Performing Gender and Comedy
Theories, Texts and Contexts
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Book Description
First Published in 1998. This lively volume explores comedy as a place where gender and sexuality, through performance, challenge sexist and heteronormative forces in Western culture. The contributors investigate the effects of gender, sexuality, sexual identity, race, class and nationality on humor and comedic performance. Each chapter, distinct in its voice and content, addresses how particular historical periods seem to affect who laughs at what, why, and with what consequences. This book not only spans a broad range of historical and literary periods, it also engages in a critical conversation with past and present thinkers to articulate the political, cultural and social effects of comedy.
Table of Contents
Shakespeare's Rosalind - character of contingency; One Said a Jealous Wife Was Like - the constructions of wives and husbands in 17th-century English jests; being and dying as a woman in the short fiction of Dorothy Parker; comic disruption in the work of Maxine Hong Kingston; parody and postmodern sex - humour in Thomas Pynchon and Tama Janowitz; heartburn, humour and hyperbole in Like Water for Chocolate; Raised by Poodles - an interview with sensible footwear.
Author(s)
Biography
Shannon Hengen