and socio-emotional boundaries.
By contextualizing pusangas within the broader framework of sexual folklore, this analysis engages with the ambivalence of erotic and affective traditions. It explores how love potions unsettle dichotomies of shame and desire, power and vulnerability, tradition and innovation. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper highlights how these practices both reflect and resist historical and social tensions, offering a deeper understanding of how folklore mediates the intersections of pleasure, fear, and cultural reinvention in urban Amazonian life.
Paper Short Abstract:
The paper discusses two Finnish 19th century folklore collectors, C.A. Gottlund and E. Lönnrot and their conflicting strategies of textualizing sexual folk poetry. The schism centered on the validity of erotic folklore in the construction of national culture and representation of folk mentality.
Paper Abstract:
Oral sexual poems in the Kalevala-meter were sung and collected in Finland and Karelia until the 20th century. Folklore collectors, most of them male, shared an ambiguous stance towards vernacular expressions of sexuality: they were both vulgar and uncannily attractive. Two of the 19th century collectors, a specialist in erotica and an academic outcast C.A. Gottlund, and Elias Lönnrot who compiled the national epic Kalevala, had a fiercely antagonistic relationship. Much of the controversy centered on the aesthetic value of the men’s respective literary products. At the same the men shared an interest in vernacular erotica and its textualization.
Both men collected and edited a notable amount of erotic oral poems but only Gottlund published the outcome of this work. The paper discusses the differing motives of these processes of textualization as well as their outcomes: Gottlund’s explicit and rough folk poetry editions and a literary quasi-epic on the one hand, and Lönnrot’s unpublished erotic manuscript and the de-sexualized published collection of edited oral poems (the Kanteletar) on the other. Gottlund argumented for a truthful representation of vernacular mentality and local dialects whereas Lönnrot strived for a reconstruction of the ancient mentality of the Finnish folk and the standardization of dialects into one national language. Representation of vernacular erotica was thus entangled not only with notions on decency but also with the politics of heritage, language, and the national.
Paper Short Abstract:
Sexual folklore has always been problematic and embarrassing for those ethnological discourses that were trying to construct national identity, build the nation or feed religious piety. Since it is old, omnipresent and upsettingly lively, the disciplinary management of sexual lore involved huge efforts to hide/ re-write/ omit or suppress what has been considered unprintable and unworthy . This paper focuses on three moments in the history of the Romanian national ethnology, when the efforts to deal with the presence of popular erotica took a conceptual / theoretical turn.
Paper Abstract:
Sexual folklore has always been problematic and embarrassing for those ethnological discourses that were trying to construct national identity, build the nation or feed religious piety. Since it is old, omnipresent and upsettingly lively, the disciplinary management of sexual lore involved huge efforts to hide/ re-write/ omit or suppress what has been considered unprintable and unworthy . This paper focuses on three moments in the history of the Romanian national ethnology, when the efforts to deal with the presence of popular erotica took a conceptual / theoretical turn.
This paper analyses and contextualizes the writings of Ion Diaconu, Ovidiu Bîrlea and Petru Caraman, three of the most important figures of the XX Romanian national ethnology. While the first attempts to produce a psychoanalytical defense of sexual lore, the second – writing during Ceausescu's regime – does that by emphasizing its hermetic character and its noble primitive functions. Petru Caraman, the third figure summoned in this talk, writing also in the communist context, recovers “folk pornology” by emphasizing its role in the erosion of the magical dimension of old folk imprecations, thus playing a part in the production of a secular popular mind.
Paper Short Abstract:
SKS folklore index cards were nominated for the national register of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme in 2024. A significant number of the cards address graphic sexual imagery or include terms for genitalia. How do these materials challenge or complement the perception of folklore as a symbol of valuable tradition and a source of national pride?
Paper Abstract:
Since 1831, the Finnish Literature Society (SKS) has amassed extensive collections of folklore, oral history narratives, and ethnographic materials. Among the most prominent of these collections is the pinewood folklore index card cabinet, which contains approximately three million cards organized by folklore genre, subject, geographical origin, and collector. Interestingly, a significant number of these cards address themes involving graphic sexual imagery or include diverse vernacular terms for genitalia.
In 2024, the SKS folklore index cards were nominated for inclusion in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, recognizing them as a nationally significant documentary and cultural heritage collection. The folklore index cards represent the contributions of tens of thousands of individuals who have recorded and preserved oral traditions over the past 150 years. While collectors from among the “folk” often documented “crude” traditional themes without hesitation, representatives of the middle-class intelligentsia were more reserved in their attitudes. The categorization of the index cards reflects both the oral tradition genres and the diverse backgrounds of the individuals who collected these materials over time.
In my presentation, I examine the status of sexually explicit folklore as part of national cultural heritage. Sexual jokes, pornographic riddles, proverbs and folksongs offer avenues for past-time intimate power relations. How do these materials challenge or complement the perception of folklore as a symbol of valuable tradition and a source of national pride? Additionally, I discuss the practical implications of including explicit sexual folklore in a UNESCO-recognized collection, particularly with regard to its presentation and accessibility.
Paper Short Abstract:
Sexual folklore provides insights into social structures, including power imbalances and cultural prohibitions. This research explores how bawdy humor addresses intimacy, embarrassment, and dominance, uncovering its role in questioning or sustaining norms and exposing deeper societal frictions.
Paper Abstract:
Humor within sexual folklore, especially in the form of jokes, is often regarded as mere amusement. However, this study argues that such entertainment offers a window into deeper societal dynamics, including anxieties surrounding authority, gendered power imbalances, cultural taboos, and mechanisms of control and resistance. By examining how these jokes navigate topics like intimacy, fear, shame, and control, the research explores their ability to challenge or uphold societal boundaries and norms. Moreover, this paper highlights the dual role of sexual humor: to challenge restrictive social frameworks while simultaneously reinforcing them. This analysis underscores the importance of a critical approach to understanding the layered meanings in sexual humor, revealing its potential to reflect social tensions, historical contexts, and cultural conflicts. By moving beyond surface-level interpretations, this work offers nuanced insights into sexual folklore, which simultaneously entertains, provokes, and critiques, as a medium that intertwines entertainment with meaningful commentary on human experiences.
Paper Short Abstract:
During the 19th century, the tradition of metered oral poetry, often referred to as “Kalevalaic” poetry or runo singing, became a fundamental and emblematic part of Finnish cultural heritage. The collections of metered poetry include hundreds of poems that discuss sexual relationships, the female body, and genitals. This paper analyses the re-heritagisations of such poems in contemporary Finland. Through an examination of ethnographic interviews, media texts, and folk music recordings, I assert that the use of traditional sexual poetry reflects progressive values, such as the promotion of equality, social change, and diversity. Furthermore, the progressive contextualisation of these sexual poems is situated within transnational body politics, such as the #MeToo movement, and is closely linked to feminist viewpoints.
Paper Abstract:
During the 19th century, the tradition of metered oral poetry, often referred to as “Kalevalaic” poetry or runo singing, became a fundamental and emblematic part of Finnish cultural heritage. The collections of metered poetry include hundreds of poems that discuss sexual relationships, the female body, and genitals. In my paper, I analyse the re-heritagisations of such poems in contemporary Finland. Through an examination of ethnographic interviews, media texts, and folk music recordings, I assert that the use of traditional sexual poetry reflects progressive values, such as the promotion of equality, social change, and diversity. Furthermore, the progressive contextualisation of these sexual poems is situated within transnational body politics, such as the #MeToo movement, and is closely linked to feminist viewpoints.
Paper Short Abstract:
“Strigatul în fășanc” is a particular sequence of the spring carnival from Banat region.This is a moment that privileges the public performance of obscene texts. The moment functions also as a form of social recognition of the community’s members emphasized on this occasion.
Paper Abstract:
Proposed paper focuses on the Lent carnivals organized in Banat cross-border region. These carnivals have different local names: fasching, moși, fărșanc, poklade, leoarfe or corni. They represent real milestones in the regional festive calendar. These Lent rituals follow the structural rules of European carnivals converting villages into a "world turned upside down" when all the forbidden everyday behaviors are allowed. The vulgar expressions, the costumes and sexually suggestive gestures are part of these rural carnivals.
Current paper draws, describes and tries to analyze a carnival scene, called either ”strigarea în fășanc” or ”strigarea darurilor” (the shout of gifts). This is one carnival sequence when a person from the community publicly presents (”shouts”) a text that is meant to be an satiric chronicle of the social life of the community for the past year. Shouted text occasions the presentation of situations related to community’s everyday life, including supposed love affairs. Cases that are otherwise ordinary are often presented by resorting to public obscenity, by turning ordinary cases into pornography. The community is carefully accounting who exactly is characterized on this occasion since when the social recognition equals the code of obscenity.
Paper Short Abstract:
Jokes about gay people constitute a significant part of Romanian urban folklore. Nevertheless, the Romanian folklorists and ethnologists still ignore them, as, with just a very few notable exceptions, they do not seem attracted to study the sexual folklore in general. The present paper tries to shed some light on the reasons, purposes, as well as on the hidden intentions of these jokes.
Paper Abstract:
It should be a truth universally acknowledged that sexual folklore is far from being a mere catalyst of sexual arousal. This affirmation is even more accurate in the case of jokes about homosexuals. From this point of view, the Romanian case presents a great interest. In this country, during the communist times, gay people were persecuted, punished with jail if they were caught on the act or blackmailed in order to be forced to serve the system. Only in 2002, almost thirteen years after the fall of communism, was the law against homosexuality finally abolished. Nevertheless, the LGBTQ+ people are still far from being fully accepted by the common (and rather conservative) people in Romania, which makes the jokes about homosexuals ever more important, as they function as a barometer, an instrument to measure homophobia/philia.
For the students of these jokes, several questions arise, such as: who is telling such jokes? To whom? In what performance context? Who is reading this type of jokes, when published on a site (for a person could become a listener without their conscious will, but the situation is different in the case of a reader)? With what purpose? Folklorists could and should address these jokes, as their agency seems to lay beyond the mere intention to provoke the laugh of the audience/readers. The present paper tries to raise a corner of the curtain which hides these questions from view.