Beyond Coming of Age: The Genderless Hero in Ukrainian Wonder Tale ATU 312D

Abstract

The article aims to unsettle the meaning of gender assignment for Ukrainian variants of the dragonslayer wonder tale of ATU 312D, “Kotyhoroshko”, which is represented by a child hero through a post-structural deconstruction on four levels: language, job, body, and belief, of which the last level, belief, is crucial for folklore studies and definitive for my understanding of gender in folk narratives. Drawing on the interpretative framework, the article explores customary law and belief from Ukrainian ethnographic collections of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The article hypothesises that the child hero in fairy tales is genderless since the nonmodern ethnographic evidence of customary law, belief narrative, and historical material on childhood in the early modern and modern eras suggest that children up to seven years old are beyond the gendered system as it is irrelevant for them, and, consequently, the fairy tale hero Kotyhoroshko is genderless.