Navigating the Narrative Space of Women: Gender and Sick Humour
Mary. Almost. Yes. Better. Ah. There. I've done it. See the invisible passage of an amiable woman. (Timberlake Wertenbaker, The Grace of Mary Traverse)
"How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?" "That's not funny." (American folk humour)
1 When microwave ovens appeared on the market, they were accompanied by a rash of stories about women popping pet poodles like corn, old people with pacemakers winding-down and ditzy blondes mistaking the appliances for heat lamps, putting their heads in, and taking off layers of fat and makeup in a matter of seconds. Those kinds of heart-stopping fables are called "jokes."[1]One of the most lucid commentaries on the equation of the comic principle continues to be found in Henri Bergson, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Shovell Henry Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan Company, 1911). The willingness of American consumers to associate microwaves with death was startling, particularly given the luridness of the images - skin burning, bones exploding - in short, what is known to be true of the crematoria of Europe not so long ago. That women and the aged were now running the ovens, rather than perishing in them, was especially ironic.
2 These visions of women operate upon women, defining them as the tools of technology they have no hope of commanding. Humour surrounds and confines those who tread outside the space given them; sick humour manipulates notions of gender and obscures the real subject while replacing it with saleable and consumable images (for instance, blondes and microwaves). Such narratives are created to disempower; by force of their acceptance they come to substitute for physical ground. Women's "narrative space," then, might be defined as the place or, in this case, authority granted women's stories (Michie 13), and is relegated to the margins as the concept of female space competes with the monopoly of the "master text." Of course the microwave stories depend upon mythical women - actual women would violate the integrity of community legend - by which we know that in these tales female identity is founded on an absence perceived as a presence. But to the degree that such stories are entertained as truths, they become the narrative spaces women navigate.
3 In this article I shall discuss the ways women, utilised as public metaphors, become the objects of "sick humour" (like that which circulated about microwave ovens). My argument will: 1) assess the narrative space of three ordinary American women whose private tragedies became sensational public domain, namely, Christa McAuliffe, Lorena Bobbitt, and Cathleen Crowell Webb; 2) explain the workings of sick humour and its social and socialising potential; 3) show how the tragedy of yet another American woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, provides insight into the use of women as metaphor, deriving from a concept of the availability of female bodies; and finally, 4) theorise female sexuality as the true object of derisive public comment. So although I began with descriptive examples of sick humour, I will be establishing some groundwork on gender and women's spaces before analysing the grotesque, a category over which sick humour reigns.
Necessary narratives
4 We turn first to the representation of women in a space so other it is called "outer," Outer Space. In this joke, which I heard myself, the connection between the Challenger and microwave ovens is exact.
Who's the first woman to cook in Outer Space?
Christa McAuliffe.
In an article headed "Spaced Out," about the schoolteacher-turned-astronaut Christa McAuliffe (Penley 1993), Constance Penley records the kind of "sick jokes" which flourished in the wake of the ill-fated Challenger flight, questioning the attitudes behind the gallows humour. Penley reveals McAuliffe as a prize in the NASA quest for "female mediocrity" and a woman made for its technology. At the moment women were borne into space, they were also born into the famed exclusivity of the masculine and masculinized U.S. Space Program. To have women in outer space suggests that women could be in outer space; therefore it became necessary to define how they could be in outer space. NASA chose to vanquish the idea of gender equity that projecting a woman into space implied.
5 During her training, McAuliffe was reported derelict in her professed project (to keep a journal for primary school students). In the NASA compound she instead baked apple pies, worked at needlepoint, and displayed wholesome feminine attributes, including being a woman who could not speak for herself. In fact, McAuliffe was deliberately silenced as a condition of her inclusion in the programme. For all her housewifery she was still a political embarrassment, a woman whose contribution to science (in the event of a successful trip) would have been empty, nothing more than the verification that non-astronauts - even women - could survive the rigours of space (a point the world's female astronauts had noticeably failed to win).[2]Perhaps this is partly because of the "masculinate" stigma attached to Eastern bloc women: female astronauts came predominantly from Soviet countries. Under NASA's careful supervision, McAuliffe became a woman "out of control" (Penley 181), symbolised and even proved by her tragic end. Although McAuliffe clearly was not an astronaut - neither a professional scientist, physicist, space engineer, nor military-trained pilot, in short, not a man hand-picked and developed for the longest of flights - her name became cruelly synonymous with the Challenger tragedy. In fact, she was blamed for it: after McAuliffe's death, NASA's conclusion was that women cannot survive in space.
What goes up and doesn't come down?
(You know the answer.)