Detailed Table of Contents
- Annette Keck and Ralph J. Poole: Editorial
- Abstract: What happens when women laugh outright, seemingly out of control, making a spectacle of themselves? Ever since Freud claimed that it is woman being laughed at and man doing the laughing,
On the tendentious joke in particular, i.e. the 'dirty' joke ("Zote"), Freud remarks: "Der tendenziöse Witz braucht im allgemeinen drei Personen, außer der, die den Witz macht, eine zweite, die zum Objekt der feindseligen oder sexuellen Aggression genommen wird, und eine dritte, an der sich die Absicht des Witzes, Lust zu erzeugen, erfüllt. […] Durch die zotige Rede des Ersten wird das Weib vor diesem Dritten entblößt, der nun als Zuhörer – durch die mühelose Befriedigung seiner eigenen Libido – bestochen wird" (114). See, however, Michael Billig, who in discussing this passage concedes: "Freud's argument is theoretically interesting for the way that he links male sexual joking with both sexual frustration and aggressive degradation. It is also rhetorically interesting: the section contains not a single example. Freud did not want smutty talk in his book" (162). laughter has entered contested gendered territory. What, indeed, happens when Medusa returns the male gaze and laughs herself as Hélène Cixous famously suggested making fun of the Freudian theory of woman's notorious lack? "You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing," claims Cixous (2048). But why, however, is it that whenever women (dare to) laugh, this laughter is considered breaking limits, rules and taboos? Does that mean, on the other hand, that male laughter necessarily remains within established boundaries of proper conduct and expected behaviour? What then happens when men become the objects rather than subjects of laughter, being ridiculed by women's humour? And above all we may ask whether humour is necessarily gendered, thus invariably reinforcing gender boundaries that otherwise have long been contested and overturned? - Author's Bio: Annette Keck is Professor of Gender Studies, Cultural Theory, and German Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. Her research interests are literary anthropology, figurations of the grotesque, literature and culture from the late 18th to the 20th century. Her current projects include Transatlantic Travesties (with Ralph J. Poole), Grotesque Art Production, and Constructions of the Gendered Body. Amongst her publications are „Avantgarde der Lust“. Autorschaft und sexuelle Relation in Döblins früher Prosa (1998), Buchstäbliche Anatomien. Vom Lesen und Schreiben des Menschen - Literaturgeschichten der Moderne (2007); as well as essays on "Kanaken" in popular culture, on transsexuality and experiment in literature of 1880/2000, on the poetics of the vampire, on Liselotte Pulver and 1950s film, and on hardbodies in Charlie’s Angels. Ralph J. Poole is Professor of American Studies at Salzburg University since 2008. Before, he was Associate Professor of English at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey. He received his Ph.D. and Habilitation from Munich University, Germany, was post-doctoral fellow at the Postgraduate Center for "Gender and Literature" in Munich, was visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies in Theater Arts at the City University, had a scholarship of the German Schiller Society at the German Literature Archive in Marbach/Neckar, and taught at Venice International University, Italy. His publications include Performing Bodies: Überschreitungen der Geschlechtergrenzen im Theater der Avantgarde (1996) and Kannibalische (P)Akte: Satirische und autoethnographische Schreibweisen als interkulturelle Verhandlung von Herman Melville bis Marianne Wiggins (2005); Passionate Politics: The Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present (co-edited with Ilka Saal, 2008), E-motion: Sentiment and Technology (co-edited with Verena Laschinger, 2009), Queering America (special issue Amerikastudien, co-edited with Catrin Gersdorf, 2001). He is currently preparing a book on Dangerous Masculinities: Manhood and Subversion on the Margins of Cultures.
- Lisa LeBlanc: Noah’s Uxor: A Shrew Worth Redeeming
- Abstract: This essay seeks to explore how humor is used in the medieval biblical dramas concerning Noah’s ark to present a wife who is truculent but worthy of being saved. The character refuses to follow a typical medieval view of husband-wife hierarchy and instead asserts herself in a way that would be unacceptable to most husbands. However, because her tyrannous behavior is slapstick rather than offensive, her role as an unruly woman becomes more acceptable. The comic trope of the shrew allows her to break the conventional role of the wife, but still be saved from the flood.
- Author's Bio: Lisa LeBlanc is an associate professor of English at Anna Maria College in Paxton, MA, USA, where she has taught for twelve years. She received her MA in English from Boston College and an MA in Medieval Studies and Ph.D. in English with a concentration in medieval literature from Catholic University of America. Her research interests include medieval drama, feminist studies in medieval literature, and apocalypticism in medieval literature.
- Michael H. Epp: A Republic of Laughter. Marietta Holley and the Production of Women’s Public Humour in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States
- Abstract: In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Marietta Holley enjoyed massive success as one of the most popular American humourists. Known as “the female Mark Twain” (Curry xiii). Holley blended dialect and regional humour into a new, democratic and transformative genre that challenged conventional representations of women’s emotional life and their relation to public and political spaces. In this paper, I define the genre of humour writing Holley helped to fashion, “women’s public humour,” and situate it in relation to political and social notions of the public, especially those fractured along gender lines, that were of key interest to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century U.S. humour industry.
- Author's Bio: Michael H. Epp is an assistant professor of American Literature and Public Texts at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. He has published on, among other subjects, nineteenth-century U.S. humour, blackface minstrelsy, and modernist publishing. He is currently working on a book project that considers the relationship between feeling, violence, and public texts in the early twentieth century.
- Heather Graves: “The Women’s Parliament:” Political Oratory, Humor, and Social Change
- Abstract: Why does humour change minds in politics when logic cannot? This article explores this question in the context of the suffragist movement in Manitoba, Canada in 1914, when the Women’s Political Equity League found logical arguments ineffective in persuading provincial legislators to grant women voting rights. When the provincial premier rejected their petition, the Political Equity League staged a series of burlesques around the province of Manitoba in which they reversed the roles of men and women to make the issue of enfranchisement more salient to voters. These satires of the reigning premier have been credited for making women in Manitoba among the first to vote in the Western World. I draw on several rhetorical theories of humour, including those of Cicero, Campbell, Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, to account for the societal shift in support of votes for women as a result of this parody. I conclude that when well-supported and trenchant logic proves ineffective in bringing about social change, innovative emotional appeals can provide the impetus for listeners to laugh uproariously and then rethink what may have been entrenched political or ideological beliefs.
- Author's Bio: Heather Graves is an Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where she teaches writing and rhetoric. She is the author of Rhetoric in(to) Science (Hampton 2005); the co-author of A Strategic Guide to Technical Communication (Broadview 2006, with R. Graves), the
- Natalia L. Pushkareva: "Women-scientists resemble guinea-pigs...": Female Academics in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Folklore
- Abstract: The thematization of the history of gender discriminations, the analysis of changes of their character in Russia after 1985 became possible owing to the collapse of the so-called “soviet scholarship”. From that time on the author collected the anecdotes, that reflect the inequities in the employment status, compensation, and reputational standing of women in the sciences. The tools of folklore studies (folkloristic) have been a crucial resource for understanding the nature, impact, and prospects for changing gender-based forms of oppression. The author hopes that in this spirit this text actively draws on, and contributes to elimination of asymmetry in Russian sciences.
- Author's Bio: B.A. (1981) with honor from the History Department of the Moscow State University, Ph.D. in Russian History (1985) from Moscow State University, Promotion in Anthropology (1997). Full Professor (2001), Leading Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology (Russian Academy of Sciences, 1998), Head of Women’s and Gender Studies Department (2008), Chief editor of the yearbook "Sozialnaya istoriya" (Social History) (from 2007). President of “Russian Association for Research in Women’s History”(2002), Member of the Board of the “International Federation for Research in Women's History” (from 2010). Published 9 monographs, edited 19 collections of essays, among them: Women in Medieval Rus. Moscow: Mysl, 1989; Women in Russia and in Europe at the Dawn of the Modern Age. Moscow: IEA, 1996; Women in Russian History from the 10th to the 20th c. New York: M. E. Sharp, 1997; 'There are our sins…' Sexual Culture in Russia from the 10th to the XIXth c. Moscow: Ladomir, 1999; Gender Theory and Historical Sciences. St.-Petersburg: 2008.