Queer Perspective on Sexuality and Normality in Folk Legends

Already on the third page of her well-written and in many ways fascinating thesis, Catarina Harjunen points out the main subject of the study. The overarching aim is to introduce, describe and analyse Finland-Swedish folklore about erotic encounters between humans and nature spirits, and thereby examine ideas of normality expressed in folk legends. Therefore, the legends are studied both with reference to how they co-exist with sexuality and gender, and with notions of nature and culture. The empirical base consists of more than a hundred (116) folk legends that Harjunen has found in archives and collections. As stated in the title, the thesis focuses on presumed erotic encounters between human beings and nature itself, and with “erotic”, Harjunen means a spectrum which starts at a slightly intangible “ambience” and ends with “results”, i.e. the children produced in the encounters’. This creates a chronological approach to the material, the folk legends and their motifs, which recurs in the outline of the empirical chapters and, at the same time, reflects a contemporary view of the ideal development of a relationship between a man and a woman within the field of sexuality. In the empirical parts of the thesis, the presentation is thus structured by the following stepping stones: meeting, courtship, sexual interaction (and more seldom: marriage) and (the even more rarely occurring) offspring. Two major research questions have guided the author in her work. The first is: how are normative sexual desires, practices and forms of relationships constructed in the realm of erotic encounters in legends? The second, addressing the same context, reads: in which ways does sexuality appear to be linked to nature? These two overarching issues are accompanied by the observation that sexuality has often been described as something “natural”, while unwanted sexuality has almost regularly been portrayed as being “against nature”. In this very contradiction, Harjunen argues, lies one of most fundamental theoretical inputs of the thesis, namely thinking critically about legitimate forms of