The Contentious Humor Repertoire

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Feminist Identities, Tactics, and Outcomes in Social Movements

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of the contentious humor repertoire to specify how movement actors use humorous frames and tactics to communicate and persuade. I define the contentious humor repertoire as the assortment of contentious tactics and frames that exploit the power of humor as a specific cognitive mechanism that can resolve discordant concepts and images to communicate new, radical or counter-hegemonic movement ideas. By focusing on the degree of antagonism and the relationship between audiences and humorists, this paper emphasizes the importance of target selection and target knowledge for activist strategy. To interrogate this relationship between antagonism in humor and movement audiences, I conceptualize three ideal types of contentious humor: cryptic, provocative and hostile and illustrate them with case studies from the U.S. women’s movement. The case studies provide opportunity to develop some generalizable propositions. I hypothesize that less antagonistic humor seems best suited to persuading diverse audiences and affecting ideological change among novice activists, bystanders and external audiences while more antagonistic humor is most effective at dismantling the claims of the opposition and stimulating ideological change among movement adherents. Analysis of these cases also highlights that groups positioned along the margins of society and movements are most likely to draw on the contentious humor repertoire. This paper contributes to scholarship on strategy by illuminating an under-studied repertoire of contentious action, illustrating the centrality of the relationship between activists and targets for movement strategy, and theorizing about the comparative outcomes of tactic and frame selection.

Author

• Rachel V. Kutz-Flamenbaum, University of Pittsburgh