Jungian Analysis of Gender Queer Folk Tale in the context of LGBTQIA community healing
music by Ensemble Tenjir-Too, Kyrgyzstan, 2006.
On 7-10th July 2022, I participated in the 17th Conference of Research in Jung and Analytical Psychology, “Liberty and Justice: Shadows of Freedom?” organized by the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies at Highline College, Des Moines, WA, USA.
It was my first offline academic conference since 2016. I was honored to present "Jungian Analysis of Gender Queer Folk Tale in the context of LGBTQIA community healing."
In my presentation, I talked about genderqueer folk tales (Shift of Sex, ATU 514 index) as an example of the deconstruction of heterosexual and cisgender perceptions of collective culture. For this purpose, I made a post-Jungian interpretation of the Kyrgyzstan Folk Tale "The Magic Source" (this story was found and translated by me from the “Storytellers and Tales collection," 2008).
By broadening the notion of cultural and individual diversity, this research allows a person to choose more different options and free oneself to choose their identity and life scenarios, regardless of established social constructs and stereotypes. People habitually consider folk tales entertaining content, forgetting about their upbringing and educational aspects that set the first communication models and images desired for children. Moreover, folk tales symbolize ancient initiation practices (transition from childhood to adulthood, choosing a leader/king, or becoming a shaman/healer). Folk tales are also a symbolic reflection of the processes at the collective unconscious level. In this way, fairy tales combine the social and psychological potential for change strikingly. A person reading a folk tale unconsciously, again and again, lives through the cultural and social transformations embedded in the fairy tale as in a virtual matrix for centuries. The activation of folk tales material helps a specific person in a metaphorical form to live through their individual and collective traumas and see hidden resources for expanding the space of a person’s struggle for the right to be Other, the right to live free from dogma and the pressure of social structures, the right to be Self in their authentic form.
For this purpose, I expanded classical Jungian folk interpretation, including the model of Anima-Animum-Animus based on Queer Critiques of Jungian Theory (McKenzie, S., Perrin, J., Kulkarni, C.)
Kew words: folklore, queer, lgbtqia, Jungian analysis, community healing, shift of sex, animus-anima, animum.
In the presentation, I used drawings by Felix d'Eon, a gay Mexican artist. At the moment, I am in the process of writing and further publishing an article based on this topic of the presentation.