Abstract
Hillary L. Chute integrates a feminist approach to trauma theories in her analysis of chiefly American women’s comics. Streeten extends this by incorporating a feminist approach to humour theories in analysing women’s comics within a British context. Streeten takes strands from theories of humour, including historical, such as Aristotle (350 bce) and Freud (Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey. Reprint, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1905); and more recent interpretations from Morreall (Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Billig (Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage Publications, 2005) and Gray (Women and Laughter. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994). She interweaves feminist ideas from Cixous and Clements (The Newly Born Woman. New York: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) and brings in Bakhtin’s (Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Reprint, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2009, 1968) ideas of the grotesque. Streeten combines this theoretical assemblage with feminist history and some key features of the comic presented in her introductory chapter to construct a more in-depth interpretation of “humorous feminist cartoons” for the purposes of this book.
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Notes
- 1.
I propose this in relation to the types of works I have looked at and the contemporary association with the form that I focus on in Chap. 6, such as associations with autobiographical narratives and health.
- 2.
This is now an incomplete list as the activity has spiralled both within academia and bridging comics practice and academic research located in a number of different disciplines.
- 3.
Kingston University and London College of Communication (LCC), University of the Arts, London incorporate comics into their illustration and animation degrees. In 2019, I delivered a module with the title “Feminism, comics and humour” at LCC to undergraduate animation students.
- 4.
The first stage of a text presents a state of “equilibrium”. The second stage introduces the “disequilibrium”. The third stage is the “sorting out” of the disequilibrium and the final stage is a “transformed equilibrium” (Herman 2007, 22).
- 5.
Eisner identified five parts: the setting, the introduction of a problem, the dealing with the problem, the solution and the end (Eisner 1996).
- 6.
First, it must be rooted in experience, which must speak to the reader. Second, it must present interesting conflicts between characters, individuals and worlds. Third, it must surprise the reader by taking them to places they have never been and must provoke emotions, such as suspense, laughter and sadness. Finally, it must have the capacity to make the readers care, to want to know how the story turns out and to return for more (McCloud 2006, 146).
- 7.
The idea/purpose, form, idiom (style or genre), structure (composition), craft and surface medium (McCloud 1993, 162).
- 8.
“Contrary to breakdown and page layout, braiding deploys itself simultaneously in two dimensions, requiring them to collaborate with each other: synchronically, that of the co-presence of panels on the surface of the same page; and diachronically, that of the reading, which recognizes in each new term of a series a recollection or an echo of an anterior term” (Groensteen 2007, 147).
- 9.
This is not dissimilar to my own approach!
- 10.
Chute shows how Phoebe Gloekner and Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s works “share a commitment to the comics pages as an uncensored autobiographical space” (Chute 2010, 38) and Lynda Barry’s work shows “the political importance of the everyday” (126). She describes Satrapi’s work as “apparent visual simplicity coupled with emotional and political complexity” (137) and states that Alison Bechdel’s career “has innovated the shape of the contemporary comics field” (176).
- 11.
Sigmund Freud viewed the psychological trauma as a wound that does not heal at the time of trauma in the way a physical wound does. At the time of the trauma, it is too much for the person to know. The healing, as he saw it, came later through the re-experiencing of the trauma, for example, through nightmares (Freud 1920).
- 12.
Beaty also does not acknowledge art movements that have changed the art world, and which have started with a politicised subcultural grassroots ethos or engaged with public spaces, with the explicit intention of creating an ambiguity. For example, the 1980s US feminist artists’ group The Guerrilla Girls used spaces such as public billboards as galleries, integrating artworks within sites of advertising. In the 1970s, postal or mail art quietly subverted the gallery system to allow a space where women could produce art.
- 13.
My inquiry is not into the relationship between fandom and the gallery, but how the feminist cartoon has operated to generate a wider audience. For example, in the US context the followers of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip were from a lesbian community, not from comics fandom. It was from here that part of the support came for her first full-length graphic memoir, Fun Home (2006). The book also appealed to a literary audience, through literary references throughout the narrative. This book has become canonised within literature rather than the fine art and gallery context, meaning it is thus excluded from Beaty’s consideration.
- 14.
In 2019, as this manuscript was being finalised, a perfect example of the power of humour in politics was demonstrated by the position of Boris Johnson as the Prime Minister of the UK. I would argue that his most prominent platform to date was on the BBC television comedy news quiz “Have I got news for you”. Beyond the UK, in May 2019, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky became the sixth President of Ukraine.
- 15.
Morreall argues that these theories are insufficient separately to provide a cohesive theory of humour and laughter, but attributes from each can create a new theory (Morreall 2009).
- 16.
Ancient Greek philosophers Plato (428/427–348/347 bce) and Aristotle (384–322 bce) and English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).
- 17.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Scottish poet and philosopher James Beattie (1735–1803), German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855).
- 18.
Mulkay draws here on Mervin Pollner’s idea of “mundane reasoning” to show that for humour to function, the recipient needs to have a real and objective understanding of the everyday world (Mulkay 1988). Such objective understanding could include, for example, cultural ideas of heterosexual normalcy dictating the frames of serious discourse.
- 19.
English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).
- 20.
When in a presentation about feminist cartoons I included a mainstream sexist cartoon alongside a feminist cartoon, it was the sexist cartoon that gained the laughs. One explanation could be that not only were the audience primed to laugh at the cartoon form, they were primed for it to be acceptable to laugh because it was a talk about feminist cartoons.
- 21.
According to Barecca, traditionally in domestic humour, the woman who makes fun of her home, children or husband is relying on a type of extended self-deprecation, in that she is responsible for them, “to kick her kids is to kick herself” (Barecca 1992, 25).
- 22.
Freud differentiated between humour, jokes and the comic. Whereas he explained jokes and the comic in terms of a release model, he incorporated elements of superiority into his theorising around humour (Freud 1905).
- 23.
Billig claims this assumption exists within some psychological theories, which he does not specify.
- 24.
It is notable that the humourless bigot is associated with other negative qualities, such as envy, which are also attributed to the humourless feminist, as I look at in more detail in Chap. 3.
- 25.
The most obvious flaw in Freud’s theorising is the inability to measure these energies and an assumption that repression takes place at all: perhaps it does not.
- 26.
This body of work included Psychopathology (1901) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
- 27.
The idea of an innocent joke seems to contradict Freud’s argument that there can be no such thing as an innocent joke or dream, as discussed by Billig (2005, 153).
- 28.
Freud explained catharsis as the relief or expelling of the victim’s suffering achieved by reliving the traumatic experience in some form. With the support of the therapist, this enabled a purgation or purification, the ridding of emotions leading to the rebalancing of emotions in the traumatised person. It is from a Freudian basis that Cathy Caruth developed her theories on trauma (Caruth 1996).
- 29.
For Aristotle, the catharsis was produced as a psychological emotion, to use British classical scholar Ingram Bywater’s interpretation. The response was to the pity and fear of the tragedy, rather than a catharsis in the tragedy of the dramatic incident itself (Bywater 1920).
- 30.
British filmmaker Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the British Film Journal Screen, introducing the term “male gaze” into feminist theory.
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Streeten, N. (2020). A Theory of Feminist Visual Humour. In: UK Feminist Cartoons and Comics. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36300-0_2
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