CFP for MLA 2021 Special Session: Laughter & Feminist Critical Thought

Feminist theory has always enjoyed a productive but uneasy relationship with laughter. What are the limits and potentials of laughing paradigms for the future of feminist critical thought?

Topics May Include (but are not limited to):

• Feminist theories of the carnivalesque, Medusan laughter, unruly women

• Affirmations of the “feminist killjoy” and intersectional politics of laughter and social power

• Race/ethnicity—laughter & black feminist theory, from histories of blackface minstrelsy + archives of slavery to present day social movements

• Marxist/materialist feminisms—critiques of the neoliberal happiness industry, e.g. via concepts of zaniness, cruel optimism, and the injunction to enjoyment

• The status of pleasure (and its relation to laughter) in the history of feminist thought and/or feminist experimental performance

• The place of humor/laughter/joy in feminist affect theory

• Semiotic-psychoanalytic approaches (critiques of sexist/tendentious jokes, theorizations of abject laughter, libidinal politics of irony, etc.)

• Feminist comedy studies (with its particular focus on popular culture, TV, and stand-up) and its relation to other interdisciplinary fields and debates in feminist studies

• Non-Western laughter as it concerns issues of translation, adaptation, migration, diaspora, refugee politics, state violence, sovereignty, environmental catastrophe

**We encourage applicants to this panel to think promiscuously about the dialectic between critical thought and feminist laughter!**

Call for Papers for a special session at the MLA Annual Convention, January 7-10, 2021 in Toronto. This is non-guaranteed but would be sponsored by the Screen Arts and Culture Executive Committee. Please send 250-word abstracts and bios by March 20, 2020 to Maggie Hennefeld (mhennefe@umn.edu). Responses to individual submissions will be sent out by late March.

All prospective presenters must be current MLA members by no later than April 2020.