Several feminist scholars have argued that the climactic change of gender reinforces heteronormativity and sexist, patriarchal gender roles. It has been treated as an aberration or anomaly, a tale that defies categorization. ATU 514 has been examined by folklorists over the years, usually very briefly. My goal in this project is to analyze the 26 variants I have found as a group in order to illuminate what they communicate about gender and transgender. Like many folk tales, this one begins with a young woman dressing in men’s clothes to have an adventure – but this story ends when the protagonist is magically transformed into a man, marries a woman, and they live happily ever after. “The Shift of Sex” is a folktale type that has been continuously told for about 3,000 years, across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas, although its variants are not well known, and it rarely appears in published collections. I argue that the protagonist of ATU 514 is a transgressive character with transgender capacity and that the tale approves and rewards these transgressions through the concluding happily-ever-after. Second, the tales are encoded with details, characters, and events that tell a “secondary narrative” that describes the threat of the patriarchy. My analysis identified two significant patterns in the tales: first, every variant has a happy ending for the protagonist, representing a narrative reward for a character who could variously be read as transgender or gender transgressive. More recent scholarship notes the tale’s transgender possibility, scholarship I build on in this project. ATU 514 has been treated as an aberration or anomaly, a tale that defies categorization. My goal in this project is to analyze the 26 variants as a group in order to illuminate what they communicate about gender and transgender. “The Shift of Sex” is a folktale type that begins with a young woman dressing in men’s clothes to have an adventure, and ends when the protagonist is magically transformed into a man, marries a woman, and lives happily ever after.
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