being president of the american folklore society (AFS) yields gifts galore, especially the opportunity to collaborate with the Board, staff, and membership to bring our Society forward into the future. I thank all of you for electing me to the honor and privilege of serving the American Folklore Society. Additionally, I thank you for two special perks: the Presidential Suite and its 2 years’ worth of hotel swank, and the Presidential Address, a chance this evening to share certain concerns in a test flight of some material that I hope will add pages to my current book and performance project What a Witch! Said not like a 10-year-old dissing her girlfriend, “what a witch,” but like a woman feeling her power: “What a Witch!”—I dedicate this presentation to folklore feminists everywhere.1Continuing where we left off last year at Miami's 2016 Women's Section Croning Ceremony, I invite the coven of the feminist killjoys and their friends to convene once again.2 Tonight, I'll hook a ride with the witch in flight to prove the depth of folklore's delights for me as a feminist lesbian queer woman who entered graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin over 40 years ago, in August 1977. It's been a great journey—and now there's one more trip to take. I'll board my broom, and like Bette Midler playing the lead witch in the movie Hocus Pocus, who commands her sisters with such pride and satisfaction, I, too, command of all you: “Let's ride.”I began my presidency 3 years ago with an urgent desire to reinvest in our discipline's core understanding of folk narrative. Perhaps more than any other aspect of our nearly 200-year-old discipline, the collection, study, and analysis of narrative arts, storytelling, and storytellers have been the central gift of folklore to the humanities and to the world. Our deep commitment to and expertise in stories, unfolding and unfinished in their variations through time, inspire me to continue in the vein of so many colleagues who have preceded and the many who will go ahead in doing one of the things folklore does best: telling the story of traditional stories.I'd be surprised if folklorists around the hemisphere had not taken note—whether dismayed or delighted—that today everyone's a storyteller and that the act of storytelling is increasingly being commodified. Caught up in the delirium driven by the current hegemony of the “me” story promoted across a dizzying array of web platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as in popular live performance projects such as StoryCorps and The Moth, we live in a world of limitless access to the performance of reductive personal stories, each competing for dominance in the feedback frenzy of “likes” and “hearts.” Then it's over: the very category for “Story” on Facebook and Instagram ensures disposability of your post within 24 hours.Doth the woman protest too much? Of course! But here's our solution. Folklore's corrective to the current glut of throwaway first-person narration engages us in recommitting to the explanatory and interpretive power of the third-person folk narrative, performed in its many distinct genres and cultural variations, repeated and revised over generations. Ours is the very important disciplinary charge—specific to folkloristics—of revealing the significance of collectively owned narratives, the ones that give us the shareable world envisioned millennia ago in Aristotle's Poetics. The ones that allow the willing suspension of disbelief to stimulate imaginative identifications and attachments. Malik Gaines, following Arjun Appadurai (1996:7), argues that “works of the imagination create a collective platform from which to project notions of ‘resistance, irony, selectivity, and in general, agency’” (Gaines 2017:17). Old stories and their variants constitute one such platform, allowing tellers to take the same old plot or tale type and make it useful over and over again by working it, making it say something new to us, not only by giving answers but more often by raising questions—stories as “equipment for living” or “good to think,” perhaps even better to feel.3I chase old stories that raise questions about the status of women, questions about desire and gender, about feeling queer and being queer. It's no wonder my career trajectory led me to the traditional witch figure, whose stories make a mess of sex and gender, exposing their socially constructed, binary-driven hegemonies, yet serving also as a source for recognizing potential alternatives. If my previous forays into the witchy worlds of the Grimms’ “Frau Trude,” ATU 334 (Turner 2012) and “Frau Holle,” ATU 480 (Turner 2015) prove anything, it is that the witch knew queer before queer was gay, or gay was queer. Seething with the unsettled debts of transgressive or unrecognized feelings and desires, witch stories disturb and often dismantle comfortably institutionalized ideas about convention, order, and control—control of women.Because witches are fundamentally characterized by their defiant failure to fit, they are woman always, but they are un-woman too—undisciplined, unnerving, unnatural. Thankfully, they are not normal; rather, they enjoy a transgressive jouissance—an ontological joy of difference from the heteronormative standard: the married, childbearing, second-class woman and second sex female owned by God's decree and husband's law. Witches revel in their contrary aspirations: they live apart; they eat children; they help young girls achieve a sense of their own personhood and agency; they are lesbian in their refusal to accept Oedipus as the father of all wanton desires. I could go on. And I will. Unnatural and abnormal, she dwells on the other side of the binary slash; also anomalous, ambivalent, liminal, magical, and shapeshifting, sitting at the crossroads of life and death on a throne of decaying garbage, she makes a claim for living beyond dualistic restrictions. Witches bitch the binary. Do they break it? Sometimes I think they do . . . Here, as likely you've already discerned and tweeted from the audience (Dom, I see you posting), I am interested once again in affirming the potential for bringing folk narrative interpretation closer to feminist and queer strategies for telling, reading, listening, and knowing. I uphold that a genuine connection exists between folklore and queerlore by underscoring the effectiveness of feminist and queer methods and theories to enhance our ability to read traditional stories in the twenty-first century. Importantly, the reverse also proves true: foundational folk narrative resources—from story collections to historic-geographic methods, from tale type and motif indexes to structural analysis—all these assets should be found on gender and literature syllabi universities-wide. I'm preaching to the coven here, I know, but it bears remembering: folkloristics alone in the humanities provides the evidence and the tools, too often under-utilized, even unrecognized in related fields, for demonstrating the social and artistic effectiveness of telling the same old story twice or 1,000 times and interpreting it differently over time and in different contexts. Let me count the ways I have successfully introduced the motif and tale type indexes to trans and gender queer students and artists seeking foundational support for their scholarship and works.In my own practice, those tools are effectively deployed for story interpretation opened up by the feminist and lesbian reading revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, under the umbrella of “reader response” theory, Bonnie Zimmerman's “perverse reading” (1993) invited the willful lesbian interpretation of literature against the grain of heteronormative convention. Once those doors of perception opened, there was no going back. Queer theory then added Eve Sedgwick's methods for what she termed “reparative reading” that consider “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (2003:150–1). Further, Tammy Clewell says that in reparative reading, Sedgwick finds an impulse “that seeks to move away from minimizing pain and toward maximizing pleasure . . . toward what Foucault calls ‘care of the self’” (Clewell 2017:59).4 Let's extract some sustenance, shall we? Let's feed off some big questions about socially spurned, politically burned witches—the kind of questions a queer feminist folklorist asks.Why do witches fly? Where do they go? How does it feel to fly? What can be learned from the witch in flight? Why should we care? For me, these questions combine like glyphs on an endgame Rosetta Stone. And to approach deciphering them gestures toward another, greater question, one we all must ask: Why folklore?We'll leave that last anxiety-producing question aside for now to concentrate on the witch quandary. In the Western imagination, helped initially by the threatening pornographic visual culture of witches promoted in the engravings, woodcuts, and drawings of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists, such as Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Hans Baldung (1484–1545), our popular stereotype of the broom-straddling witch overrides (pun intended) her much older avian associations. Broom-flying witches hardly exist before they are shown in print after 1450, when Gutenberg's invention of the printing press allowed for widespread dissemination of their provocative deviant image. One of the earliest and best-known at the time is a tiny hand-painted illumination of two sorceresses, one on a broom, the other on a stick, depicted in the marginalia of Martin Le Franc's allegorical poem on the nature of woman, Le Champion des Dames, published in limited edition in 1451 (Zika 2007:63–4). But long before brooms, cooking sticks, and giant spindles were mounted lasciviously in nocturnal flights to meet-ups with the devil, witches worldwide flew with wings.5In the beginning was the witch, and the witch was a woman, but not only a woman. She was part bird. Take Lilith. Biblically referred to only once in Isaiah 34:14–15 in a list of creatures exiled to the desert, the King James Bible aligns her with the “screech owl,” alluding to night flights in search of prey. My old King James reads “yea, there shall the night hag alight, and find for herself a resting place” (Isa. 34:14). This scant mention gave rise to numerous apocryphal stories assigning Lilith as the first wife of Adam, a “mistake” made by God. Though he created both from the same earth, she was not given equal rights or dominion. Angered, she refused to submit to Adam and flew away. Or, she was exiled by God and flew away to the Red Sea, or flew away and returned in vengeful attacks on Adam, Eve, and their progeny. Underscore or hashtag “she flew away.” She had wings, and when the patriarchal going got rough, she angrily fluttered off. Lilith's sisters include the Greek Furies and Sirens, hybrid bird-woman figures, both desirous and headstrong.6Not as old but old enough, the Russian fairy-tale character Baba Yaga retains bird-like qualities too. She lives in a house on chicken leg stilts and famously loves flying about in a mortar, using the pestle for a rudder and a broom to sweep her tracks. Dubravka Ugrešić links her origins to early Slavic and Russian tales and images conflating birds and women, including hens and magpies (2009:301–11).Remaining for the most part earthbound themselves, the Grimms’ fairy-tale witches still associate with birds and engage in magical avian transformations. The witch in “Jorinda and Joringle” (ATU 405) deserves special mention. A bit of an avian-a-holic who can turn herself into a night owl, she captured over 7,000 innocent young ladies and turned them into birds caged in her castle. In a local Russian legend, recounted by Ugrešić, witches about to be burned in Moscow by Ivan the Terrible turn into magpies and fly away (Ugrešić 2009:306). Folklorist Barbara Rieti's study of Newfoundland witch lore recounts a fisherman's boat being pursued by a crow. Having no luck getting a fish, he shoots and wounds the crow that he believes is a witch out to curse him. Later, he sees an old woman walking near the shore with her arm in a sling (Rieti 2012:1).These are but a few examples suggesting that in stories widespread over time, avian-female hybridity affords witches an essential means of flight. Part of the answer to why witches fly is because they possess the physical instrument—bird wings—to do so. But, of course, there's more. The very early association of women and birds poses ontological as well as utilitarian questions concerning the need for, or desirability of, flight. The figure of the winged witch captivates; her many stories reveal a complex, contradictory, and for me, a strangely consoling nature.I turn now to one such story I first read decades ago. From house to house, I have carted among my most precious possessions the beaten up, spine-broken book in which it appears because that same book is also my folklore touchstone. Américo Paredes published his edited collection Folktales of Mexico in 1970, one in the popular University of Chicago Press series “Folktales of the World,” edited by Richard Dorson. This was back in the day of incentivized folktale collections being published when widespread popular interest in traditional narratives followed on the heels of the 1960s folk song revival.I ordered the book as background reading for a yearlong excursion to Mexico in 1974—the life-changing journey that later brought me to folklore studies. I didn't know who Dr. Paredes was, but the book's back cover described him as a University of Texas professor who directed the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Oral History. To this day, I can see myself reading that little bio and coming to a halt on the word “folklore.” That light that has gone bright for many of us, turned bright for me: “FOLKLORE,” I said aloud to myself, “maybe that's what I'm interested in.” It seems fitting to return to Dr. Paredes’ influence on me. Mexico's influence. Mexican American women's influence. That's where I started, and it's a great pleasure to round the bend of a full circle with you this evening by paying some dedicated attention to Paredes’ anthologized story called “The Witch Wife” (1970:27).Sourced by Paredes as a localized legend or caso (belief tale), the story is widespread in Greater Mexico, he says. The version Paredes published was originally collected by Jacob Pimentel S. in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, on September 24, 1954. It was told to him by Efrain A. Paniagua, a 35-year-old schoolteacher, and subsequently published in an article “Creencias” ([1955:159]; see note in References Cited for Paredes tale is I'll give it to you “The Witch say that in the of San Cristóbal de Las there a and his The woman was a witch and she was her It was her to say some that made the from her but the Then she wings, and the go out flying through the In this she go out night and out at her found out she was him and that her out he to One night he in he was as his wife got out of and out into the got up too and followed in the he the from his and from her Then he her fly making a like he got over his he where the was, and he it up into with his Then he over it so it Then he back and in a and for the to this the before the and said the to make it back in But the not because it was The flew away. are the who see this being flying through the at and they say it and the tale a of witch found in of including Witch through the Witch followed by his wife is a and Witch who is out of is from it when or In the same collection, Paredes also us tales of witches with and of a witch who the of a Our witch wife tale links with such as “The found in A. of American Folktales The witch story is also one of the greater of night hag and old hag some of which women who out of their My own limited of witch hope to do more in Presidential on stories of a who into your house as a of and the whose is not long to cover her turn now to Wife” with the of working a tale to for the question of witch flight. I from the of and whose structural to story analysis I continue to Our tale in are on and with and are of course, by not binary but For the tale a ontological How can a woman create a the tale in but as says of so we can say of tales such as this with any of we for the when the are binary this potential for including one that a aspect of feminist Paredes it is told by a to a I read it and “The Witch Wife” as a story of great interest for One of feminist analysis it into the patriarchal of stories at women's for For me, the central of this story is its of a witch woman who for her own Our interest in with my feminist and queer theory to that flight proves a to the female by the of out of the that her as a woman owned by a in day, she her and the not walking alone on the that in Mexican are the of a woman out of the witch wife to the by cover of her and once to its binary I that in both she to a is a and if she the earthbound as she all the She them into of her power to leave life to that other kind of of folk and tales give us of for The wife have been out for That she flew on a is in the was her . . . to herself using The also her within a of where she those In that we into the world of by witches across of traditional In a world that women and the power of a given evidence here, a woman to off the owned by and rise in the that to her me our wife have it both by day, by And that's her She some time in the night where her find and the binary she even her . . . her was to She around out most likely who enjoy such If only her had But his in on to his of the to made their This who he his wife by her with the into it with The of the by his and the in by he he the that her for him as a to all the and that women under the of very she to be the the but from it, our witch into know, I think him. Though this version of the story a to return to her does she also over not being to go back to him and the of I think is not an with The playing to the husband's sense of over his wife as he in the her return to the A different or as her this “The or flew away.” The story does leave her as an But does she that one she and the it and she still in to as in the Lilith do witches fly? Lilith and the Witch millennia that witches fly in to fly in the of and who of women as their The Wife” told in the of the seems more than the between and will help what seems like such an life and death to be in and tales the of a by at once making it a of her and her the the it is the of both and also a for and In her of her own the wife that which and female and the very of the physical and that in those the pleasure she in her and all its what it both and make women into objects by and be all of but a witch it with liminal, magical it can be for as the witch in Grimms’ “The at the (ATU in telling her young a to go to the take off her as and her own do your the witch In our by day, the her female but at it an for the witch of her to the it for to power up her This with a kind of that and by one is for the If I that we they are not at to a very different version of life and and are by a got witch on the the patriarchal and of woman. and she into the of her own she her own and desires. She a of what I'll the woman performance genres to by Richard Of interest is “what he calls the be referred to as the in the performance of in If that reads as the of the at then flying witches especially the potential for women's of the in that their and I am at I am and in the my is and for there be a better kind of from all flying around in the of is the for I know some of you to be know the witch wife is out there doing it for doing it for any who to fly with can in your and still the of understanding that a witch in flight a command performance and a flying as a kind of by equal and Our witch in flight the of She claim that can be no of and The witch commands an performance of with no in yet still a of up in the Let's fly with In the physical sense that most we feel her of recognizing it as to after she left her husband's of her she his and his A of of flight or sixteenth-century artists, such as the Dürer and witches in of wanton as the that their a for even as they a very threatening one to flying sisters could for by or wings, flight witch women from they those patriarchal to enjoy transgressive on the from her the witch wife what seems a by no a as her She as she to leave these different but related answers to our and in the through which the witch wife I us to go into the where this act of flight also a queer a from the of patriarchal and an of from the of binary or those our witch in flight is and out of not or her important Queer for a kind of queer it
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