The Best Medicine? Re-politicizing Laughter for Feminist and Queer Politics

• In Event: Aesthetics and Politics in an "Age of Populism"

Abstract

In September 2018, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she had been the victim of sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge when they were in high school in 1982. Asked to identify the strongest memory she had of the assault, Ford replied: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the laugh – the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” Ford repeatedly recalled this “uproarious laughter,” describing how Kavanaugh and Judge were “drunkenly laughing during the attack.” The laughter that accompanied Ford’s assault and continues to haunt her today is not unusual: victims and witnesses of male-perpetrated sexual violence regularly recall and remain traumatized by their attacker’s laughter. Ford’s testimony highlights how laughter constitutes a key experience through which male sexual power is achieved, celebrated, and entrenched.

Laughter has been at the center of radical feminist and queer theory for over four decades. Beginning with Hélène Cixous’s 1976 “The Laugh of the Medusa” and continuing in the work of Irigaray, Butler, Halberstam, and others, feminist theorists have celebrated laughter as an experience that is intrinsically opposed to patriarchal and heteronormative practices and institutions. In light of Ford’s testimony, the present paper questions whether this discourse offers an adequate account of how laughter operates in contemporary sex and gender politics. First, I argue that the prevailing feminist discourse hinges on a de-politicization of laughter itself. This discourse’s overly philosophical focus on laughter’s emancipatory powers obscures how concrete experiences of laughter also function to entrench patriarchy and heteronormativity. Second, I contend that a re-politicized feminist/queer account of laughter requires emphasizing its productive capacities. Through a re-reading of Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, I show that laughter does not simply undermine conventional formations of gender identity and sexual desire; it also plays a constitutive role in the construction and maintenance of those formations. Third, a re-politicization of laughter requires attending to laughter’s relation to the social order as a whole. I argue that Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 stand-up special Nanette reveals how even the most ostensibly liberatory experiences of laughter are parasitic on and thus sustain the patriarchal and heteronormative logics that govern the broader social order. Rather than being, as Cynthia Willett suggests, “just the medicine for what ails us in our social norms,” laughter is but another site in and through which political contestation over sex and gender proceed – a site distinguished only by its peculiar efficacy in creating, enforcing, and resisting formations of gender identity and sexual desire.

This paper demonstrates that “thinking aesthetically” in democratic politics means attending to aesthetic experiences (like laughter) not simply for the possibilities of freedom and resistance they offer, but rather as dialectically complex sites wherein the broader social order constructs, preserves, and transforms itself politically. In the context of contemporary feminist and queer politics, this means attending to how aesthetic experiences contribute to the production, maintenance, and overcoming of patriarchal and heteronormative practices and institutions. “Thinking aesthetically” is thus not simply the theorization of aesthetic experiences, but rather the theorization in, with, and/or against the democratic possibilities and dangers that such experiences present within a given social order.

Author

• Patrick Giamario, University of North Carolina, Greensboro