240015 PS Feminist Anti/politics in historical perspective (2025S)

For a long time, comedy has been a heavily male-dominated genre within popular culture, structured by gendered and heteronormative as well as racialized, classed and ability-based mechanisms of power and exclusion. This means that marginalized groups have been vastly underrepresented on comedy stages and commonly have been made the butt of the joke. The continuing popularity of e.g. “rape jokes” in stand-up comedy reflects a climate in which harmful humor is not only tolerated, but even enjoyed. In recent years, however, there has been a significant change in who performs on comedy stages and what the target of their ridicule is. More and more women, queer and trans comedians, Black artists and people of color as well as disabled performers use comedy and satire as a platform for political commentary and critique. Regarding women’s comedy, film scholar Linda Mizejewski notes: „[W]omen’s comedy has become a primary site in mainstream pop culture where feminism speaks, talks back and is contested” (Mizejewski 2014: 6).

Outspoken (queer-)feminist comedians such as Hannah Gadsby, Margaret Cho and Wanda Sykes use humor and comedy to address issues of (hetero)sexism, heteronormativity and intersectionality in their work. By taking an entertaining framework, they can reach a wide audience and potentially initiate a broad debate on questions of social justice and social transformation. However, feminist cultural studies also caution us against an overly optimistic approach when analyzing and systematizing products of popular culture. Concepts such as postfeminism (McRobbie 2016; Gill 2007), neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg 2018), commodity feminism (Mukherjee/Banet-Weiser 2012) and popular feminism (Banet-Weiser 2018) provide us with critical tools for examining the political capacities and shortcomings of feminist popular culture within neoliberal capitalism.

In this seminar we will explore (1) how intersectional (queer-)feminism manifests itself within comedic popular culture, (2) what political potential a humorous approach to feminist issues might offer, and (3) where its political limits lie. We will address these questions using theoretical literature on postfeminism, neoliberal feminism and popular feminism as well as selected cultural texts from comedic popular culture (e.g. social media satire, stand-up comedy, sketch comedy).

Teaching and Learning Methods:
- input lectures by the teacher
- close readings and group discussions of selected theoretical literature
- in-depth analysis of selected comedic cultural texts (e.g. social media satire, stand-up comedy, sketch comedy)
- written assignments, small presentations, written paper