Ian Reilly. Feminist Media Studies. Volume 21, Issue 1, 2021.
Jokes on the Internet appear in various guises via an ever-expanding array of platforms: email, listservs, forums, archives, and corporate social media (Elliott Oring 2016, 131), to name but a few. Joke lists, one manifestation of the joke’s broader circulation and consumption, represent an important vehicle for, and expression of, humour online. Despite the pervasive visibility of joke lists in online popular culture, the latter remains a surprisingly neglected site of scholarly inquiry. Indeed, the accelerated growth of the format is inextricably tied to the prominence of folk culture in the digital age (J. Trevor Blank 2012) and to increased global Internet ubiquity, features that have made joke lists a highly adaptable cultural form. One notable manifestation of the form—the feminist joke list—has slowly begun to materialize as an important purveyor of feminist humour. Feminist joke lists represent the concerted efforts of online content producers to curate a wide range of feminist humour, content that is expressly feminist in political orientation and/or sympathetic to highlighting feminist issues and sensibilities. Popular media articles such as “28 Times Feminists Were Fucking Hilarious on Tumblr” and “The 58 Best and Funniest Feminist Comebacks Ever to Grace the Internet” typify both the format and content of feminist joke lists: they feature curated content repurposed from online websites and platforms that positions feminist humour and feminist themes/issues as central to this form of cultural production.
The selection, categorization, organization, juxtaposition, and display of feminist jokes online through the popular listing format offer a unique case study through which to explore the function and significance of these recent web curation activities. For the purposes of this essay, the appearance of feminist joke lists online offers a compelling point of departure for interrogating the uses, limitations, and possibilities of joke lists for feminist communities of practice and how this cultural form enacts or inscribes feminist politics online. In what follows, I theorize the political significance of feminist joke lists through an examination of 20 distinct lists featuring over 350 jokes spanning a six-year period (2013–2019). Through an examination of general curated feminist joke lists, as well as humour lists produced in the wake of the Women’s Marches of 2017 and 2018, I argue that these broader activities contribute to the visibility and validation of feminist humour, the sharpening of feminist critique, and the solidarity of feminist communities.
What’s in a list? Lists, listing, listicles
Lists and list-making activities constitute vital facets of how cultures materialize, adapt, and evolve over time. Consider Homer’s “Catalogue of Ships,” ancient Sumerian grain inventories, pop music and film box office charts, and shopping or to-do lists as paperwork, formats, and cultural techniques associated with list-making activities. Lists perform critical administrative, communicative, epistemological, and poetic functions, all the while laying bare the very real notion that order in a world of enumerate data is impossible (C. Liam Young 2017, 128). As Young insists, “a study of lists is a battle against entropy” (9). Lists are perhaps best known in the socio-cultural field, a site that invokes the subjective and participatory taste cultures and lived experiences of the world’s Internet users (49). Compare, for example, international sales charts (Billboard), top-ten or year-end lists, playlists in music or comedy.
Curation online involves a variety of duties and skills, of which the selection, categorization, organization, juxtaposition, and display of content serve as core activities (Elisa Giaccardi 2012, 32–33). These exercises in what is now more commonly referred to as digital curation serve to measure, trace, and map distinct fields of cultural activity in the interests of highlighting what is perceived to be of significant value. As Susan Sontag once wrote of her own listing activities, “I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create—or guarantee—existence” (as cited in Young 145). For Sontag, value is perceived, conferred, created, and sustained through lists. Nowhere is the conference of value more evident than in the modern-day listicle, a word that denotes the blending of both list and article. Popular lifestyle and entertainment website BuzzFeed has all but perfected the formula, generating “300 to 400 items a day, mixing lighthearted fare like ‘10 World Leaders Re-Imagined as Hipsters’ and traditional news stories designed to catch fire on Facebook and Twitter” (I. Lukas Alpert 2015). Examples range from curated pieces on art/creative expression (“40 of the Most Powerful Photographs Ever Taken”) to the itemization of trivia (“7 Modern Conveniences That Are Way Older than You Think”). At their best, listicles are compiled thoughtfully, with an eye towards introducing readers to specialized content and offering entry points through which to explore subjects or topics in greater detail; as popular modes of digital curation, “lists give us focused, annotated tables of contents” (Rachel Edidin 2014) worthy of closer examination. At their worst, listicles have been scorned for degrading long-form writing, debasing reason, limiting attention spans, and stripping art of meaning and context (Young 12). It is no wonder that listicle producers and media corporations are often characterized as Internet content-farmers obsessed with cheap clickbait (Steven Poole 2013). These neatly quantified servings of information and diversion (Mark O’Connell 2013) are most commonly leveraged as algorithm-generated operational lists geared towards data mining and the future capture of capital (Young 109).
The BuzzFeed model has proven enormously influential and lucrative for producers of niche online content. The creative teams behind the proliferation of listicles are producing “branded ‘shareable content’ that will spread quickly and measurably through social networks: everything from images, memes, animated GIFs, and video, to serious journalistic investigations and, yes, listicles (articles delivered in list form)” (Young 177). The range and breadth of list creation activities online are impressive, covering sports (The Sportster), music (NME), comedy (Cracked), and miscellanea (Listverse). For the purposes of this essay, it is crucial to note that feminism has also figured as a recurring topic, theme, or trope on mainstream listing sites. For example, BuzzFeed routinely publishes articles for its predominantly female audience (Richard Sedgwick 2016); articles range in style, theme, and tone, from “23 Hilariously Savage Responses from Feminists” to “15 Reasons We Actually Don’t Need Feminism.” The listicle has of late been adapted by notable feminist content producers: namely, Everyday Feminism, The Toast, and Reductress. Everyday Feminism leverages the listicle as an opportunity to discuss difficult topics (“25 Everyday Examples of Rape Culture”). The Toast (now-defunct) was revered as “a bastion of hilarity, comfort, and understanding” (Staff Slate 2016); it published lists of varying lengths featuring lighter fare (“Every Argument About ‘Buffy’ on the Internet, from 1998 Until Now”). Reductress has adopted the form to irreverently parody any and all aspects of Internet culture and women’s lifestyle magazines (“3 Camel Coats to Wear While You Spit at Men”). Indeed, lists have seen continued widespread visibility across formats, platforms, and publications.
Situating joke lists
Of all the lists and listicles currently making the rounds online, many of these texts have sought to incorporate humour. Jokes appear online under various guises, but the joke list is itself a special form of humorous expression. Jokes online most often materialize via email, listservs, forums, chat rooms, archives, streaming audio/video platforms, and social media applications. As Oring (2016) observes, joke lists are essentially visual, predominantly textual, and open-ended; they can be skimmed, skipped, or randomly accessed; with lists, he suggests, “it is not necessary to grasp each and every part” because listing encourages “gliding over the surface of things” (140, 145). In this regard, lists tend to replace quality with quantity. Certain features of the joke list are needed to appreciate the latter’s overall makeup: each item in a given list is meant to be humorous, but they do not as a whole add up to an integrative joke or punchline (136). In what is perhaps its most essential feature, the joke list is regarded as “the quintessential mode of aesthetic humour production on the Web; it is bricolage: compilation, recombination, and cannibalization for parts” (142). This last feature offers various actors a great deal of flexibility and latitude in the creation of lists. Online joke lists are compiled through the selective and at times indiscriminate poaching activities of list creators. Humorous content is lifted from corporate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter just as quickly as it is adapted from more niche sites such as Reddit and Tumblr. How value is conferred is contingent on the types of jokes and humour being leveraged on the part of list-makers and list-making sites.
Feminist humour, feminist joke lists
To grapple with the feminist joke list as an object of study, one must first delineate what constitutes feminist humour. In general terms, a feminist joke is “created by a feminist that assumes the shared values of most feminists” (Janet Bing 2004, 22). Writing in the early 1990s, Regina Barreca ([1991] 2013) observed that feminism was increasingly tied to humour, and that feminist humour sought to openly challenge the status quo by exposing and criticizing “the bizarre value systems that have been regarded as ‘normal’ for so long that it is difficult to see how ridiculous they really are” (185). At its core, feminist humour seeks to critique, reform, and overturn patriarchal structures of domination (R. Louis Franzini 1996). Feminist humour “reveals and ridicules the absurdity of gender stereotypes and gender based inequalities” (Joanne Gallivan 1992, 373; Mary Crawford 2003; Limor Shifman and Dafna Lemish 2010), challenges antifeminist discourse and lionizes feminist politics and issues (Emilie Lawrence and Jessica Ringrose 2018, 214). Feminist humour is also notable for its community-building possibilities and for its capacity to model compelling and innovative ways of doing feminism (Carrie A. Rentschler and Samantha C. Thrift 2015). Because humour often gives rise to divisive and ambivalent forms of public discourse (Danielle Bobker 2017; Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner 2017), context is crucial to determining both the real and perceived outcomes attached to humorous forms of feminist expression. By examining a broad sample of feminist joke lists—either expressly feminist in political orientation or sympathetic to highlighting feminist issues or sensibilities—one is afforded greater insight into the intriguing makeup of list-making and publishing activities on the Internet.
In this study, I examine 20 unique lists published on public websites that featured over 350 jokes spanning a six-year period (2013–2019). Given the relative scarcity of these lists online, this small sample represents the most clearly delineated manifestations of the form currently available. Following Lena Karlsson (2019), individual website lists were saved, manually identified, and coded for prominent themes and patterns. The small sample encouraged close reading techniques, textual analysis, and manual data coding to better illuminate “specific patterns of use that would [be] difficult to ascertain with a more automated method” (E. Alice Marwick 2013, 109). Examples were selected based on the curated display of public material showcasing numbered lists that featured feminist jokes and/or humour. These lists were published on both popular and niche websites such as BuzzFeed, Elle, Bored Panda, Bustle, and Stylist, the majority of which identify as online fashion or lifestyle magazines geared towards millennial audiences and readerships. Although these sites are home to content that features feminist issues or subject matter, none of the websites surveyed can be described as specializing in humour; rather, humour is often invoked on a piecemeal basis and/or serves to punctuate various articles. Based on a close reading of the 20 lists comprised of over 350 jokes, certain characteristics, tendencies, and themes come to the fore. For instance, the content of these lists is culled from across the web (namely: Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and various blogs/websites/forums), offering a glowing example of what Lawrence and Ringrose (2018) call “inter-platform contagion” (224). Jokes are delivered in text, tweet, meme, GIF, film still, and video clip format, covering a wide range of feminist issues. Jokes are most often presented as exercises in self-deprecation and self-preservation (“21 Jokes That’ll Make Any Feminist Laugh and then Audibly Sigh”). There are generic lists of “knock knock” jokes and “comeback” humour, platform-specific (Twitter/Tumblr) and meme-only lists, as well as text-based joke threads. There are several recurring jokes, many of which appear on separate lists: “period jokes,” rape jokes, anti-sexist humour, responses to catcalling, “mansplaining,” aggression, and abuse, as well as a wide array of meta-jokes about feminists and feminism.
The experience of reading these joke lists is extremely variable. To access this content, one might scroll through Twitter or Facebook feeds; one might also peruse already-bookmarked sites (BuzzFeed, Reddit) or serendipitously stumble upon any number of Internet forums and threads. Given the scrollability of the lists (encouraged by the now-standardized numbered entry format), some of the humour is potentially glossed over, with only a few jokes landing in the reader’s camp. Because jokes are poached from all over the web (and because visible attribution is a defining feature of many of the joke lists surveyed in this study), reading these jokes also makes possible the user’s virtual bouncing from one site to another, offering up unexpected opportunities to discover new sites/content (feminist or other). In most instances, the iterative display of image- and text- based jokes offer enough enticement to encourage readers to temporarily engage with the feminist humour on offer. The iterative structure of these jokes and joke lists facilitates the “gliding over the surface of things” (Oring 145), a practice that establishes a firm baseline upon which to introduce a preliminary theory of feminist joke lists.
In what follows, I argue that the implicit and explicit rationale for the feminist joke list is
- to provoke and ensure feminist laughter;
- to confirm and reinforce the notion that feminists are (and feminist humour is) funny;
- to add greater visibility to important topics and sites of feminist struggle (patriarchy, labour, sexism, abortion, sexual assault, women’s rights).
Just as lists “establish or reaffirm social categories and relations by placing human subjects next to one another, inscribing or creating relations between diverse subjects” (Young 32), the feminist joke list affirms feminist humour’s standing as distinct(ive) in relation to other, more mainstream bodies of humour. At stake here is the notion that feminists do assertively leverage humour and that feminism does absorb and channel humour towards various ends.
The broader significance of validating the notion that feminists and feminist critique can be funny should not be understated. I will draw upon two short passages to make my point. In All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents (Rebecca Krefting 2014), Krefting incisively unpacks the turn of the (20th) century debates surrounding women’s “biology-as-destiny” plight—that they are incapable of being funny:
The debate raged on over the next century: women can exercise wit but not humor; vanity prevents women from pursuing comedy because women can be funny only by sacrificing their beauty; a woman’s comic appeal requires she be beautiful otherwise she risks losing male patrons; funny women are unnatural; funny women are manly; women cannot be ladies and comediennes—the two are antithetical; women cannot be funny and feminine; women are too emotional to be humorous … and on. (130)
Elsewhere, Shifman and Lemish (2010) describe the continued marginalization of women in the realm of humour:
Until quite recently, women have been marginalized in many fields of humour—especially in the public realm. As part of the general expectation that females restrain themselves and repress sexual and aggressive drives, women were expected to smile respectfully when men told jokes, but not to create humour of their own. This asymmetry was also reflected in the topics of jokes as women, rather than men, tended to be the butt of sexist jokes. (871)
Not only were women not expected to be funny, they were excluded from this realm of cultural production. More recently, Krefting (2017) has shown that the persistence of two dueling discourses in the comedy industry—1) that content is king, and 2) that women aren’t funny—continues to “delimit what counts as humorous, negatively impact[ing] interest in women’s comedic production, and imped[ing] potential for women’s success” (246).
Feminist joke lists express a countering logic that affirms that (a) women are funny and (b) not all content is discovered, seen, or consumed based on merit alone. What is clear is that Internet-based feminist joke lists function in the interests of promoting feminist humour, feminist humourists, and pressing contemporary issues, all the while supporting the broader movement in displays of solidarity. For example, feminist humour is leveraged to display moments when the cause is funny (“The 58 Best and Funniest Feminist Comebacks Ever to Grace the Internet”), when feminists are proven to be funny (“24 Tweets That Prove Feminists Are Fucking Hilarious”), when serious issues can be framed in a humorous light (“Safe, Legal, and Hilarious: Five Actually Funny Jokes About Abortion”), and when antagonists are kept at bay (“13 Hilarious Feminist Memes For You to Whip Out When You Need to Shut Down the Haters”). More generally, feminist joke lists reflect in part social changes precipitated by feminist movements, especially in terms of the “growing visibility of women in public joke-production domains” (Shifman and Lemish 2010, 871); more specifically, when taken together, these lists create the impression of a unified feminist front that regularly engages humour in the expression of feminist politics.
As sites of cultural production tied to the broader practice of online curation, each list presents a distinct number of jokes or humorous items. In “24 Funny Tweets” (Jenna Guillaume 2017a)), Twitter jokes range from observations on wage/labour inequality (“Another day, another 77 cents”) to witticisms about patriarchal culture (“The patriarchy’s fatal mistake was installing windows over the kitchen sink so we could see what was outside”). Several jokes are directed towards real/imagined so-called well-intentioned, malevolent, or aggressive males online. A urbandictionary.com definition of broflake is instructive: “Straight white male offended by any feminist or ethnic activity which is not directly designed for him,” supplanted with an epiphanic tweet: “GUYS! GUYS! GUYS! IT HAS A NAME!” A second tweet attends to the overt lack of courtesy and etiquette shown to women in online spaces: “I have accidentally used mens moisturiser on my hands & now I can’t shake the urge to write tweets correcting women online.”1 Yet another sardonic tweet addresses the concept of mansplaining as a self-perpetuating feature of online discourse: “I JOKINGLY MANSPLAINED @MLB [Major League Baseball] AND GOT MANSPLAINED HELP I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING.”
A number of jokes are striking in their attempts to serve as correctives to gender-based social injustices. In “28 Times” (Jenna Guillaume 2017b), jokes on domesticity, “female privilege,” and sexual consent figure prominently. A joke on housework responds directly to a popular media article entitled, “5 Reasons You Should Be Helping Your Wife Clean House.” Answer: “You fucking live here” (repeated 5 times). A similar style joke addresses the kitchen as a site of imagined shared labour: “women belong in the kitchen. men belong in the kitchen. everyone belongs in the kitchen. kitchen has food.” The question of “female privilege” arises in a heated Tumblr exchange, in which a male user likens the former to “getting to claim a headache to avoid sex.” This statement would inspire two curt and pulverizing rebukes: the first, arguing that female oppression consists of first having to claim physical illness to avoid sex because men don’t accept a simple “no,” then to witness men alluding to their own oppression as a by-product of being denied sex; the second, vocally shaming and humiliating the original poster by way of the first incisive critique: “#OOOO FUCKING OWND YOU GOT FUCKING SLAM DUNKED SON YOU’RE GONNA NEED LIKE TEN FEDORAS TO COVER THAT BRUISE FUCKNUTS.” In a joke labelled “on consent,” the humour centres on a woman’s response to a man’s inappropriate sexual advances. By invoking a (now) well-known scene from Baby Face (1933), Barbara Stanwyck’s character puts an end to an unwanted form of sexual aggression by calmly pouring a cup of hot coffee on her aggressor’s hand. The humour derives from the subdued satisfaction she feels in temporarily curbing his actions. Below the two-panel GIF, an endorsement and affirmation: “The importance of consent: a narrative.” Each curated joke signposts the power of humour as a corrective to the oppressive indignities of everyday life, rendered in a format that sheds light on feminist struggles and sites of contestation.
Despite the positive dimensions of this broader project, however, not all jokes/joke lists are inclusive or constructive. Even a cursory survey of joke list titles reveals a potentially exclusionary framing of content. Consider: “23 Real AF Jokes That Will Make All Feminists Laugh,” “17 Jokes You’ll Only Find Hilarious If You’re a Feminist,” “43 Funny Tweets That Will Make Feminists Laugh,” and so on. For readers that do not readily identify as feminist or lack curiosity/interest in feminist forms of humour or politics, these joke lists risk being flippantly dismissed or ignored. Certain jokes give rise to combative and antagonistic forms of expression, a feature of contemporary humour that is potentially divisive or off-putting (Whitney Philips 2015). The quality and breadth of the jokes is also contingent on the creator(s) of the list. Compare this stale “knock-knock” joke list/format (Kimberly Harrington 2017) with this text- and GIF-based forum comprised of sexist, misogynist, and anti-feminist humour (“Feminist Jokes!”)—neither of these joke lists deliver satisfying progressive humour, with the latter effort presenting particularly harmful and hateful depictions of women. Despite the risks associated with alienating some online users through the proliferation of feminist concepts/ideas, the circulation of these joke lists may also render feminist politics more accessible. Given the visual, textual, and open-ended format of these joke lists—and given the ease with which these numbered lists can be leisurely skimmed or “glided over”—the reader/user is given greater latitude to experience a wide(r) array of feminist humour, all the while favouring the funniest and glossing over the worst offerings. Through the deliberate leveraging of humour, the curation of feminist joke lists works to diversify and amplify the range of feminist perspectives one might encounter on popular mainstream or niche websites, all the while encouraging the transmission of feminist ideas on issues as diverse as pay equity, domestic labour, and sexual assault.
Signs o’ the times: the Women’s March
The above examples offer a much-needed overview of general joke lists dedicated to feminist humour. These lists offer a middle ground of sorts for thinking about the broader role, function, promise, or potential of these kinds of humorous practices and discourses. Another important manifestation of the joke list is the curation of humorous content tied to a figure or event. As a political event that has inspired waves of feminist humour production and circulation, the Women’s March represents an important case study for thinking about the curation of feminist politics and humour online. The inaugural Women’s March of January 21 2017 swiftly became one of the largest single-day demonstrations in recorded U.S. history (Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman 2017). This international protest event was comprised of over 700 solidarity marches across the world, in which participants of a women-led movement advocated for women’s rights, gender/racial/economic/climate justice, healthcare reform, worker’s rights, immigration reform, and LGBTQIA rights, among other pressing issues (Women’s March on Washington 2017).
The March materialized the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, as a concerted public response to, and rejection of, many of the latter’s offensive sexist, racist, and misogynistic statements and positions (Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore, Anne Graefer, and Allaina Kilby 2018). Trump’s visibility as a catalyst for the March was nowhere more evident than in the steady stream of signage openly mocking and ridiculing him. Although much of the signage was sincere, a wide array of the signs and visual imagery attached to the March were inherently charged with humour, ridicule, and satire; so much so that the signage from both the 2017 and 2018 Marches inspired a wave of curated lists, many of which gathered the best, greatest, and funniest examples from the rallies. The richness and significance of the signs did not go unnoticed, as museum curators at the New York Historical Society, Museum of the City of New York, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History have since collected protest posters from the 2017 and 2018 Women’s Marches (Sarah Cascone 2018). As the Director of the New York Historical Society put it, “Our primary concern is capturing this moment for future generations” (Hofer, as cited in Cascone 2018). At the same time that museum curators began documenting and preserving signs for posterity, various actors and websites were engaging in curation activities of their own. Lists featuring feminist politics and humour have appeared on highly popular websites such as BuzzFeed, Slate, Huffington Post, even Teen Vogue, and on lesser-known sites like Bustle, Smosh, The News & Observer, and Political Punchline. The popularity of these signs also attracted the attention of the likes of late-night comedian Stephen Colbert, who dedicated a segment in honour of the bigger crowds and even funnier signs of the 2018 March; in it, he curated his favourite signs (e.g., “Super Callous Fascist Racist Nazi bragga docious”; “Please note the lack of Nazis at our marches”).
Trump’s body, feminist struggles, and women’s bodies
In a recent study of images and signage from the 2017 Women’s March, three recurring themes came to the fore: the ridicule of Trump’s body, situating the March in relation to wider historical contexts, and a focus on women’s bodies (including their “pussies”) (Inger-LiseBore, Anne Graefer and Allaina Kilby 2018, 531). Although the latter study focused on Facebook and Twitter posts that used the #WomensMarch hashtag, the above themes reappear with great frequency in the curated lists of humorous signs from both the 2017 and 2018 Marches. A vast majority of protesters made explicit reference to Trump as the object of ridicule. He was mocked for his stature (“Keep your tiny hands off my rights”), physical attributes (“We shall overcomb”), ego (“You’re so vain you probably think this March is about you”), character (“I’d call Trump a cunt but he lacks depth and warmth”), bigotry (“You can’t comb over bigotry/racism”), credibility/trustworthiness (“Impeach the racist orange traitor!”), policies (“Keep the immigrants, ban the assholes”), and political supporters (“Please note the lack of Nazis at our marches”). It is not an understatement to say that the Women’s March materialized with Trump as a major catalyst and source of public outrage. In one sign, Trump’s entire standing as president is succinctly called into question through his likening to a deli lunch item: “Trump sandwich: white bread, full of baloney, w/ Russian dressing and a small pickle.” Rough translation: Trump here figures as a run-of-the-mill, deceitful bullshit artist, propped up by the Russian state (Putin’s interference in the U.S. election), and in the possession of a small anatomical part. Together, the above signs show the explicit uses of humour, irony, and mockery to openly criticize the president, as well as to air grievances about the latter’s illegitimate standing as commander-in-chief (“Not My President”).
Importantly, the uses of humour are not limited to ridicule, in that they are also wielded in the interests of valorizing feminist struggles within a wider historical context. Protesters dressed up as suffragettes to draw attention to the ongoing challenges tied to upholding women’s rights (“Same shit, different century”) while making known their unmistakable target (“Suffragettes against Trump”). Other clever references to historical epochs featuring women appear in signage stating “Viva la vulva” and “Vulva la résistance,” the first an indirect allusion to the July Revolution of 1830, the second a reference to women’s important role in the French Resistance. Signs featuring the significance of intersectional feminism also offered the opportunity for rally-goers to reflect on the histories of oppression women have experienced the world over: “Women’s rights are human rights: Black, Worker, Immigrant, Trans, Poor, Muslim, Queer, Native, Disabled.” The omnipresence of older women at the rallies also figured prominently in the lists through a vast array of funny self-referential signs:
- “Now you’ve pissed off Grandma”
- “Ninety, nasty, and not giving up”/“Still fighting at 90”
- “I can’t believe I still have to protest this fucking shit!”
- “I’ve been married 53 years, raised 8 kids, enjoyed 20 grandchildren and taught music and Special Ed … hold my Chardonnay. I GOT THIS. #Imarchforthefuture”
- “Feminist AF”/“The future is female”
The humour channeled through these signs is that of the enraged granny who has witnessed or experienced more than enough of her share of injustice in her lifetime, but asserts her place as an ally in the ongoing struggle to ensure women’s rights. She is nasty (a descriptor Trump has used to devalue women), steadfast in her resolve (not giving up), animated through disbelief (still having to protest), embodying complete cycles of personal, professional, and domestic activity. It should come as no surprise that women who have seen it all should so seamlessly adopt and integrate the language of the moment (“Nasty Women Make (Her)story”; “Feminist AF”; “The future is female”). As Bore, Graefer and Kilby (2018) have shown, the coalescing of these historical epochs and struggles, the visibility of older women’s subjectivities, and the realities of the present moment encourage protesters (and the audiences of these lists) to “feel part of a long history of women’s protest” and to recognize and feel outraged by the notion that “this can be happening to us now” (534).
The final core theme to emerge from these lists is the focus on women’s bodies, including their “pussies.” List curators took delight in showcasing the broad range of humour tied to the female body. Signs depicting or referencing vaginas or pussies constituted the clearest manifestation of how women’s bodies were leveraged in the articulation of political critique.2 The use of puns and wordplay is a common feature among these examples. Protest signs jokingly quipped that all human life is made possible via women (“Made in ‘Gina”); another example extends this idea to the province of voting: “VAGINAS Brought You Into the World … VAGINAS Will Vote You OUT!” Other protest signs addressed the importance of continued persistence and vigilance (“Be Vag-ilant”; “It’s time to ovary-act”), all the while reinforcing the notion that women are resourceful and resilient (“This pussy grabs back”). More references to women’s bodies appeared under the guise of protest against government-regulation of women’s access to healthcare (“Public Cervix Announcement: No uterus, no opinion”; “We need to talk about the elephant in the womb”). To borrow a recurring trope from Women’s March signage, “Pussy power” was on full display, a sight made most evident via the scrolling cascades of pussy-related texts and imagery (e.g., “The Funniest Signs from the 2018 Women’s March”).
Even the more diffuse types of humour were convincing in expressing the need to protest the political culture of the moment. Segments of the population not normally associated with marches were in attendance (“So bad, even introverts are here”; “You know it’s bad when librarians are marching … ”), exasperated publics/citizens were visible (“Just, Ugh”; “Not usually a sign guy but geez”; “My outrage can’t fit on this sign”), and protesters came to rally in solidarity (“Girls just wanna have fun-damental rights”). Together, curated lists of humorous signs from the Women’s March help to reinforce the deeper rationale of such curation activities: to provoke/ensure feminist laughter, to champion feminist humour, and to add greater visibility to topics, issues, and sites of feminist struggle.
What do we learn from “feminist joke lists”?
At first blush, it would seem that feminist joke lists sit uncomfortably alongside other forms of cultural appropriation and capitalist accumulation (Andi Zeisler 2016). In its crudest form, the feminist joke list is reduced to everyday clickbait, a cultural unit designed to titillate just enough to generate advertising revenue. In a more nuanced form, the list functions in the service of affective and communicative capitalism (Jodi Dean 2005) creating profit via the “productions and modulations of emotions, feelings and gut reactions” (Anne Graefer 2016, 145). Thus, it is fair to ponder whether these joke lists feed “mainstream media and corporate appropriations of feminism as part of a dominant media ‘sensibility’” (Lawrence and Ringrose 2018, 211). Far from offering any clear-cut (re)solutions, however, feminist joke lists can be seen to participate in the circulation of confusing digital text and imagery (Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle 2016), assist in the expansion of cut/paste logics of content that registers as both jarring and powerful (Alexandra Juhasz 2017), and simultaneously muddy and reveal “the sticky relations between neoliberalism and popfeminist activism” (Smith-Prei and Stehle 2016, 16). Consider the aggregation of feminist humour on a site such as BuzzFeed: although the latter has identified feminism as a topic of great interest to its predominantly female readership, the site also “regularly publishes content which promotes and endorses male objectification and male body shaming” (Sedgwick 2016). In addition, ambivalence remains a by-product of sorts of feminist humour curation across websites and platforms through the creation of community ingroups and outgroups (Phillips and Milner 2017, 96; Bing 2004); the same generativity and magnetism that makes these lists attractive also produce the conditions for exclusion and othering. As Philips and Milner put it, websites that produce discursive environments have the capacity to simultaneously build communities and dividing walls (121).
More specifically, if readers do not readily identify as feminist, lack interest in feminist issues/concerns, or fail to appreciate feminist humour, broader efforts to curate these types of humour may provoke negative or indifferent responses. These tensions may at times be glossed over due to the lists’ circulation on decidedly non-political corporate sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr (Rentschler and Thrift 2015, 332). As Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) argues, the political efficacy of humour in popular feminism is limited precisely because even political forms of humour are defanged and distilled due to the transience and ephemerality of online content (140–41). According to this logic, just as one feminist joke list appears, it is swiftly absorbed and replaced by a new one (often channeling fun over anger). This is not to say that feminist humour or feminist joke lists are apolitical, but rather that the fleeting visibility of these endeavours leads to a distillation of politics whereby political messages are merely circulated, not engaged; or, as Dean (2005) might say, “it is precisely the circulation that becomes the politics rather than a route to politics” (141). Despite their potential for increased visibility across popular (media) culture, feminist joke lists—as a manifestation of popular feminism—“do not challenge deep structures of inequities” (11). Importantly, however, Juhasz (2017) reminds us that the affect harnessed in and beyond these spaces can also be leveraged according to other dictates (intellectual, bodily, social, spatial), and can operate contra-capitalism and towards loftier aims (686). Ultimately, what we learn from feminist joke lists may have more to do with the cultivation of feminist sensibilities (writ large) and the fostering of feminist activities.
What kinds of spaces or communities do lists build/foster/sustain?
In the interests of developing a more coherent theoretical frame for studying these lists in the future, I suggest two possible points of departure:
- Engaging with/defending feminism;
- Energizing and sustaining feminist work.
The sites publishing feminist joke lists have undoubtedly made an effort to add visibility to, and increase interest in, feminist humour. These lists offer an important template or model for “doing feminism in the network,” showcasing innovative forms of feminist Internet content and lending greater visibility to “a larger feminist-identified network connected through laughter” (Rentschler and Thrift 2015, 331). The positive dimensions of this project warrant further attention.
Engaging with/defending feminism
Following Ted Cohen (1999), jokes often serve as devices for inducing intimacy, providing relief from certain oppressions, and building communities of appreciation and amusement. One striking example is the TrollX community on Reddit; at the time of writing, this Reddit community boasts 763,000 subscribers, with 1091 online users curating both the content and the frontpage. TrollX is a shining and uncharacteristic example of how feminist communities, ideas, and discourse can not only exist but flourish in otherwise toxic (read: misogynistic) spaces such as Reddit. The TrollX tagline nicely encapsulates its hopes and politics: “Come for the period [menstruation] comics. Stay for the cultural awareness.” Here, feminist humour connects public display and mediated affect to function as a “lubricant for social online interaction” (Graefer 2016, 152). For L. Adrienne Massanari (2017, 7), TrollX members represent agents of “cruel optimism” (Lauren Berlant 2011) that relish the pleasures of crass and self-deprecating forms of humour and channel the energies unleashed through trickster and trolling practices—all in the interests of creating supportive and positive online environments for feminist Redditors.
An important feature of feminist humour is its tendency to defend and engage with feminism. At the level of the sentence, almost all of the joke lists surveyed featured jokes about feminism and feminist issues, often in the service of identifying, critiquing, and/or correcting harmful assumptions, ignorant perspectives, or unwanted rhetoric. One oft-cited joke discusses the perils associated with adequately characterizing feminism:
Feminism? no thanks, I prefer gender equality
Water, no thanks, I prefer H2O.
Another joke outlines the ongoing discrepancies between the lived realities of men and women: “I’ll have what HE’S having! (higher pay, right to make choices about my body, ability to walk down a street at night without fear …).” Yet another irony-wielding Twitter account (@NoToFeminism) addresses the structural barriers that obstruct women’s rights:
I don’t need femims [feminism] if women want fair treatment under Trumpcare they
should just try not having the pre-existing condition of being alive.
Such jokes signal the ongoing need to redress false characterizations and to reinforce the notion that feminist struggles are not only real but deepening. The protest signs at both Women’s Marches (most of which appeared front-and-centre in the humour lists discussed above) lay bare the realities and vicissitudes of the current moment.
Energizing and sustaining feminist work
In the face of ongoing encroachments against the broader feminist movement, these joke lists have the potential to energize and sustain feminist work. As I have shown, the feminist humour portrayed in joke lists functions to showcase “sweeping creative practices and sharing communities” (Ian Reilly 2015, 9) and to support the larger idea that “networked content such as memes, reaction GIFs, and tweets can serve to coalesce sentiment to do the everyday, affective work of feminism” (Massanari 3). Building on Michael Hardt (2015), Smith-Prei and Stehle (2016) have advanced the concept of awkward politics in feminist work as a means of cultivating joy (“the increase of our power to think and act”) and reducing sadness (the decrease in that power), an intervention that creates space for feminist interruptions and disruptions (17). At its most basic level, the joke list has the capacity to cultivate joy and reduce sadness, but on a more profound level, it also has the potential to increase one’s power to think and act within and beyond feminist frameworks. Joke lists also constitute an important site of feminist consumption and enjoyment as they confer a “pleasure-in-mastery” (Janice Loreck 2018, 9) for both list creators and audiences alike. Following Loreck (2018), joke lists may also be regarded as pleasurable modes of feminist criticism that produce “feelings of community” (6). Finally, as Massanari has shown, trolling activities via feminist forms of humour production enable users and observers to revel in everyday absurdities, all the while providing social supports for likeminded others (16).
Although jokes have been described as a form of “coping humor” (Jennifer Hay 2000, 726) capable of creating “fantasy alternatives to oppressive situations and may offer women momentary relief and a feeling that others share their situation” (Bing 2004, 26), they may also offer an added layer of reinforcement. In these times of increased networked atomization (Juhasz 2017, 662), joke lists offer “the possibility that they can help sustain activists’ energy (E. Louisa Stein 2017) by reminding the latter that they are part of wider communities of feminist feeling, and by helping them to overcome despair through defiant, unruly laughter (Bore, Graefer, and Kilby 2018, 539). Feminist joke lists offer instances to re-energize feminist communities through funny and incisive critique and to facilitate the creation of shared spaces and political concerns (Rentschler and Thrift 2015, 351). Elsewhere, Lawrence and Ringrose (2018) have argued that humorous posts play a crucial role in expanding feminist audiences as well as facilitating connectivity, collectivity, and solidarity among feminists” (211). Finally, Kate Clinton’s insights on the slowness and seriousness of feminist humour may be applicable to the current discussion surrounding feminist joke lists:
Consider feminist humor and consider the lichen. Growing low and slowly on enormous rocks, secreting tiny amounts of acid, year after year, eating into the rock. Making places for water to gather, to freeze and crack the rock a bit. Making soil, making way for grasses to grow. Making way for rose hips and sea oats, for aspen and cedar. It is the lichen which begins the splitting apart of the rocks, the changing of the shoreline, the shape of the earth. Feminist humor is serious, and it is about the changing of this world. (as cited in Bing 2004, 32)
In this essay, I have argued that the broader curation of feminist joke lists is contributing to the visibility and validation of feminist humour, to the sharpening of feminist critique, and to the solidarity of feminist communities. The online curator’s or list-maker’s role in foregrounding the primacy of feminist humour on both popular and niche websites is at once an undertheorized realm of cultural production and a promising new vehicle for feminist politics. If Sontag was correct in her assertion that the practice of creating lists represented the power of perceiving, conferring, and creating value as a tool for guaranteeing the existence of things, the creation of feminist joke lists may, over time, prove an important form of cultural expression that deepens feminism’s overall value in popular media culture. Although these lists and broader practices may fall short of producing much-needed systemic change (Banet-Weiser 2018), they may eventually lay to rest the unfounded notion that feminists and feminist humour aren’t funny. More than this, the perceived value of feminist joke lists may also expand if/when the form becomes more widely adopted. Should these joke lists enjoy a greater stronghold across popular culture and within feminist communities online, they could in turn fulfill an important role in documenting, recording, and archiving a wide range of feminist humour. Revisiting Jo Anna Isaak’s (1996) work on the revolutionary power of women’s laughter, the jouissance and laughter produced via feminist joke lists “may be a catalyst that could enable a break or subversion in the established representational and social structure” (15). Like the lichen doing its slow transformative work, so too is feminist humour making a slow, serious, and more concerted bid to call for meaningful social and political change. Feminist joke lists have yet to assume the kind of influence or ubiquity I have just described, but future research in this area could include more widespread and systematic documentation of feminist joke lists (including examples from existing archives), curation practices, audience/community reception, as well as qualitative research based on interviews with humourists and joke list curators.