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Lori Marso is the recipient of the APSA Politics, Literature, and Film Section's Pamela Jensen book award for her recent publication, Politics with Beauvoir (Duke 2017). She also received the Wilson Carey McWilliams award for Politics, Literature, and Film for her “Dear Dick” article now appearing in Politics & Gender. She presented an earlier version of this article at the American Political Science Association Meeting in 2017 and at the Johns Hopkins Political Theory workshop in early 2018. She would like to thank several people for helpful comments on these two occasions and whom she solicited separately: Bonnie Honig, Jane Bennett, Sam Chambers, Perry Moskowitz, Davide Panagia, Jennifer Culbert, William Connolly, Luci Lobe, George Shulman, Lida Maxwell, Laurie Naranch, Torrey Shanks, and Tom Lobe. She especially thanks Mary Caputi and three anonymous reviewers for Politics & Gender..
In an interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on her role in the 1974 black feminist group the Combahee River Collective, Demita Frazier remembers herself as a “wild card” and quips that “comedy will save us all!” (Taylor 2017, 124). Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai add that “comedy helps us test or figure out what it means to say ‘us’” (2017, 235). Linda Mizejewski's Pretty/Funny demonstrates that women's comedy has become a primary site where “feminism speaks, talks back, and is contested” (2014, 6).
Today's female comedians—Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Ali Wong, Jessica Williams, Lena Dunham, to name only a few—unabashedly employ the “subversive force of feminist humor” (Willet and Willet 2013, 16) to make “disruptive spectacle(s)” of themselves (Karlyn 1995, 31). They eagerly abandon the constraints of modeling positive behavior, and they refuse to buttress and perpetuate erotic attraction to toned, white, slender bodies on the part of spectators. Podcasts and comedic television series with central female roles, such as Two Dope Queens, Broad City, and Girls, achieve comedic impact through the use of irony as they model body diversity and explore sexual shame. They share humiliating (and what some would deem politically incorrect, inappropriate, or tawdry) stories and situations with the audience and each other. Ali Wong, for example, parades her very pregnant body onstage in her Netflix special Baby Cobra (2016) as she announces that she tricked her boyfriend into marrying her so that she would...