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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2011 Liminal Laughter: A Feminist Vision of the Body in Resistance Sarah E. Fryett

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COLLEGE OF AND SCIENCES

LIMINAL LAUGHTER: A FEMINIST VISION OF THE BODY IN RESISTANCE

By

SARAH E. FRYETT

A Dissertation submitted to the Program of Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2011

The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Sarah E. Fryett defended on March 18, 2010.

______Robin T. Goodman Professor Directing Dissertation

______Marie Fleming University Representative

______Enrique Alvarez Committee Member

______Donna M. Nudd Committee Member

Approved:

______John Kelsay, Chair, Program of Interdisciplinary Humanities

______Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members.

ii

Maricarmen Martinez

In Solidarity

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation, though including the word “laughter” in the title, rarely induced me into peals of laughter, unless tinged by a certain manic madness. I am, however, greatly indebted to those individuals who kept me laughing and forced the madness to stay at bay. I take this opportunity to extend thanks to them. I would first like to thank my committee members: Robin Goodman, Marie Fleming, Enrique Alvarez, and Donna M. Nudd. Each provided me with their own unique resources. I thank Donna M. Nudd for taking the time to locate old Mickee Faust scripts and answer last minute frantic emails. To Enrique Alvarez, I thank you for the Queer Theory class that proved invaluable while writing this dissertation. I thank Marie Fleming to whom I owe one of my greatest debts; she introduced me to the writings of which I immediately fell in love with. To Robin Goodman, I extend my deepest gratitude. As my professor, mentor, editor, and support system, she patiently suggested revisions (and then more revisions) on each of my chapters. This project would have been impossible without her guidance, patience, and dedication. I would also like to thank all of my friends for their various contributions over the last few years. To Katheryn Wright, I thank you for our Tom Brown walks which allowed me to think through aspects of my argument. I thank Christa Menninger, Samantha Levy, Melisa Reddick, Erin di Cesare for all their support and encouragement. I extend a special thanks to my best friend Francis Orozco and her partner, John Newell, for providing much needed relief (football and beer) throughout my writing process. Thanks to Ashley and her place of employment, Snookers, that offered many welcome moments of respite. I thank Stacy Tanner for flowers, smiles, encouragement, and random stories about people I do not know. To Brandy Wilson, though you live many miles away now, you have always supported my writing, and I thank you. Without my Monday yoga class, I might have been a little less calm throughout the writing process, and thus, I thank Mary at Namaste Yoga for providing me with a bit of deep breathing for one and a half hours each week. To All Saints café, my office, I thank you for always providing me with a place to drink chai green tea. A special thanks to Amit S. Rai for his love, support, and belief in my project.

iv My family has sustained me in a variety of ways, and I conclude by offering thanks to them. Thank you Dad for your love, naps on the beach, and great home-cooked food, especially grilled cheese and tomato soup. To my Mom, I thank you for our long Saturday conversations, during which you listened patiently to my convoluted updates, digressions, and progress. I thank John, my brother, for his friendship, love, and sense of humor. You always know how to make me laugh. And finally, I thank Tobias and Zoe, my cats, who, though having no idea about the dissertation writing process, still managed to provide me with much needed laughter and joy.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ……………………………………………………………………vii

INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………1

1. FEMINISM, THE BODY, AND RESISTANCE …………………...... 4

2. LAUGHTER AS TRANSVALUATION……………………………..31

3. THE MICKEE FAUST CLUB ……………………………………....63

4. HÉLÈNE CIXOUS …………………………………………………..89

CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………….111

WORKS CITED …………………………………………………………113

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …………………………………………....118

vi ABSTRACT

This dissertation argues for a feminist practice of liminal laughter, a bodily laughter that cements a critical engagement. Liminal laughter is formed in the margins, across various disciplines and genres; it is a subversive and parodic laughter that radically challenges the hegemonic narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality. To contend that feminism benefits from this practice of liminal laughter, I expand on poststructural and phenomenological feminisms and their conceptualizations of the body. Subsequently, using the nineteenth century , Friedrich Nietzsche and his concepts of the transvaluation of all values, overcoming, and affirmation, I create a conceptual frame for thinking liminal laughter. To provide examples for this theory, I look to the Mickee Faust Club, an eclectic theater troupe in Tallahassee, Florida and the works of the theorist and novelist Hélène Cixous. Liminal laughter is a practice that revalues the body’s capacities of sensing feeling to disrupt and destabilize the mind / body, masculine / feminine, natural / unnatural, and subject / other binaries. By doing so, liminal laughter not only displaces the dominant terms, but it is also creates alternative narratives.

vii INTRODUCTION

This dissertation revolves around the question: What can the phenomenon of laughter contribute to a feminism of the twenty-first century? Initially, I started pondering the phenomenon of laughter during my forays into the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and my reading led me to the following: Can laughter offer a methodology of critical investigation? The answer, quite simply, is: Yes. Emerging out of my engagement with Nietzsche and Hélène Cixous and combined with my own moments of laughter, is the conceptual frame of this dissertation – liminal laughter. Liminal laughter is of the margins, the in-between spaces; it is a subversive, parodic laughter. The moments of this laughter are various and include the reading of critical theory and novels as well as the viewing of parodic performances in theater. Feminism, concerned with challenging the structures of language, narrative, discourse, and truth should look to my theory of liminal laughter as it is a laughter of pushing boundaries, forming new alliances, and creating alternative myths and narratives. Luce Irigary asks, in her essay, “The Sex Which is Not One”: “Isn’t laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression? Isn’t the phallic tantamount to the seriousness of meaning? Perhaps woman, and the sexual relation, transcend it ‘first’ in laughter?” (qtd in Rowe 1). In agreement with Irigary, my theory of liminal laughter is a practice that emphasizes the physical, corporeal, feeling, and sensing body in the moment of laughter. Furthermore, feeling and sensing, for me, become the basis of an alternative method of critical interrogation. I attempt to move the tradition of critical analysis out of its confines of pure thinking and into the realm of feeling and sensing where, I suggest, exists an alternative practice of resistance rooted in the body. I begin, in chapter 1, by suggesting that the theoretical framework of liminal laughter adds a new element to previous feminist analyses by concretely demonstrating an approach that relies not solely on the perceived mental capacities to read and to analyze, but that, instead, relies on the perception fomented by the physical body to initiate that critical engagement. As the dissertation progresses, I first look to the philosophical tradition of Nietzsche to develop my theory, and that chapter is followed by two chapters of examples of liminal laughter.

1 In chapter 1, I argue for liminal laughter as feminist politics of resistance. Through an examination of various critics and their writings on laughter, I define my theory of liminal laughter and subsequently suggest that it gives to feminism a new critical methodology to challenge and destabilize the hegemonic narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality, which condition thought, action, and the body. I contrast my theory of liminal laughter to the conceptual paradigms of poststructural and phenomenological feminism in order to argue for laughter as a bodily experience of excess that destabilizes the binary systems of mind / body, subject / other, and natural / unnatural. As the laughing body foments a moment of critical engagement, a method of resistance emerges. Chapter 2 functions to expand on my theory of liminal laughter by arguing that it institutes a practice of the transvaluation of values. Using the nineteenth century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically his writings in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Gay Science, I demonstrate how laughter becomes an essential element, for him, in the investigation of values, beliefs, and practices. Nietzsche, though rooted in challenging and examining the conceits of the nineteenth century, cements a useful bodily practice of laughter for feminism through his concepts of overcoming, affirmation, and the transvaluation of values. Through a close reading of his texts, I focus on how laughter comes to the fore as a method of investigation and creativity. This, then, allows me to substantiate a definition of liminal laughter as an aesthetic parodic practice concerned with tackling supposed inherent and innate values, systems, and structures. The Mickee Faust Club, an eclectic theater troupe in Tallahassee, Florida is the focus of chapter 3, and I look to three skits to provide examples of liminal laughter in performance. My focus is with the “Queer as Faust” summer 2008 and 2010 performances that interrogate the norms of sexuality and gender. Liminal laughter, in this discussion, is of a specific form: a combination of parody, humor, and critical investigation. The laughing body of the audience members, during these parodic performances, foments a critical engagement with / to the norms of masculinity and femininity and the categories of natural / unnatural. By analyzing my own reaction to these skits, I argue that liminal laughter, in these instances, also substantiates the creation and proliferation of new narratives and truths.

2 In chapter 4, I look to two more examples of liminal laughter from the critic and novelist Hélène Cixous. By examining her “The Laugh of the Medusa” and The Book of Promethea, I demonstrate how liminal laughter emerges in a context other than performance. I begin by looking to her seminal essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” to suggest that, though usually emphasized for it notion of écriture feminine, it cements a practice of laughter which challenges phallocentrism. I subsequently look to her novel, The Book of Promethea, to illuminate how laughter functions as a generative and creative force, especially in relation to thinking, sensing, feeling, and writing the body. Each of these chapters builds on my theory of liminal laughter as a method of not only destabilization but also creation. Liminal laughter functions to refuse the exclusion, silencing, and erasure of minority bodies while simultaneously fostering a critical method of analysis that takes, at a fundamental level, the knowledge of the body. Ultimately, this laughter transvalues the life-negating values associated with the hegemonic narratives of gender and sexuality, thereby, cementing a practice of affirmation. This laughter emerges in various forms, across many mediums, but each moment is an example of the body in resistance.

3 CHAPTER 1 FEMINISM, THE BODY, AND RESISTANCE

There is no theory of laughter, there is only an experience – lacerating, intimately explosive. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

I heartily laughed recently, out loud to myself, while putting together an essay discussing the Canadian lesbian stand-up comedian, Elvira Kurt. In one of my favorite routines, she says: “The more I hang around straight people the more I find them like me. As long as they keep it to themselves. As long as they don’t flaunt it. [Pause] Stay away from my kids!” In this controversial time period with the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) and a variety of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered (LGBT) groups lobbying for adoption rights and marriage rights, the narrative I often hear embraces the following sentiment: “If gays and lesbians keep their sexuality to themselves, I’m okay with them.” That narrative, conceptualizing homosexuality as “other,” namely deviant, receives severe critical engagement within a variety of Kurt’s skits, and specifically here as the “other” morphs into “straight people.” Without delving too far into stand-up or other examples of critical comedy as they are thoroughly discussed in Chapter 3, I note that my initial thinking about laughter stemmed from a variety of comedy routines. I quickly moved to wondering: Can laughter, deriving from a plethora of mediums, be considered critical? If so, what specifically is that relationship to critical engagement? How and why do parodic performances, comedy routines, paintings and novels create laughter? Among the above questions, I am also interested in examining what role the body plays within the laughing moment. How do facial movements and gestures combine with the humorous event to produce the laughing body? What might this laughing body contribute to an already abundant field of theories that revolve around the body? In, as Kathleen Rowe writes, a culture where the preference is for “women’s over their

4 laughter” what might laughter enable (Rowe 214)? In sum, what can the phenomenon of laughter contribute to a feminism of the twenty-first century? I begin this Chapter by examining ’s theories on laughter in order to establish how my theory of laughter differs significantly from his version, which argues for laughter as a cathartic moment of release. Secondly, I tackle four paradigms that provide in-depth analyses of the potential of laughter for critical engagement in order to establish the foundation for my future arguments. Using critics such as Michel de Certeau, Judith Butler, Kathleen Rowe (Unruly Women), and Audry Bilger (Laughing Feminism), I argue that laughter is political in its capacity to be critical and creative through its challenge to categories of knowledge and language. I then discuss how feminism will benefit from an engagement with laughter, specifically how laughter challenges the language associated with the maintenance of patriarchy and its subset heterosexuality. In order to suggest that laughter offers a new method for engaging the body in critical engagement, I document feminism’s varied imaginings of the body. Finally, I delve into a variety of feminist critics including Gloria Anzaldúa and Monique Wittig to examine how one branch of poststructuralist thought conceptualizes the body’s relationship to language, discourse, and identity. While fruitful on many levels, some postructuralist theories remain entrenched in thinking transcendence through awareness, I suggest, at the expense of the body. Secondly, I look to phenomenological feminism and to Toril Moi’s discussion of Simone de Beauvoir to examine the phenomenological feminist engagement with the body, which resonates with my theory of laughter in relation to the notion of experience. However, both poststructuralist and phenomenological feminism exhibit tendencies to overlook unique components that are the body. I conclude with a few remarks on how liminal laughter offers feminism a strategy for resistance that places the body at the center of critical engagement. Freud and Laughter Prior to examining the different theories of the potential of laughter, I briefly examine Sigmund Freud’s and Their Relation to the Unconscious in order to express how my own theory of laughter differs drastically from his understanding of laughter as release. Freud writes: “We should say that laughter arises if a quota of

5 psychical energy which has earlier been used for the cathexis of particular psychical paths has become unusable, so that it can find free discharge” (147). That is, laughter acts to foster the discharge of mental or emotional energy. Freud subsequently notes that some laughter, such as that induced by joking, is “an indication of pleasure, we shall be inclined to relate this pleasure to the lifting of the cathexis which has previously been present” (148). Thus, Freud views laughter as a discharge that evokes pleasure; it is a pleasure that occurs in the transference of energy from a previous identification to a new one. Laughter, then, remains an adaptive function, a second order tool from which the individual receives release. My understanding of liminal laughter is not a second order adaptive function, but, instead, a primary function related to the body’s engagement with a given text (performance, literature, critical theory). Liminal laughter is not a moment necessarily of pleasure, though it has the potential to be such, nor is it a moment of discharge in the sense of a release of psychical energy. Laughter, for me, is a moment of articulation and creativity whose consequences and ramifications travel far beyond the limiting Freudian framework. The Potential of Laughter I can think of a variety of jokes told, I presume traditionally, in the company of men where women remain the humorous object. I point to this because often laughter remains linked to derogatory comedy or stereotypes of femininity, and I want to determine whether there is another type of laughter. A further example of this might be asides such as “Clearly, it’s her time of the month,” said to garner a guffaw at the supposedly overly-emotional female. While jokes causing laughter abound in this particular fashion, I begin here with the question: Are there moments, devoid of misogynistic tendencies, where women laugh? What might this laughter look like? How might this laughter challenge and question the institutions of patriarchy and heterosexuality and the language and narratives1 used to keep intact those institutions? As suggested at the opening of this Chapter, Kurt’s comedy, I argue, does offer a

1 I realize that the term narrative is quite loaded: What is a narrative? What are its conventions? Is there a narrative of patriarchy? If so, what does it look like? (Is patriarchy a universalizing concept?) This dissertation uses the term narrative to designate a semi-coherent grouping of norms, values, and practices. In other words, when I use the terms narrative of patriarchy, I am referring to a variety of practices that privilege hegemonic masculinity, the Western metaphysical tradition, and the hierarchical system of male dominance. Similarly, the terms narrative of heterosexuality, what I would consider a subset of the narrative of patriarchy, are used throughout the dissertation to refer to the dominance of heterosexuality.

6 challenge to compulsory heterosexuality, but are there other instances, besides comedy, where humor and laughter emerge? The following is a look at four distinct arguments regarding laughter and its ability to foment critical engagement. This is in no way a comprehensive examination of laughter; however, my intention is to cement a working definition for my idea of liminal laughter, my concept of a radical laughter that functions to challenge norms while simultaneously questioning the very process of challenging. Kathleen Rowe’s text, Unruly Women, engages with the above question regarding women’s laughter in her examination of the Dutch feminist film, A Question of Silence (1982). The film chronicles four women, unknown to each other, who murder a male sales clerk after he catches one of them stealing. The majority of the film revolves around their psychological evaluation by Janine who interviews them to determine, for the court, whether they are of sound mind and able to stand trial. The viewer, during these evaluations, is taken into all of the women’s lives, their abuse, physical, mental, and emotional at the hands of various males (husbands and bosses). It is clear that they are silenced and erased by patriarchy. As the film unfolds, Janine becomes more and more empathetic to the reasons and actions of the four women, in the end deciding to forgo leaving the courtroom with her husband in favor of remaining with the women. The dénouement of the film occurs when the four accused women, at the very end of the trial, begin to laugh, quietly at first and slowly gaining momentum and sound in the concluding minutes. They are joined, in their laughter, by Janine, who has just been silenced by the all male judges, and four other women (who witnessed the murder but never came forward to offer testimony). Rowe contends that this laughter creates a spectacle that clears a space for “female writing, female bodies, and female desire” (9). This “violent and productive” laughter is “an apocalyptic annihilation of the Law – of all that classifies, divides, names” (9-10). From her argument, I borrow the notion that laughter critically engages with and ultimately disrupts the institution of patriarchy; however, my focus, unlike Rowe’s, remains at the level of language and how the body manifests this laughter. Rowe’s analysis of the final scene where all the women are laughing coincides, in part, with my thinking of laughter, but there are also distinct differences regarding the actual effects of laughter. Writing about these final moments, Rowe argues:

7 Their laughter is explosive and irresistible. It breaks boundaries, filling the void left by their refusal to speak, or bear witness, in the language of their oppressors. It is both terrible and wonderful, expressing at the injustice and illogic of the law and forging a bond among women who up to that point shared nothing but their gender and silence. When the women begin to laugh […], they transform themselves into a spectacle that is incomprehensible and frightening to the men in the film. Their laughter, as they march out of the trial-turned-farce, hints at the collective power of women to shatter the symbolic authority of the patriarchy. (2) For Rowe, the laughter of the women at the end of the film acts in a variety of important ways. Firstly, laughter breaks through the boundaries of masculine language which have imprisoned, literally and figuratively, the women of the film. Secondly, the laughter generates a sense of community, a community founded in anger, isolation, and the absurd. The moment of laughter, thus, builds solidarity among the women while at the same time productively and provocatively criticizing the institution of patriarchy. Rowe notes: “This laughter not only comments on the depth and absurdity of the women’s oppression, but it binds them together” (16). Similar to my contention at the outset of this chapter regarding Kurt’s humor as showcasing the absurdity of the narrative of compulsory heterosexuality, the laughter during the ending moments of A Question of Silence points to the absurdity of patriarchy and its ultimate failure to silence and erase. What Rowe does not acknowledge is that that shattering is fleeting, lasting only a moment, but, I argue, a decisive moment. In other words, though the women laugh together at the end of the film, the institution of patriarchy and its authority, remain after the laugh. However, that moment of laughter in which the body protests its position within the institution of patriarchy is one instance of liminal laughter. The laughter, evidenced in the above scenario, is a language of protestation. This will be clearer later; however, for the moment, laughter is a language not of the disembodied mind or intellect, but a language of embodiment, a language that emerges from the very condition of being denied language. Laughter, in other words, is the only mode of display that is appropriate to the situation of the women noted above because laughter can convey the deep rooted fear, isolation, and anger. Laughter “speaks,” but it “speaks” by radically displacing the

8 traditional notions of speech or, as Hélène Cixous would have it, those notions associated with phallocentrism. The laugh as critical engagement, a method for a feminism of the twenty-first century, at once demonstrates the pitfalls of a language entrenched in patriarchal narratives, while simultaneously and creatively offering a means of signifying inextricably linked to the body’s sensations. Not only can laughter function to offset the language of patriarchy, but it also functions to displace the language of heterosexuality. Judith Butler argues: “[T]here is a subversive laughter in the pastiche-effect of parodic practices in which the original, the authentic, and the real are themselves constituted as effect” (186-7). While this final part of her text Gender Trouble is commenting on the practices of drag, there are a variety of elements that are useful for my own argument. For one, Butler notes the potential for parodic practices to challenge the notion of an original, authentic, or real. That is, drag, a parodic practice, illuminates how hegemonic masculinity and femininity are themselves only effects. Laughter, directed at a parodic event, whether a drag show or other parodic performance, illuminates the absurdity of an original, natural, or authentic. The event of drag and other performances such as those presented by the Mickee Faust Club, an eclectic theater troupe in Tallahassee, Florida discussed at length in Chapter 3, foster an environment of laughter that interrogates narratives of sexuality and gender. Thus, this bodily laughter challenges not only practices of gender, but also showcases the failure of heterosexuality to be the natural referent (original, authentic, real). A second level of this parodic laughter that denaturalizes heterosexuality, then, is a radical disruption of the natural / unnatural binary, an essential element to the maintenance of the narrative of heterosexuality. The above two examples supported liminal laughter as a challenge to patriarchy and heterosexuality. Here, in my third example, I suggest that another element of liminal laughter is that of humor. This component, discussed in detail in Chapter 3, includes specifically feminist humor used in such as way as to expose, mock, and ridicule the institution of patriarchy. In that way, then, this third example is not so much separate from the above discussion, but it is another way to envision liminal laughter as challenging patriarchy. Bilger, examining three authors, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, argues that women’s comic writing is “radical and

9 subversive” in its focus on gender politics (9). For the purposes of this piece, I am interested in Bilger’s Chapter: “Defiant Laughter: Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Humor,” which analyzes Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. According to Bilger, the laughter that emerges within Wollstonecraft’s text is a critical laughter that offers exposure: Wollstonecraft’s treatise displays her talent for reading with critical laughter, particularly through the use of what Mikhail Baktin calls ‘parodic stylization’ – that is, she brings antifeminist voices into her text in order to expose their self-interest and to drown their authoritative pronouncements in female laughter. (44) Through female laughter directed toward male pronouncements on women’s conduct and education, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Emile, Wollstonecraft, in Bilger’s argument, tears at traditional narratives. In other words, the female laughter again, as in the example at the end of A Question of Silence, disrupts the narrative of patriarchy through a playful and humorous engagement with language. What Bilger does not mention is the body’s role in this laughter. For me that role offers a second level of exposure and challenge because it cements a critical engagement that relies, in part, on the body’s sensations and not solely on the rational mind. In my own reading of Wollstonecraft I have found a variety of passages that elicit female laughter in order to negate antifeminist voices. I suggest that these examples are also moments of liminal laughter. Granted, my conceptualization of liminal laughter does not require the component of comedy / humor; however, there are clear instances of feminist humor that function in the vein of liminal laughter by challenging the language of patriarchy. For example, Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication, writes: My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them, that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous

10 with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt. (“Introduction”) This passage, using humor and irony, explicitly engages with the language of patriarchy, specifically the language of Rousseau and others who, through a biologically determined argument, suggest that women are unable to acquire knowledge and learning in the same fashion as men. Wollstonecraft begins with a sarcastic comment, asking women to excuse her for believing them to be rational, a clear reversal of the dictates explicated in Emile. My laughter in this moment foments a bodily engagement with the critical project that remains linked to valuing the body. As this passage continues, Wollstonecraft brings attention to the language of patriarchy and how it is used to render women as objects of weakness and passivity. I am in agreement with Bilger, then, in seeing and hearing in Wollstonecraft’s playful and somewhat sarcastic tone a challenge to the authoritative voice of patriarchy which comes directly out of my own laughter. The feminist humor of Wollstonecraft, embracing a mocking and ridiculing tone functions as another example of liminal laughter. The final critic I look to for a theoretical understanding of laughter is Michel de Certeau because he offers a further frame for thinking laughter. Here, laughter is figured as a moment that opens the possibility for thinking differently – a burst of creativity. And, I suggest that this burst of laughter is a moment where the body demonstrates its interrelation to knowledge creation. De Certeau’s essay, “The Laugh of Michel Foucault,” proposes that laughter is generative in that it creatively inspires. According to Certeau, Foucault’s The Order of Things, emerged from an irrepressible laugh. Commenting on Foucault’s “bouts of surprise” that often led to his interest in different subjects and subsequent writings, De Certeau writes: “Something that exceeds the thinkable and opens the possibility of ‘thinking otherwise’ bursts in through comical, incongruous, or paradoxical half-openings of discourse” (194). In other words, Foucault’s inspiration to tackle such subjects as the condition of knowledge and truth through history from a radically new vantage point occurred through a laugh, a sudden moment, an ah ha, ha. De Certeau adds: “The philosopher, overtaken by laughter, seized by an irony of things equivalent to an illumination, is not the author but the witness of

11 these flashes traversing and transgressing the gridding of discourses effected by established systems of reason” (194). Thus, de Certeau suggests that Foucault, and presumably other thinkers (possibly Nietzsche, you, me?), find in laughter a power of revelation that functions to jolt the senses out of complacency. The jolt is inextricably linked to the body’s engagement in the production of knowledge. That is, the irrepressible laugh of Foucault or the laugh of the four women in A Question of Silence embody momentary flashes where a reversal occurs that destabilizes reason and established foundational narratives through the body. In the case of Foucault, his “laugh” fostered a fundamentally different method for thinking truth and knowledge. The laugh of the four women similarly disrupted the strictures of patriarchal language, the “established system of reason.” The Laughing Body The body2 remains a central contested component of feminism for good reason. Thinking back to the Cartesian subject or the necessary disinterestedness of Kant’s analysis of the beautiful, I am struck by the failure of a variety of philosophical approaches to think the body. Perhaps this failure is one of the many reasons feminism has subsequently denoted the body as a valid topic of theory. Or perhaps feminism’s interest stems from the traditional narrative that associates the body and passions with the feminine and the mind and reason with the masculine. Needless to say, theories of the body abound within a variety of diverse feminist frameworks including those that are tied to the disciplines of psychoanalysis, poststructualism, Marxism, and phenomenology. For example, many poststructuralist feminists3 often examine how the body is constructed through discursive modes, and this perspective will be analyzed in detail shortly. Even as far back as the mid-twentieth century there are feminist examples of body studies, specifically, with Simone de Beauvoir and her understanding of “body as situation” in The Second Sex. Later in this Chapter, I will discuss a few of these perspectives in order to suggest that the phenomenon of laughter offers a way to critically

2 I hesitate to write this word without quotes, as it is a highly contested term in a variety of different frameworks of which feminism is simply one. For the purposes of this essay, I eliminate the quotes. I use the term “body” to designate a site of resistance – it is to be understood as the corporeal body of drives and forces. 3 I recognize that these terms linked together denote a variety of feminisms oftentimes in direct contrast to each other. For a further discussion of the relationship between feminism and postructuralism see Linda Singer’s “Feminism and Poststructuralism” in Feminists Theorize the Political.

12 engage the narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy in a way that emphasizes the body’s positionality in a practice of resistance Given the continued interest in thinking the body and subjectivity, ethics, and politics, the driving questions of this dissertation are: What can a theory of liminal laughter add to previous feminist discussions about the body? And, what is the purpose of creating such a theory? Let us tackle the latter of the two questions first as the initial one is answered more specifically in the next section. Quite simply, my purpose in writing this dissertation is to argue that liminal laughter offers feminism a strategy of resistance that is inextricably linked to the body’s movement. As articulated above, this resistance comes in a variety of forms, including a laughter that challenges heterosexual and patriarchal language. Not only does liminal laughter challenge, but it also fosters the creation of new knowledges, myths, and narratives. For example, the laugh of Foucault offered just this moment of creativity and construction where laughter opened a space for thinking differently. Liminal laughter does not simply make one feel better, nor does it offer transcendence, or a utopian community of solidarity. What liminal laughter does offer, though, is a feminist intervention into language practices that attempt to erase and silence the body. I argue that liminal laughter neither succumbs to discursive indeterminacy nor does it remain mired, as much feminism does, in identity politics. In this I agree with Butler who asserts in “Contingent Feminisms” that identity “as a point of departure can never hold as the solidifying ground of a feminist political movement. Identity categories are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (15). Thus, my aim in creating this theory of liminal laughter is to locate a site of political articulation that revises the notion of articulation. My understanding of this laughter emerges from my own laughter, from my body. It is with my body and my laughter in mind that I began this project, a project that fosters a new bodily habit. Laughter -- by invigorating and enhancing feeling, touching, thinking -- illuminates a field of possibilities to conceptualize the body in resistance. Elizabeth Grosz, in an essay interpreting Nietzsche, offers a methodology for thinking that I translate to my own project: “Where philosophy, or what counts as truth, enhances the body’s capacities, enlarges its powers of becoming, intensifies the body’s sensations, makes it able to do other things in the world, such a philosophy is affirmative and

13 productive of the overcoming of [wo]man” (Grosz 61). That is, philosophy or a critical inquiry such as this examination of laughter should: a. offer insight into the varied ways in which the mechanism, the body, changes, morphs, and moves; b. support a project of becoming, a project that is affirmative, a project that recognizes the power inherent in the body’s knowledge; c. expand understanding of sensations including but not limited to feeling and touching; and d. showcase the abilities of the body, its potential. While Grosz’s conceptualization could be read in a variety of ways, I explain below how I envision a project of affirming the body’s capacities through liminal laughter. For me, the laughing body foments a moment for thinking the material- theoretical. That is, laughter affirms the body in such a way as to suggest a dynamic relation between the mind and the body that in no way eclipses or privileges one over the other. This moment does not simply put the body into discourse, but instead, is a moment where the material violence done to the body through the narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality is challenged. By laughing, the body affirms itself and its capacities, a reversal of the above narratives. What I am suggesting is that feminism needs further frameworks for making intelligible the body, and liminal laughter does just that. It offers another possible way of envisioning the body, its interactions, experiences, and sensations. All of the previous feminist frameworks offer important structures for thinking the body. There are feminist perspectives that have recourse to the biological in order to reassert the power of the female maternal body. Another perspective, phenomenological feminism, is tied to notions of embodiment and experience, whereas, poststructuralist feminism attends to the body in relation to materialization and discourse. There are feminists, such as Kristeva, that use Lacanian psychoanalysis to discuss the body and the Symbolic. Each of these unique perspectives adds another level and layer to feminism’s understanding of the body and its capacities. What I aim to do in this dissertation, through my conceptualization of liminal laughter, is expand on these theories in order to pose further questions, some tentative answers, and ultimately, argue for a practice of resistance. The rash of feminist perspectives that remain tied to creating ever more categories and definitions of identity often remain stymied. For example, Anzaldúa’s new mestiza posits a utopian transcendence through the creation of simply another

14 category of identity. Identity politics is mired in the masculine language of the either / or and us v. them, and thus significantly, the coalition building of many of these feminists simply reaffirms hierarchical structures. On the other hand, poststructuralist feminists, including Donna Haraway and her conceptualization of the cyborg and Butler and her understanding of performativity, break free from many of the limiting structures of feminisms rooted in identity politics. These theories often examine discursive constructs, which play a part in defining and determining the body and experiences. In a general sense, many of the poststructuralist theorists critically examine structures of discourse, language, and signification, which I find productive in that these examinations investigate institutions overlooked by other feminisms. Institutions such as capitalism, patriarchy, and heterosexuality and the narratives that surround these institutions are places where feminist insight must continue. Interrogation into theses narratives allows further discovery of how the body is, in some sense, constructed by and through them. For example, I find Butler’s idea that gender is performative important for a feminist political stance that refuses natural and authentic delineations of masculinity and femininity. My theory, though, of liminal laughter avoids a number of the limits of previous feminisms, and these are discussed below in more detail. For one, liminal laughter does not offer a perspective of transcendence which remains inextricably linked to an autonomous agent and has recourse to consciousness and awareness, nor does it offer a utopian vision of universalism that negates difference and the particulars. Liminal laughter does not offer a practice whereby the narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy will miraculously disappear into the ether. There is no “moving beyond” to a terrain free from the previous constraints and conditions. What liminal laughter does offer, though, is the possibility of transformation and overcoming in a small and local context. I do, however, want to bring back the notion of experience which Butler seems to find suspect, keeping, though, the radical critical engagement of discourse. In other words, I want to entrench my understanding of liminal laughter within the sphere of poststructuralist attention to how the body is mediated by and through discourse, but I also want the moment of laughter to substantiate a specific bodily experience that offers resistance. Yes, this might appear as an irreconcilable contradiction, but, as will surface throughout this dissertation, my understanding of laughter actually mediates these two positions.

15 Finally, liminal laughter does not have recourse to a new type of awareness rooted in consciousness or a new category of identity, as noted above. My aim here is not to belittle or minimize the wide array of productive theories that have emerged from many branches of feminist theory. Feminist theories revolving around identity politics offer much insight into the erasure of female histories, to silenced female voices, and to coalition building. Similarly, postructuralist theories extend many worthwhile critical engagements into areas of discourse that exist on a variety of often hidden levels, uncovering how social norms function to condition the individual. My aim is, however, to suggest that laughter, as a critical tool, cements a feminist aesthetic practice that is critical of the hegemonic narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy through the specific lived bodily experience of laughter. Unlike previous feminist theories rooted in poetry or other forms of writing or even in the performative moment of Butler’s drag, the corporeal moment of a decidedly feminist laughter performs a critical engagement through the body’s sensation. Butler’s discussion of drag as a performance of denaturalization offers a beneficial starting point, but, I suggest, that the laughter, surrounding these performances initiates the productive parodic moment. The laughing body during these performances challenges the categories of masculinity and femininity, thereby acknowledging the artificiality of social norms of dress and gesture that inform those very categories. I extend and expand on Butler’s notion of subversive laughter in order to posit liminal laughter as a subversive moment in its challenging, but also as a specific bodily experience that undermines traditional notions of articulation. Laughter, for me, is a moment of confluence where the intellect (the mind), the body, the social, and the discursive mesh. Laughter, I suggest, as it erupts forth from the body, is the catalyst for a creative moment of knowledge expansion. This knowledge creation could mirror the moment in A Question of Silence where the women laugh because traditional language does not and cannot adequately communicate the total disenfranchisement of their situation within the institution of patriarchy. Or the knowledge creation could be in the generative moment of Foucault’s inspirational laugh. Important though, in both of these diverse scenarios, is that the moment of laughter disrupts our understanding of how knowledge is traditionally created (reason, the mind) by supporting the capacity for a bodily knowledge. What occurs in these specific spaces

16 of laughter, I suggest, is critical for a feminist project of the twenty-first century for a variety of reasons. Firstly, as already articulated in the examples at the outset of this Chapter, laughter re-envisions the process of critical engagement. In this revision, laughter becomes the critical component, instead of reason and logic, components traditionally associated with critical investigationt. This revision subsequently demonstrates the importance of learning from and with the body. A critical and creative engagement that stems from the laughing moment, whatever that moment might look like, cements a feminist project that grounds knowledge, change, and challenge with the body. Secondly, as the body in the laughing moment becomes the source of knowledge, the tradition of dualism, whereby the mind is the privileged signifier in the mind / body binary, is torn asunder. To reiterate, the new method of critical engagement, instigated by the laughing moment, reaffirms the body’s importance, strength, and endurance. This process, then, subjects dualisms to serious interrogation, including dualisms such as the mind / body divide that presupposes other divides: active / passive, male / female, and subject / object. In one sense, the laughter that emanates during Kurt’s comedic performances radically reverses the binary of heterosexual / homosexual. Thus, the laughter supports a challenging of the natural / unnatural binary, a construction that helps to maintain the narrative of heterosexuality. In other instances, explicated later in this dissertation, the laughing moment alters the mind / body dichotomy. Learning from and with the body displaces the privileged term mind in the sequence. I find this particular task constructive for a feminism because it allows for a reassessment of the passive, feminine, and weak body that still conditions a number of societal norms. Not only does laughter allow for a transformation of traditional conceits surrounding the body, but this element works in conjunction with the above to re-value the system of knowledge acquisition, arguing for a specifically bodily method. My theory of feminist laughter, in specific moments as those noted above, is not a complete reversal of previous feminist conceptualizations, but intends, instead, to develop a methodology for generating questions and theories about the body. For example, I find Kurt’s stand-up comedy valuable for a critical engagement of the institution of heterosexuality, on one hand. On the other hand, I argue that the laughter

17 created from her comedy supports a powerful elevation of the body that reverses a masculine tradition of oppressing the body. The bodily laughter that emerges during the skit is on one level a laugh at the reversal, but it is also a laugh the “speaks” against the phrase “keeping it to themselves,” which forces the closet door closed, thereby maintaining silence.4 Through this elevation, I envision theories emerging that privilege a feminist aesthetic practice that is rooted in laughter. From that laughter, then, feminist concerns such as the problems of signification, language, and discourse are examined and interrogated. I tackle, in subsequent chapters, questions such as: In what specific ways does laughter engage with discourse and language? Why does feminism need to continue its vigilance toward these narratives? What does this “bodily knowledge” look like? How can laughter challenge the dominant tradition that privileges the mind and oppresses the body? The Body and Identity With laughter and its relation to the body briefly illuminated, I turn to feminist perspectives that revolve around poststructuralist and phenomenological conceptualizations of the body. The remainder of this Chapter examines three feminists whose work has been monumental in broadening and re-structuring the field of feminism within the last thirty years. For me, a twenty-first century feminism must remain thankful to all of the varied contributions, but must also branch out into new fields of possibility, and, here, laughter, I argue, is that possibility. As articulated above, laughter extends and expands a feminist tradition rooted in discursive analysis, but it also roots that analysis in the moment of the laughing body. Clearly, I am not attempting to return to a feminism of the 1970s that is solely dependant on experience at the expense of thinking discourse and larger institutional oppressions. What I am suggesting, though, is that any critical engagement of discourse and ideological structures must be tied to the body. The laughing moment offers just this tie. More specifically, it is not productive to only theorize about fluidity, denaturalization, disruption, and alternative languages without also offering a theory that demonstrates a bodily involvement. Feminism cannot solely

4 I use the term silence and silencing throughout this dissertation to refer to how the hegemonic narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality negate those that exist as the minority term in a given binary. This negation takes many forms such as the privileging of heterosexual narratives in the media, in children’s stories, in advertisements, etc. Silencing also occurs in various discourses such as psychoanalysis and medical narratives.

18 be about re-imaging concepts, or re-writing history, or forming coalitions, as these tasks maintain exclusion and hierarchical practices. Similarly, much feminism has been burdened with finding alternative language practices that reach outside or beyond institutions of oppression, heterosexuality, patriarchy, and capitalism. These practices often sidestep the question of the body and its position within those institutions. I discuss Anzaldúa and Wittig first, as both feminists offer examples of theorizing identity politics. I begin this analysis with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza for two reasons: to emphasize one feminist tract of thinking identity politics and secondly, to consider how Anzaldúa locates the body within her conceptualization. The focus, here, is on Chapter 7 “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness,” as it outlines her theory of the new mestiza. Upon first reading Anzaldúa years ago, I was persuaded by her theory of hybridity, existence in the margins, and blurring of boundaries. I found her theories important for questioning hierarchies of gender, race, and sexuality. However, rethinking Anzaldúa’s theories recently led me to a few questions: Does the creation of another category, the new mestiza, offer a significant challenge to other exclusionary categories of designation? Where exactly is the body in Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the new mestiza and the power of poetry? Is poetry an effective vehicle for blurring borders? Can laughter offer a practice beyond that of blurring? And what might that practice look like? Anzaldúa advocates for a feminist practice that brings subjects together under a new category, that of the new mestiza consciousness. I wonder, though, if simply creating more categories is productive: What does the proliferation of new categories offer feminism? Anzaldúa might answer that new categories disrupt and disturb the boundaries cemented by previous exclusionary categories of, as noted above, gender, race, and sexuality. She writes: “From these “crossings” emerges an ‘alien’ consciousness, characterized as “a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands” (99). This new mestiza consciousness, in other words, is a mixture of “crossings,” conceptualized here as geographical crossings of indigenous Mexican populations and North American populations, as well as the crossings of minority genders and sexualities. These crossings, of traditionally distinct boundaries, foment, for Anzaldúa, the new mestiza consciousness. My question remains

19 though: How does Anzaldúa envision this term consciousness? Where does the body fit into this consciousness? Is the new mestiza consciousness solely about an intellectual understanding of these varied crossings? I delve deeper into Anzaldúa’s text in order to pose further questions about the practice of the new mestiza consciousness, critical engagement, and the body. The “new mestiza consciousness,” according to Anzaldúa, blurs the boundaries between identities constructed around race and sexuality, and I contend that this blurring denaturalizes binaries of dominance (heterosexual / homosexual, male / female). I am, however, perplexed about Anzaldúa’s specific method for blurring and hybridizing. She writes, “The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended” (236). The new consciousness, then, is able to transgress the subject / object binary that locks individuals into either / or identities. In the phrase “the images in her work,” Anzaldúa is referring to poetry, which is the catalyst for the moment of disruption, and her own poetry, placed strategically throughout Borderlands, offers a cross pollination of different languages, different voices, and different images. For example, she writes, “Because I, a mestiza, / continually walk out of one culture / and into another, / because I am in all cultures at the same time, alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro […]” (99). Through poetry, Anzaldúa envisions the emergence of the new mestiza consciousness. First, I find this medium of poetry conceptually productive as it directly tackles questions of language and communication by undermining the tradition of reason, distance, and linearity and supporting a “writing” that is fluid, tangential, and involved. However, to tackle these structures, the very method of critical engagement, I suggest, must go beyond the written word, and must be seen and felt within the body. She is on the right path with her suggestion, from above regarding to “show in the flesh;” however, she does not expand on that sentiment. Perhaps a performative poetry would further Anzaldúa’s project? Laughter, unlike poetry theorized above, does not begin in a moment of consciousness where there is a posited subject who begins to come to terms with his / her crossings. Laughter does not begin with a “rational” individual who desires to piece together or at least think through a liminal space of border crossings. Instead,

20 laughter, as sensation, refuses a decidedly conscious position as it is an eruption coming through the body. I briefly explain further the mestiza consciousness, according to Anzaldúa, in order to examine her idea of a self and also to think about the place of the body in her concept of the new mestiza consciousness. Anzaldúa writes, “In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness – a mestiza consciousness” (101-2). In other words, the new mestiza consciousness transcends the “severed parts.” My concern here is with the term consciousness because arguably it maintains the hierarchical divide between mind and body, and I suggest, in order to efficiently challenge the institution of patriarchy, it is necessary to find means that do not continue that hierarchy. Shortly thereafter, Anzaldúa writes, “The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts” (102). I agree with Anzaldúa here that there exist splits, male / female and active / passive come to mind, that detrimentally affect our lives in ways that are divisive and exclusionary. However, is the answer to the problem of this split a new consciousness? No, I do not believe that a theory of consciousness is what feminism needs now; instead, what is needed is a theory that neither privileges the mind nor simply inverts the hierarchy to body / mind. Recent critics of Anzaldúa’s writing have also noticed a similar penchant for relying on consciousness in relation to knowledge creation. In “Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies and the Challenge of Mestizaje,” Christina Beltran, for example, writes, “In her desire to promote agency among real subjects experiencing real inequalities of power, Anzaldúa veers from the productive possibilities of contingency and crossings toward the solace of epistemic privilege” (606). I suggest that Beltran’s challenge of epistemic privilege relates directly to my previous contention about the reliance on consciousness. Again, what I see emerging from Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness is a theory that reifies hierarchies that privilege thinking over sensing or feeling. This mestiza consciousness, though a product of crossings and blendings, maintains a patriarchal narrative that focuses on language as written and the thinking, conscious mind.

21 To clarify, I am not suggesting that laughter will miraculously sever ties to oppression associated with race, class, sexuality, or gender. Nor am I suggesting that all laughter is somehow critical as racist and sexist jokes abound. But, my conceptualization of laughter, specifically, that detailed in the above examples, embraces a feminist aesthetic practice by grounding the notion of critical engagement within the body’s movement. Furthermore, laughter does not so much blur the boundaries of gender and sexuality, but it does call into question how those boundaries are policed through language quite similar to the opening example of Kurt’s humor. Moreover, laughter as critical engagement supports the needed move away from consciousness and toward the body. Unlike the reliance on the traditional understanding of the mind that the new mestiza consciousness supports, laughter, as a bodily moment, demonstrates the excess that refuses to be contained by patriarchal and heterosexual narratives. The Body and Transcendence My analysis turns now to Monique Wittig, the author of the seminal text Les Guérillères and the essays to be discussed here, “The Category of Sex” and “One is Not Born.” I am interested in Wittig as her feminist project revolves around assessing women as a social class through an examination of language and the category of sex. Many of her arguments are fruitful for my own project, especially her discussion of the category of sex as all-consuming and conditioning of not only mental production but the body as well. Where we differ, though, is in theorizing the possibilities of resistance to these deterministic categories. Moreover, though her project is markedly different from Anazaldua’s, I suggest that there exists a similarity between the two – recourse to consciousness and awareness at the expense of thinking a specific material resistance. I subsequently find Wittig’s conceptualization of the “lesbian,” a category of transcendence, which transcends the categories of “man” and “woman,” a fraught and unrealizable strategy for feminism. I point to Wittig’s conceptualization of sex as a category that radically conditions women’s minds and bodies because it offers further evidence of a need for my theory of liminal laughter. Wittig writes: “The category of sex is the product of a heterosexual society in which men appropriate for themselves the reproduction and production of women and also their physical persons by means of a contract called the marriage

22 contract” (6). Furthermore, the category of sex, according to Wittig, is “the political category that founds society as heterosexual” (5). She envisions the category of sex as an all-encompassing system that designates a secondary class for women. As such, I also suggest that the hegemonic narrative of compulsory heterosexuality, which keeps intact the category of sex, must be radically undermined whenever possible, and laughter offers one route for this undermining. I point to one more passage here to show how totalizing the category of sex is for Wittig in order then to suggest that laughter offers the possibility to resignify unlike the category of transcendence. She writes, “For the category of sex is a totalitarian one, which to prove true has its inquisitions, its courts, its tribunals, its body of laws, its terrors, its tortures, its mutilations, its executions, its police. It shapes the mind as well as the body since it controls all mental production. It grips our minds in such a way that we cannot think outside it” (8). This passage begs the question: What are the possibilities for resistance, if this category of sex is all-encompassing? I am also concerned with the latter part of the passage where Wittig, in my reading, suggests that the body is of a second order. That is, if mental production shapes the mind and the body according to the category of sex, is the body, then, unmediated by experience, sensation, and interaction? To a certain extent, I agree with how Wittig conceptualizes the category of sex, but I also argue that there are moments in which the cracks of that totalizing category can emerge and thus, laughter is a better method of resistance than transcendence. The above passage also suggests a privileging of mental production, i.e. consciousness. Again, I see Wittig as falling in line with Anzaldúa’s reliance on consciousness, though both do so through clearly different frameworks Wittig writes, at the end of “The Category:” “It [the category of sex] grips our minds in such a way that we cannot think outside of it. This is why we must destroy it and start thinking beyond it if we want to start thinking at all” (my emphasis, 8). Again, I am left wondering about the relationship of the body with / to this thinking. If our mind is in such a vise-like grip, how can feminists start thinking beyond it? Though this question will be answered in the following paragraph in my discussion of Wittig’s conceptualization of “lesbian society,” I pose it here to offer further justification for my own theory. Liminal laughter does not begin with thinking, which continues to privilege consciousness and the mind over the

23 body. In order to attempt to disrupt the Western tradition of mind / body, it is necessary to alter the terrain of resistance away from awareness and consciousness toward the body in all its manifestations. Liminal laughter, as a moment of critical engagement through the body, fosters a disavowal of this hierarchy by re-valuing the body as a knowing and learning entity. It is not, as Wittig would have it, mental production that through the category of sex shapes the mind and body, but instead, a relationship of confluence and complexity where each component feeds into the other. In concluding this discussion on Wittig, I move to her essay “One is Not Born a Woman,” which offers the concept of “lesbian society” as a category of transcendence. This construction moves beyond the concept of woman, the institution of heterosexuality, and the inequalities of the category of sex. I am quite at a loss to envisioning this transcendence given the place of the category of sex in her argument. What are the strategies for an implementation of “lesbian society?” How does one begin such a project? Is this an androgynous category? Wittig writes: “This [the destruction of the class of women] can be accomplished only by the destruction of heterosexuality […]” (20). While I am in agreement with Wittig’s task to destroy heterosexuality, the pervasiveness of the system will not be undone by transcendence. Instead, local practices of momentary disruption are, for me, a way to tackle the narrative of heterosexuality. Wittig characterizes “lesbian society” by writing: “Lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a ‘natural group’” (128). And she continues with: “One needs to know and experience the fact that one can constitute oneself as a subject, that one can become someone in spite of oppression, that one has one’s own identity. There is no possible fight for someone deprived of an identity […]” (314). For Wittig, then, the formation of a specifically “lesbian” identity manages to transgress the category of sex by radically altering the individual’s relationship to that very category. However, that practice of resistance negates the possibility of resignification. Butler correctly identifies the inherent problems within this conceptualization: “Lesbianism that defines itself in radical exclusion from heterosexuality deprives itself of the capacity to resignify the very heterosexual constructs by which it is partially and inevitably constituted. As a result, that lesbian strategy would consolidate compulsory heterosexuality in its oppressive forms” (163).

24 Coming from a materialist tradition, Wittig clearly desires to locate this resistance in the daily lives of subjects; however, I think there is a lack of attention paid to the specific material practices needed in order to move to “lesbian society.” Here, again, is where my theory of liminal laughter posits material practices of resistance. Liminal laughter does not promise transcendence of material reality. Actually, it does not promise anything quite so radical. Instead, liminal laughter is a strategy of resistance that demonstrates the excess, places of possible resignification. It is a practice that tackles the category of sex, as articulated by Wittig, but through transformation not transcendence. The Body and Experience I turn now to Toril Moi’s What is a Woman?, a decidedly different approach to thinking the body that is rooted in phenomenology. Moi suggests returning to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex5, notably, Beauvoir’s conceiving the “body as situation” in order to rethink categories of sex and gender. By examining Moi’s text which offers a strident critical engagement of poststructuralist feminism, I am able to elaborate on the above discussion, analyze a branch of phenomenological feminism, and further concretize my own project of thinking the body and laughter. For one, Moi posits a number of limits to poststructuralist feminism, specifically in relation to the level of abstraction necessary for that particular feminist project. Secondly, Moi’s phenomenological approach supports a framework of questions about the body that I find useful in their insistence on the embodied being. While I am persuaded by Moi’s paradigm on the level of founding critical engagement in material existence, the lived body, I am leery of her dismissal of poststructuralist feminist criticism. The following examination of Moi moves me closer to cementing an understanding of the body that is rooted in the material, in laughter, but that also remains faithful to poststructuralism’s challenge of language and discourse.

5 “While We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex,” an essay by Moi, describes the vast array of concerns surrounding de Beauvoir’s text in translation. “In French, The Second Sex is almost one thousand pages long. In English, there are mistakes and omissions on every page. Only a tome as long as the book itself could document all the flaws in this translation” (1006). For Moi, as for other critics who have examined the French and English versions in tandem, there are monumental mistakes that detract from the overall argument of the text. With this in mind, I rely on Moi’s interpretation of de Beauvoir for my analysis. There are, indeed, concerns implicit in this reliance; however, until a worthwhile translation appears, Moi’s analysis remains, for me, the authoritative one. A more recent essay of Moi’s “The Adulteress Wife” in The London Review of Books further comments on the complications of a new translation just out in November 2009.

25 Moi questions the usefulness of poststructuralism’s method of devising a theory for thinking the body, and she writes, “I have come to the conclusion that no amount of rethinking the concepts of sex and gender will produce a good theory of the body or subjectivity” (43). In other words, Moi argues that poststructuralism’s project, as it is mired in thinking and rethinking the concepts of sex and gender, fails to conceptualize material subjectivity and the body. According to Moi, the failure to conceptualize subjectivity and the self, as poststructuralism often does, negates the importance of the body as lived and experiencing. Moi extends her argument by contending that the seemingly endless train of abstraction, revolving round the sex / gender divide, results in “work that researches fantastic levels of abstraction without delivering the concrete, situated, and materialist understanding of the body it leads us to expect” (31). Thus, Moi calls for a theory of the body that is “concrete, situated, and materialist,” and she hopes to provide one through her examination of de Beauvoir (31). On the one hand I agree with Moi’s call for a material theory of the body; however, I also side with poststructuralist theory and the need to remain critical of the terms sex and gender considering the lived bodily oppression that stems from these terms. Let me explain with an example. Recently at my university, a friend has run up against the “bathroom dilemma.” She is transitioning from male to female, and the question about whether to use the room marked “Women” or the room marked “Men” assaults her everyday. In fact, she was asked to refrain from using the women’s restroom by a fellow colleague and supervisor. This situation, a very real situation, concerns these two terms in a variety of ways. Which bathroom should she use? Which bathroom makes her incredibly uncomfortable? What do the pictures that usually accompany bathroom doors represent? These questions revolve around the concepts sex and gender and their traditional definitions, and it is imperative to remain critical of these often naturalized terms as they continue to play a monumental role in influencing the lived body. Returning to Moi’s argument, she points to what I consider a major problem inherent in a number of feminist theories: the reduction, of everything, to sexual difference. This tendency is seen in the Wittig discussion above regarding the totalitarian system of the category of sex. Clearly, this reduction occurs, Moi contends, at the expense of race, class, nationality, among other components, and the reduction also has

26 serious consequences for theorizing the body. “All forms of reductionism implicitly deny that a woman is a concrete, embodied human being (of a certain age, nationality, race, class, and with a wholly unique store of experiences) and not just a human being sexed in a particular way” (36). In other words, the reductionism of Wittig disavows the concreteness of women’s experience. Moi explains: “The narrow parameters of sex and gender will never adequately explain the experience and meaning of sexual difference in human beings” (36). I wholeheartedly agree with the contention that sexual difference is not the determining factor of one’s lived experience, though, it is a significant part. Thus, what I abstract from this contention of Moi’s is the need to have a theory of the body that allows for the examination of a variety of components including those listed above, but one that does not reduce to only sex and gender. The conflicting feminist paradigms of Moi and Wittig point to the need for a space of laughter. In other words, Wittig does, in my understanding, successfully pose the category of sex as conditioning the mind and the body, but her tactics for resistance reveal a maneuver away from the material body. Laughter, then, functions to disrupt the category of sex, figured here as the narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality, while also remaining entrenched in a local strategy of resistance. I move now to a discussion of de Beauvoir’s conceptualization of the body, in order to frame a few of her arguments in relation to my own project. She writes, “Our bodies are an outline or sketch of the kind of projects it is possible for us to have, but it doesn’t follow from this that individual choices or social and ethical norms can be deduced from the structure of the human body” (40). In other words, the body, for Beauvoir and Moi, is a living complex entity that constantly and consistently interacts with its environment. The body is not a static vessel to be written on, a text to be deciphered. This phenomenological conceptualization states that the body is not mired in totalizing categories such as sex, gender, race, or class. The body, here, in this argument is a “sketch” and a “project.” Thinking of the body as a project, as a potential, radically revises the poststructuralist body. The body is an unfinished project -- body as process. De Beavoir notes: “The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and a sketch of our projects” (62).

27 My understanding of liminal laughter relies, in part, on the above conceptualization of the body as a project. That is, the laughing, experiencing body of liminal laughter requires a framework like the one posited by Moi and Beauvoir, and later, in chapter 2, this will be clearer in my discussion of overcoming and affirming. To clarify, the women’s laughter in A Question of Silence showcases the inability of traditional language structures to account for their lived, bodily experience under the narrative of patriarchy. That moment, though, suggests an excess, something that cannot be contained by patriarchy, which, in turn, suggests that perhaps the category of sex is not as totalizing as Wittig would have it. The moment of transforming laughter, in A Question, where the body transgresses and surpasses the patriarchal narrative of silence, is aligned with the above phenomenological standpoint. Furthermore, Moi assesses: “For Beauvoir […], the human body is fundamentally ambiguous: it is subject at once to natural laws and to the human production of meaning, and it can never be reduced to either one of these elements” (69). The body, in this conceptualization, remains fluid and indeterminate, and this indeterminacy is useful for my own project. To further illuminate these ideas of body as situation, Moi examines the concept “lived experience,” and I borrow this idea of experience for my own project, noting, though, the inherent concerns with the term experience6 as well as the existentialist underpinnings of a radical freedom. Moi writes: “My body is a situation, but it is a fundamental kind of situation, in that it founds my experience of myself and the world. This is a situation that always enters my lived experience” (63). For Moi and Beauvoir, then, the “body as situation” demonstrates the importance of the body, which weaves through experience and knowledge. Through the body and its interactions with the world, used here in the broadest possible sense, information is gathered, processed, and understood. The usage of the word “fundamental” from above leads me to a few questions: Does the phenomenological approach envision the body as a tabula rasa? Is

6 The notion of experience has received significant attention, namely in the writings of Joan Scott. Her essay “Experience” treats the concept of experience critically. She writes: “The evidence of experience works as a foundation providing both a starting point and a conclusive kind of explanation, beyond which few questions need to or can be asked. And yet it is precisely the questions precluded – questions about discourse, difference, and subjectivity -- […] that would enable us to historicize experience” (33). Though laughter stems from “experience,” it is a decidedly different type of experience than what Scott emphasizes in her essay. The moment of laughter does not preclude questions; instead, it is the very moment of laughter that induces questions about discourse, difference, and subjectivity.

28 the body a radically free entity? Moi explains: “The situation is not coextensive with lived experience, nor reducible to it. In many ways ‘lived experience’ designates the whole of a person’s subjectivity. More particularly the term describes the way an individual makes sense of her situation and actions” (63). “Lived experience,” then, is the umbrella term for all the complexities of existence. She continues with: “Lived experience is, as it were, sedimented over time through my interactions with the world, and thus itself becomes part of my situatedness” (63). In part, I suggest keeping this idea of situatedness as it creates a foundation for a feminist critical engagement that takes into account the body’s experiences as it affirms change and growth. However, I want to constrain this feminist approach by also suggesting that the radical freedom of phenomenology should be mediated by a clear poststructuralist intervention. That is, while the body is a situation, it is also mired in the larger structures of language, including the narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality. Liminal Laughter There are questions that remain unanswered here. How can laughter inform and / or add to the concept of situatedness? Is there a laughter that would be critical of Beauvoir and Moi’s interpretations? Where does laughter deviate from the phenomenological conceptualization of the body? I take a moment, here, to address some of these concerns and further articulate my understanding of laughter. I argue that laughter demonstrates a material situated critical engagement while also taking note of those structures important to any poststructuralist analysis. These two different strands of feminism will never merge in a happy marriage, but, I argue, liminal laughter is a new space where key components of both critical engagements remain prominent. Again, to use the example from A Question of Silence, the laughter evidenced at the end of the film arguably acts on two levels. Laughter focuses a critical engagement on the real and experienced exclusion of women, their physical and mental silencing through the narrative of patriarchy. The critical engagement emerges directly out of the material violence of that institution, and through laughter, the women are able to arrive at an articulation. It is through the situated laughing bodies of the four women that this articulation occurs, though it is a new type of articulation because it disrupts the structures of reason and logic and the mind / body binary. Liminal laughter challenges

29 both phenomenological feminism and postructuralist feminism by offering a third possibility that grounds critical engagement within the lived and experienced body while also remaining critical of discursive structures. Liminal laughter offers feminism a theory of resistance that challenges the narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy while simultaneously opening a space for new narratives of the body to emerge. The instances are varied and include comedy skits, films, and drag shows, as evidenced in this chapter, but there are also many other possible instances, for example, in theater performances and critical theory. What many of these instances all have in common is the element of parody, which is detailed in the next chapter along with a further explication of liminal laughter. Ruth Salvaggio, in The Sounds of Feminist Theory, posits a strategy for feminism: “It [feminist theory] has become a place where those of us who are rightly frustrated with the limitations of dominant and normative discourses do something other than create an oppositional language with its own rules and prescriptions” (5). My theory of liminal laugher does this something other.

30 CHAPTER 2 LAUGHTER AS TRANSVALUATION

Perhaps even laughter still has a future. Friedrich Nietzsche

In Chapter 1 I argued, through a look at a variety of feminist writings, that there is a need for continued attention to language practices, narratives, discourse, and truth, specifically in relation to how these systems erase and silence women and other minority communities such as Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, and Transgendered (GLBT) individuals. I also noted that there is a need to draw attention to ways such minority communities can be made more visible. These areas of inquiry are not yet exhausted, and an active engagement with a practice of laughter, I contended, expands and broadens a realm of resistance that offers an investigation of how the norms of patriarchy and heterosexuality condition the body. This practice of laughter I termed liminal laughter because it is a laughter that exists in the margins, on the threshold of many different disciplines, including comedy, literature, drama, and philosophy. It is a laughter that showcases the ambiguity of meaning and signification. Liminal laughter is a practice that emphasizes the power of the body to initiate and substantiate a new mode of critique. Chapter 1 covered a comedy show, a parodic performance, A Question of Silence, and Foucault’s laugh as theorized by de Certeau in order to provide concrete examples of liminal laughter. In conjunction with these examples, I argued that laughter has the potential, in specific instances, to engender a critique of the institutions of patriarchy and heterosexuality while simultaneously denaturalizing the language and values inherent in those institutions. Subsequently, I contended that a practice of laughter not only challenges traditional methods surrounding critical analysis, but that it also helps to foster alternative practices and narratives that refuse to maintain the binary of mind / body. As outlined in Chapter 1, liminal laughter offers much to a feminist aesthetic practice of the steeped in examining and challenging the structures that condition thought, action, and the body.

31 To define further and expand upon my understanding of liminal laughter, here in chapter 2, I turn to the writings of the nineteenth century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Throughout Nietzsche’s body of work, the term laughter emerges in relation to a critical methodology that examines language, narratives, discourse, and truth. These instances of laughter within the works of Nietzsche help to broaden my examination by cementing a framework for thinking a critical laughter that is essential for philosophy and any practice concerned with tackling supposed inherent and innate values, systems, and structures. In an essay covering Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg suggest that the untimely figures7 of his writings cement a methodology to attack prevailing cultural beliefs, and though they are specifically referencing these particular figures, their questions below also apply to laughter. They frame their discussion by asking: How does one go about opening up a space in which to think about that which typically demands no thinking and which is usually taken for granted by the prevailing culture? How does one think within a horizon that one wants to open up to critical scrutiny when the only modality of thought available to undertake this scrutiny is the very one being put into question? (12) How can the philosopher think in an untimely fashion? What are the difficulties in thinking other than what the current cultural spirit allows? Though Rosenberg and Hicks do not mention laughter specifically, I argue that one possibility for this “alternative modality of thought” is located in the laughing body. As I laugh, in certain instances of a critical engagement, I open a trajectory of sensing, feeling, and thinking that is inextricably linked to the body and its capacities. Many more recent critics, including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault among a variety of others, have opened similar horizons of alternative methods; however, I contend that Nietzsche’s laughter as a specific bodily moment of critical investigation opens a decidedly new horizon. These others, though offering feminism routes to think about how institutions maintain and

7 In Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche, discussing the untimely, writes: “It was thus truly roving through wishes to imagine I might discover a true philosopher as an educator who could raise me above my insufficiencies insofar as these originated in the age and teach me again to be simple and honest in thought and life, that is to say untimely […]” (133). That is, the untimely, a method, figure, philosopher, is thinking and sensing in a way that is not necessarily mired and rooted in the culture of the moment.

32 support systems of values, do not offer an accessible practice that demonstrates in concrete and evident ways a challenge to those very institutions through a bodily engagement. In other words, Nietzsche, as philosopher of laughter, opens up a space for how to think with / through the body that fosters a questioning and challenging of the prevailing culture on the scale of what Hicks and Rosenberg mention above, an alternative modality of thought. Similarly, many feminists ask questions regarding how to locate an alternative modality of thought. I pause here to examine Alice Jardin and Jane Flax, two seminal feminists, who ask about the possibility of locating these types of strategies. Jardin asks, in Gynesis, “What could be new strategies for asking new kinds of questions [for feminism],” and I argue that laughter is just such a strategy for asking questions (26). These questions, as noted above, pertain to how the structures of heterosexuality and patriarchy inform our behaviors, thought patterns, actions – our lives. Moreover, laughter, as a strategy also creates a concrete social practice that fosters critical engagement with various aesthetic mediums, from comedy to drama to literature through the body’s movement. Clearly, part of my project continues the avenues opened by many poststructural feminists who are invested in examining, as Joan Scott lists, language, discourse, difference, and deconstruction (34-38). My project is also aligned with Jane Flax’s characterization of Postmodern feminist philosophy in that it “reveals and contributes to the growing uncertainty within Western intellectual circles about the appropriate grounding and methods for explaining and / or interpreting human experience” (624). However, as I also noted in chapter 1, I am aligned with phenomenological feminism as well because laughter is a bodily moment of disruption that demonstrates the excess and focuses on the lived and experiencing body. Though I embrace many tenets of poststructuralism, I also want to create a solid, concrete, and material practice that challenges and opposes dominant trends in thought. Thus, it is to Nietzsche that I turn because he illuminates a unique methodology of a laughing political philosophy that emphasizes the importance of the body. Again, the theory of laughter that I borrow from Nietzsche challenges constructions of meaning, relationships of power and creates visibility and voice for silenced and erased communities. Nietzsche’s conceptualization of laughter is that of a powerful and critical bodily element, unlike, for

33 example, the way in which Freud conceptualizes laughter, illuminated in chapter 1, as release of repressed desires. Nietzsche understands laughter as a vital component to philosophy, inquiry, and creativity. The main argument of the chapter revolves around laughter as an integral component to the transvaluation of values, a practice that feminism must embrace to further its project of critical investigation into the narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy. I argue that transvaluation, the process whereby values are transformed, occurs initially at the level of laughter, and feminism can benefit from this laughter as it shocks and jolts the body into a mode of resistance. Though Nietzsche did not specifically equate laughter with transvaluation, a close textual reading of his works demonstrates how laughter is invaluable to the process of transvaluation. I begin with a thorough examination of the concept of transvaluation and how it is used within his writings. I then discuss how Nietzsche conceptualizes laughter as a creative and essential event for a philosophy of the future. Transvaluation, an integral component to Nietzsche’s overall project is inextricably linked to two of his other main concepts: elevation and overcoming also discussed in this chapter. Alongside the practice of revaluing concepts (transvaluation), almost hand in hand, laughter supports a project of elevation and the overcoming of traditional beliefs, and it is here that I suggest feminism can locate a practice for destabilizing tradition (hegemonic narratives of sexuality and gender). The second to last section tackles the relationship between parody and laughter, providing concrete examples of specific instances of transvaluation and overcoming. Nietzsche does not extensively discuss parody, but he does mention it in Beyond Good and Evil, and many critics are in agreement that his texts, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Genealogy of Morals, are themselves parodies. In sum, laughter, as theorized by Nietzsche, fosters the revaluation of concepts, systems of belief, narratives, and truths, cementing a practice of overcoming and affirmation, which, in turn, creates a foundation for thinking a twenty-first century feminist practice of laughter. Prior to delving into the main argument, though, I examine feminism’s rocky relationship with / to Nietzsche. I first examine two critics who critique Nietzsche’s misogynistic passages, and that analysis is followed by a look at how he uses woman as metaphor. This section continues with a look to Jacques Derrida’s Spurs: Nietzsche’s

34 Styles and Gayatri Spivak’s “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman” to examine how “woman” figures (as metaphor, as symbol, and as device) into Nietzsche’s writing. I conclude with a detailed examination of two critics who find in Nietzsche’s critical examination of Western rationalism a method for analyzing the institution of patriarchy. Subsequent to this section, I outline Nietzsche’s understanding of the body as a great wisdom because it is essential for my argument regarding laughter as the transvaluation of values. The laughing being, according to my readings of Nietzsche, focuses philosophy within the body. In other words, Nietzsche’s theoretical frame encourages validating knowledges that emerge from the “body’s reason.” The body, for Nietzsche, is not a passive vessel carrying around the intellect, but, instead, the body is a valuable source of knowing, feeling, and sensing, and laughter is one manifestation. In order to understand how the body, laughter, the transvaluation of values, overcoming, elevation, and parody function within Nietzsche’s writings, I outline the threads contained in his philosophical project. Nietzsche’s main works include The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Human All to Human (1878), Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Beginning with The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s examination of the Dionysian and Apollonian forces behind Greek tragedy that ends with his argument detailing the influential nature of Socrates on changing the tradition of Greek tragedy (Dionysian to Apollonian), he traces patterns of thought through a genealogical method. This method, an investigative technique that examines histories, including knowledges, beliefs, and values to challenge dominant assumptions, allows Nietzsche to arrive at somewhat radical conclusions regarding the progression of Greek drama. Though this example, at first glance, appears to have little to do with feminism and laughter; it, in fact, outlines the type and depth of Nietzsche’s critical investigation. My notion of laughter as transvaluation stems directly out of this genealogical method of interrogation that refuses to settle for traditional understandings and consistently pushes the boundaries of what is already supposedly known as fact and / or truth. I conclude this introduction by examining one of Nietzsche’s seminal texts, GM, to further support how his genealogical engagement raises specific questions that, though here relating to the nineteenth century, offer a possible model from which to begin

35 thinking liminal laughter. That is, laughter as transvaluation is a manifestation and expansion of the genealogical method’s critical engagement that disrupts traditional narratives. Though here these narratives revolve around religion and the values stemming from that institution, I contend his genealogical method of engagement should also be employed to tackle the narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy. Nietzsche begins by questioning the value judgments good and evil: Under what conditions did man devise these value judgments good and evil? And what value do they themselves possess? Have they hitherto hindered or furthered human prosperity? Are they a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life? Or is there revealed in them, on the contrary, the plenitude, force, and will of life, its courage, certainty, future? (GM: Preface, 3) Throughout GM, Nietzsche argues that the nineteenth century western values of good and evil emerged out of a non-linear trajectory in which previous understandings of good as noble, powerful, and wealthy and bad as low, common, and poor were transformed to their opposite. Through his elaboration on the reactive force of ressentiment, the process whereby the “bad” in the above equation came to signify the “good” and the good to signify evil, Nietzsche argues that the value of the good, understood in the nineteenth century (and perhaps now as well) as natural, innate, and inherent, is, in fact, a fairly recent phenomenon. Without delving too far into GM, I note that what I find essential here is the idea that meaning and signification morph radically, and values considered pre-determined, static, and natural often emerge out of specific relations. Nietzsche, working from a genealogical method, sees these changes on a broad level, which is couched in a complex historical process whereby no one thing determines the overarching structure of beliefs. Critic Douglas Smith supports my contention through his argument regarding the genealogical method: “According to Nietzsche, the present is not the culmination of the continuous development of a linear history; the present is rather the point of intersection of a number of different and discontinuous pasts” (28). The idea, then, that meaning and signification emerge out of different and discontinuous paths is one thread that permeates Nietzsche’s texts. In these brief summaries, one early work and one late, I demonstrate that Nietzsche’s overall project critically examines

36 events, including the emergence of new philosophical outlooks, changes in artistic expression, values, and norms, to theorize how and why these changes occurred. The genealogical method, implemented by Nietzsche, disrupts and destroys the notion of narrative cohesion and truth, and I similarly envision laughter as transvaluation accomplishing the task of questioning and investigating. Moreover, laughter as transvaluation moves beyond simply questioning, investigating, and attempting to fragment these narratives by actually also creating new values. Thus, I want to implement the genealogical method for feminist purposes in order to tackle the hegemonic narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality. Nietzsche and Feminism At first glance, pairing Nietzsche with feminism might seem rather implausible, considering that his writings contain a number of, what appear to be, derogatory comments regarding woman. Of course the most infamous passage is from TSZ: “You go to women? Do not forget the whip!”8 (“On Little Women Old and Young”). The criticism, beginning at the time of his writing and continuing today, contains critiques that envision Nietzsche as an asset to feminism, specifically regarding critiques of subjectivity, identity, and reason. On the other hand, there are those that see his misogyny as irreconcilable with / to feminism and also many perspectives that fall somewhere in between the extremes. Beginning his article “Who is the Ubermensch? Time, Truth, and Woman in Nietzsche,” Keith Ansell-Pearson writes: “On the level of overt pronouncements, Nietzsche’s views on woman are straightforwardly those of an aristocrat who sees male-female relationships and the social roles of each sex in strictly functional and unsentimental terms” (327-8). This statement enforces the point, which I agree with, that there are a number of levels on which to have a conversation regarding Nietzsche’s writings on woman, women, and the feminine. Ansell-Pearson subsequently notes, though, that: There can be found in Nietzsche’s writings a celebration of the ‘feminine’ and of woman conceived as sensuality, the multifaceted body, and passion, an affirmation which stands in marked contrast to the masculinist

8 It is important to note, here, that Zarathustra does not actually speak this quote. Instead, it is spoken by an old women to whom Zarathustra is asking questions.

37 tradition of Western philosophy which has erected the phallus of Reason in a position of superiority over emotion, desire, and passion. (327) Granted a number of questions emerge from this celebratory quote: To what end does Nietzsche employ the feminine? Yes, he seems to put a somewhat positive spin on conceptualizing the feminine for his own overall philosophical project, but is this really beneficial for feminism? Is this celebration simply re-affirming the feminine as that which is outside the tradition of the rational? Is this good / bad / neutral? Are there productive ways in which feminists could use Nietzsche for projects examining language, discourse, identity, and the subject? Or does his overt misogyny negate any possible usage? I tackle these diverse questions and more in the below paragraphs in order to paint a complex and, at times, contradictory perspective regarding Nietzsche, woman, and the feminine. I begin with the arguments put forth by Ellen Kennedy and David Booth in order to critically engage with the misogynist assumptions often thrown Nietzsche’s way. Subsequently, I introduce the oft noted contention that Nietzsche uses “woman” as metaphor for his own philosophical project without much consideration of the historical context of “woman” or the “feminine.” To briefly introduce this idea I point to Eva Feder Kittay’s “Woman as Metaphor” and then move to an examination of Gayatri Spivaks’s “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman.” The latter piece investigates Jacques Derrida’s Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles and offers a critique that, though not mentioning metaphor, critically assess Derrida’s and Nietzsche’s employment of “woman” as a tool for their respective projects. Finally, this section concludes with a look to two critics who envision Nietzsche as beneficial for / to feminism. As will be clear at the end of this section, Nietzsche was, indeed, stuck in many misogynist conventions of the nineteenth century and unable, himself, to overcome his own ressentiment related to “woman” and the feminine; however, I maintain that his propositions regarding laughter as transvaluation, demonstrated through elevation, overcoming, and parody, support a twenty-first century feminist project critical of language, discourse, truth, and narratives. One of the main feminist contentions with Nietzsche is regarding his overtly anti- woman passages. I look to two critics, here, to discuss his misogyny and to also argue

38 that, though these passages exist, they do not negate Nietzsche’s possible contribution to feminism. Furthermore, I argue that occasionally the passages quoted are interpreted without contextualization and therefore fail to accurately represent Nietzsche’s theories. As Ellen Kennedy notes in “Nietzsche: Women as Untermensch,” “he is […] the founder of peculiarly modern patriarchy and the inventor of one of the crassest and most subtle misogynies” (198). She comes to this conclusion after pointing to a number of different passages from BGE and Ecce Homo (EH) regarding women and emancipation. One of her examples, from EH comes from the following quote: “Emancipation of women – that is the instinctive hatred of the abortive woman, who is incapable of giving birth, against the woman who has turned out well” (186). While reading this passage does, at first, belie an extreme hatred toward women, I would like to offer an alternative reading of this passage that moves away from Kennedy’s initial charge of misogyny. Another way to understand the above quote is as a critical engagement with the notion of ressentiment. After Kennedy’s quoted passage, Nietzsche, in EH, writes: “At bottom, the emancipated are anarchists in the world of the ‘eternally feminine’ the underprivileged whose most fundamental instinct is revenge” (267). Notice how he uses “the emancipated” suggesting that the term is applicable to both men and women. Instead of focusing on the rhetoric of one or two randomly selected passages, as Kennedy does, it is essential to read the entire paragraph, section, book in order to garner a clearer understanding of the passage in question. Again, I am not suggesting that there are no misogynistic passages in Nietzsche, but I am arguing that taking passages out of their context paints an inaccurate picture. Similar to Kennedy, David Booth in “Nietzsche’s ‘Woman’ Rhetoric: How Nietzsche’s Misogyny Curtails the Implicit Feminism of His Critique of Metaphysics” suggests that “the revaluation of all values is truncated by the misogyny he [Nietzsche] never overcame” (312). Booth continues with: Beyond the rhetorical employment of ‘Woman.’ therefore, Nietzsche’s philosophy converges with feminist concerns through its affirmation of plurality and change as opposed to identity and moralism. And yet the fulfillment of Nietzsche’s philosophical course is blocked by his own abiding misogyny. (321)

39 In other words, there are aspects of Nietzsche’s writings that might benefit a feminist project, but his overall misogyny erases that possibility. Again, I agree that there are definitely misogynistic quotes within Nietzsche’s texts, but I want to suggest that there are also elements – overcoming, elevation, laughter, affirmation, becoming – that feminists can use to subsequently dismantle the philosophical tradition that even Nietzsche with all his anti-philosophical posturing could not overcome. The other critique launched at Nietzsche is a bit more complex than the previous examination as it concerns his use of woman as metaphor for his own philosophical project, and I find this particular critique quite valid in light of a long standing tradition that conceptualizes woman as other for a variety of reasons. For example, he begins BGE with: “What if truth is a woman?” This passage, in direct contrast to his misogynistic musings, sets up a relationship between woman and truth, and bespeaks the questions: What are we to make of this particular quote? How does Nietzsche understand the term “woman?” What is the relation between truth and woman? The article “Woman as Metaphor,” by Eva Feder Kittay, though briefly mentioning Nietzsche, points to a larger tradition in Western philosophy and critical thinking that uses the figure of woman as other in order to posit what is outside that very tradition. Kittay argues: As woman are the Other, mediating for men between one stage of life and the next, between the familiar and the new, so Woman serves symbolically, through metaphor, to mediate man’s conceptualizations between himself and those alterities he must encounter. (65) Her essay revolves around this argument, and in making it, she points to Nietzsche along with Plato, Rilke, and Locke as individuals who use “woman” in this manner. In other words, and thinkers alike have used “woman” to signify truth, the other, the beyond, etc. for their own philosophical arguments. I am persuaded by this argument, especially as evidenced in passages from BGE. Though this argument must be acknowledged before implementing Nietzsche for a feminist project concerned with the very question of language and discourse, I argue that the seeds of the destruction of “woman as metaphor” exist within his actual writings. In other words, and this is emphasized shortly, Nietzsche’s conceptualization of transvaluation, the process of

40 revaluing values, could, in fact, be used as a tool to challenge his usage of “woman” as metaphor. Gayatri Spivak makes a somewhat similar argument in her essay “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” regarding the usage of “woman” as figure in Jacques Derrida’s Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, an examination of Nietzsche’s own use of “woman.” While I do not want to delve too deeply into Derrida’s text, here, suffice it to say that through a deconstructive approach Derrida tackles the ideas of writing, style, and woman, and he begins with: “It is woman who will be my subject” (37). “Woman” for both is a rhetorical device, a placeholder of sorts. Spivak writes, in regards to this implementation of “woman:” “It is my suggestion, however, that the woman who is the “model” for deconstructive discourse remains a woman generalized and defined in terms of the faked orgasm and other varieties of denial” (170). That is, deconstruction’s usage of “woman” as a tool to tackle discursive constructs, including the very concept “woman,” sustains a tradition that unquestionably and uncritically benefits from the woman as other conceptual frame. Spivak concludes: “It is rather an awareness that even the strongest personal goodwill on Derrida’s part cannot turn him quite free of the massive enclosure of the male appropriation of woman’s voice, with a variety of excuses” (190). I agree with Spivak’s interpretation of Derrida and tangentially of Nietzsche. The metaphor or rhetorical device of “woman” glosses over the complex historical context of the very term and maintains a long philosophical tradition, going back to Kittay’s argument and including the traditions of humanism and psychoanalysis among other discourses that uncritically employ “woman” as other or truth or lack, etc. I turn now to two critics in order to substantiate the argument that, read in a certain manner, Nietzsche offers, in his genealogical method, much for a feminist critique of patriarchy and other regulatory regimes. Keith Ansell-Pearson’s essay “Women and Political Theory” asks if Nietzsche’s critique of Western rationalism can be extended to patriarchy, and I, along with Ansell-Pearson, answer with a resounding: Yes. Ansell- Pearson writes: Nietzsche’s thinking contains an emphasis on ambiguity, on plural identity, on the affirmation of the constructed self in terms of an artistic task in which one freely gives ‘style’ to one’s character, all of which can

41 be useful for articulating a feminist mode of thought which seeks to subvert an essentializing of human identity whether female or male, and which would simply efface ‘difference’(s). (31) While Ansell-Pearson’s article presents the question of how Nietzsche’s thought might be used to denaturalize categories of the feminine, the above quote also pertains to laughter. That is, laughter, in certain contexts, helps to showcase the absurdity of a natural and / or innate identity. For example, this idea of subversion is located within Butler’s argument, examined in chapter 1, regarding subversive laughter in drag. Her suggestion, though briefly noted, is that laughter denaturalizes any inherent feminine or masculine and questions the very practice of gender. Similar to Ansell-Pearson, Kristen Brown, in “Possible and Questionable: Opening Nietzsche’s Genealogy to the Feminine Body,” writes: “Nietzsche’s ‘Second Essay’ [GM] does not explicitly expose the concept of natural woman as a mistake. But by revealing the concept of the ‘unified’ subject (natural man) as a mistake, Nietzsche’s critique extends to the concept of natural woman” (53). Though, as noted at the beginning of this section, Nietzsche is criticized for his misogynistic perspective, it is clear that his writings do have much to offer feminism. In conclusion, the criticism of Nietzsche regarding his writings on women span a wide spectrum that encompasses a vast array of thoughts and arguments, and, here, I have only begun to brush the surface. Regarding the misogynistic argument, though, I agree that there are passages that demonstrate a serious dislike for women, and those should be clearly critiqued. However, those passages do not negate the fact that Nietzsche has much to offer feminism, and, in some circumstances, the passages considered misogynistic, in fact, contain alternative readings that are not misogynistic. The arguments regarding the usage of “woman” as metaphor and / or rhetorical device comprise valid critical engagements that must continue to be made. Booth, one of the critics mentioned above, closes his article with a clear framework for thinking about Nietzsche and feminism: “Yet Nietzsche – feminist and misogynist – remains our colleague, and as we might with another colleague, we can ask what to take from his thought in an attempt to press his dissolution of other-worldly metaphysics forward into a dissolution of phallocentrism” (322). In agreement with Booth, I contend that Nietzsche, though unable himself to transvalue certain nineteenth century traditions of thought,

42 offers feminism a method that can help tackle the structures of patriarchy and heterosexuality through a radical new mode of critique that embraces laughter and the body. Nietzsche and the Body Before moving to the main argument, I analyze Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the body because he revalues the body in such a way as to include it as a sensing, feeling, knowing entity in his creation of an alternative modality of thought. The body, as I have articulated, is a key component in my theory of transvaluative laughter, and I pause, here, to offer Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the body as it informs all of the subsequent concepts and practices. While there is no succinct theory of the body offered in any one text, snippets do exist that, pieced together over an array of works, suggest a radical theory of the body grounded in sensations and drives. His theory of the body is also a clear example of the transvaluation of values as, throughout many different works, Nietzsche attempts to elevate the body to a position of power and knowledge and remove it from its secondary status below the mind. He writes: “I have asked myself often enough whether, on a grand scale, philosophy has been no more than an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body” (GS: Preface). Thus, in one of his early books, GS, Nietzsche begins to question how philosophy has thus far engaged with the body, suggesting that the engagement has mistakenly substituted consciousness for the body. Later in GS, he tackles conscious thought directly: For the longest time, conscious thought was considered thought itself; only now does truth dawn on us that by far the greatest part of our mind’s activity proceeds unconscious and unfelt; but I think these drives which here fight each other know very well how to make themselves felt by and how to hurt each other. (GS: Book Four, 333) Here, then, Nietzsche begins to cobble together an examination of conscious thought as thought itself, by arguing for an approach that views the body as a multiplicity of drives. In other words, there is no dualism in Nietzsche, no binary of mind / body. Instead, he suggests that we are made up of drives, conflicting different forces that operate simultaneously within the body. For me, this conceptualization refuses to privilege any one component whether that component is the mind or the body or something else.

43 Nietzsche’s framework for thinking the body disavows a hierarchical perspective and avoids essentializing any element. Furthermore, the notion of the drives focuses attention on the body and its varied forces. Elizabeth Grosz contributes to this particular discussion in “The Stomach for Knowledge” where she succinctly articulates her understanding of Nietzsche’s body: “Rather it [the body] can be understood as a series of surfaces or energies and forces, a mode of linkage, a discontinuous series of processes, organs, flows, and matter” (52). This understanding of the body is important for twenty- first century feminism because, as articulated in Chapter 1, the body often falls to a secondary position in feminist discussions of consciousness, awareness, and identity, as noted in my examples of Anzaldua and Wittig. While these individuals offer much for thinking feminist poststructural and phenomenological approaches to the body, I want to extend and expand on them in order to envision the body as a surface of energies of which laughter is one possible flow. Without recreating any hierarchy, I advocate for an understanding of the body in line with Nietzsche and Grosz because I want to develop a corporeal feminist practice of investigation that not only disrupts but also creates. The idea of the body as energy and force also lends support to my argument regarding liminal laughter because, in this conceptualization of the body, laughter materializes as a creative bodily force. Nietzsche, in TSZ, offers further evidence for conceptualizing the body as a valuable and knowing force in the section titled “On the Despisers” as he continues to revalue the traditional religious and philosophical understanding of the body. He writes: “But the awakened, the knowing one says: body am I through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is just a word for something on the body” (I: “On the Despisers”). This is immediately followed by: “The body is a great reason, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, one herd and one shepherd” (I: “On the Despisers”). In other words, the very conceptualization of the soul can only emerge directly in relation to the body. The body, for Nietzsche, is a “great reason,” and by this statement, he suggests that the body plays a fundamental role or perhaps is the fundamental component of not only thinking, but feeling, sensing, and laughing. Roe Sybylla, in her essay “Down to Earth with Nietzsche: The Ethical Effects of Attitudes toward Time and Body,” argues that “Nietzsche values laughter as the highest form of the body’s reason” (327). While

44 laughter is, without a doubt, a form of the body’s reason, whether Nietzsche would argue that it is the highest I cannot say for sure. However, laughter, for the purposes of this dissertation, is the focus, as it is through laughter that the process of the transvaluation of values occurs. In other words, laughter is one manifestation of the body’s great reason, and it is the form of interest here for my specifically feminist project for a number of reasons. On one level, laughter is what enables the revaluation of the body to occur. With this revaluation, through laughter, then, the body emerges as a knowing entity that invests challenging and disrupting with the corporeal, and thus allows for a radical alternative method of investigation. Again, I contend that this liminal laughter fosters a new engagement that enables feminism to challenge patriarchy and heterosexuality not through reason and logic, tools of those institutions, but, instead, through the body. Sybylla writes subsequently: “Laughter, for Nietzsche, is the greatest (bodily) affect because it throws off the spirit of seriousness that looks regretfully or rancorously to the past, and mocks at the false pretensions of self and others. Laughter, then, is a way – the best way – of overcoming ressentiment against time and subjection to embodied values, habits, and memories” (327). I am leery, again, of using “the best” to create an unsubstantiated hierarchy within Nietzsche’s writings; however, Sybylla’s argument that laughter is a way to overcome traditional values, habits, and memories is fully in line with my understanding of liminal laughter. She is correct in asserting that laughter offers a type of play, often during a parodic or ironic moment, that cements a critical practice subjecting values, habits, and memories to mockery. I want to subject the norms of gender and sexuality, those that perpetuate the binaries of mind / body, subject / other, and natural / unnatural, to this playful, ironic, parodic laughter – liminal laughter. Laughter as Transvaluation Building on Sybylla’s notion that laughter is part of Nietzsche’s concept of the body’s great reason and the process of overcoming, I turn to my argument regarding laughter as the catalyst for the transvaluation of values. Transvaluation of values, a process whereby concepts are forced into a rigorous examination, is a creative act that emerges out of liminal laughter. Though not explicitly illuminated throughout Nietzsche’s texts, laughter, as I will show, is an integral component to theorizing the usage of transvaluation as a process to fundamentally challenge the hegemonic narratives

45 of patriarchy and heterosexuality. To begin, Gary Shapiro offers a clear definition of transvaluation: “The creation of new metaphors and the destruction of old ones is the activity of transvaluation itself” (171). Thus, transvaluation is a twofold procedure. Part one interrogates and challenges traditional “metaphors.” Part two of the process occurs where new metaphors are created, and though, here, I have divided transvaluation into two processes, they, in fact, occur simultaneously. Built into this very notion of transvaluation is Nietzsche’s concept of overcoming, which poses a constant process of revaluing, thereby negating the possibility that the new metaphors or myths will become sedimented. What, though, was Nietzsche hoping to respond to through this process of transvaluation? Manuel Dries, in “On the Logic of Values” offers a possible interpretation: “The motivation for Nietzsche’s transvaluation project is the problem of nihilism” (31). While I agree to an extent that initially transvaluation of values was created to combat nihilism, I also suggest that the very process can be applied to any structure of values that portends to universality and has, at its heart, life-negating values. George de Huszar supports my point when he writes: “They [new values] must be means for the enhancement and affirmation of existence, and not means to escape from it” (264). On a similar note, Dries argues that: “New values can no longer be ahistorical, absolute, and universal. Instead, they are constructed and therefore in principle always revisable” (44). That is, the values that emerge from the transvaluation of values are radically new in that they are formed considering context, the particular, and they remain open to questioning and ultimately a further revaluing. Furthermore, Dries writes: “In order to successfully ‘transvalue’ values, the internal logic according to which values and valuation function needs changing” (40). Thus, transvaluation also alters practices of logic, and I want to alter the logic that cements the binary of natural / unnatural, deviant / norm. To be more specific, the moment of laughter as transvaluation alters the logic of hegemonic narratives of gender and sexuality that exclude, silence, and erase. Moreover, de Huszar argues that “To Nietzsche the transvaluation of all values is not an intellectual problem – it is something to be experienced” (268). Again, the transvaluation of values through laughter is a corporeal experience, and one, I argue, that can, in light of my conceptualization of liminal laughter, encourage a challenging and questioning of the

46 values associated with patriarchy and heterosexuality and the ahistorical, absolute, and universal narratives that surround those institutions. The two texts to be discussed here, GS and TSZ, fall in between BT and GM, though it is notable that Nietzsche wrote very highly of his own work in TSZ.9 GS is a lengthy discussion, in a round about way, of the need for a method of inquiry that moves away from the philosophical tradition steeped in seriousness, reason and logic toward a more light-hearted, laughing, and bodily infused one, specifically a gay science (wissenshaft). Science, here, refers not to simply physics or biology, but to all methods of study including the humanities. His project, in GS, is critically to examine eighteenth and nineteenth century patterns of thought including those influenced by religion, the Enlightenment, and German Romanticism through aphorisms that often contain contradiction and paradox. While Nietzsche is concerned with institutions and structures of the nineteenth century, his particular mode of critique is what I borrow for my feminist project. To be more specific, GS, is an example of how parody and laughter are integral components to a philosophy of the future, as they are necessary to initiate transvaluation of all values. Thus, it is through Nietzsche’s methodology in GS that I began to develop a similar project of transvaluation, specifically in regards to the institution of patriarchy and heterosexuality. Williams’ Introduction to the volume of GS used here succinctly summarizes Nietzsche’s aims: “[GS] does not in the first place consist of a doctrine, a theory or body of knowledge. While it involves and encourages hard and rigorous thought, […], it is meant to convey a certain spirit, one that in relation to understanding and criticism could defy the ‘spirit of gravity’ as lightly as the troubadours, supposedly, celebrated their loves” (x-xi). Williams’ summary of GS as advocating a lighthearted spirit that tackles the doom spewing “spirit of gravity,” sometimes figured as a creature that weighs down the world with moral valuations, supplements my argument as it is laughter that I see defying the “spirit of gravity” and mounting an attack on the ethics of the nineteenth century. In a similar vein, TSZ also offers a variety of critiques concerning

9 In EH, Nietzsche writes: “Among my writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by itself. With that I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever been made to it so far. This book, with a voice bridging centuries, is not only the highest book there is, the book that is truly characterized by the air of the heights – the whole fact of man lies beneath it at a tremendous distance – it is also the deepest, born out of the innermost wealth of truth, an inexhaustible well to which no pail descends without coming up again filled with gold and goodness” (219).

47 religious values such as morality, good and bad, notions of the body, as well as thorough examinations of his main concepts, eternal recurrence, the overman, and affirmation, through the protagonist Zarathustra. For example, “On the Despisers,” noted in the above section “Nietzsche and the Body,” mocks the traditional viewpoint of the body as conceptualized through a religious vantage point. Again, through laughter and parody, Nietzsche is able to re-value the body from its understanding as a vessel for the mind to a powerful and knowing entity. Moreover, TSZ, using an odd amalgamation of philosophy and narrative, chronicles Zarathustra’s journey as he meanders through woods and towns, mountains and valleys, looking for disciples at times and looking for silence and solitude at others. Though not specifically mentioning Zarathustra, critics Hicks and Rosenberg argue that alternative myths and figures play a large part in Nietzsche’s writing: “Nietzsche thinks his own transvaluative attempts to formulate nonascetic counterideals for a late-modern age will first have to appeal to alternative myths and figures in order to be accepted and understood” (20). I extend Hicks and Rosenberg’s argument to suggest that the laughter of Zarathustra also fosters acceptance and understanding of the process of transvaluation. I begin the subsequent analysis with GS, though, because it offers a more general perspective on laughter and the transvaluation of values, whereas TSZ, with which I conclude this discussion, offers numerous specific examples of the transvaluative power of laughter in conjunction with elevation and overcoming. Laughter and Philosophy Laughter, as theorized by Nietzsche, transvalues the very notion of philosophy, by inserting the body, the laughing body, into a traditional practice reserved for intellectual (mind) pursuits. The first aphorism of GS, “The teachers of the purpose of existence,” argues for laughter as an integral part of philosophical inquiry. Laughter, envisioned in this way, revalues an otherwise serious discipline, philosophy, thereby manifesting “a gay science.” The passage challenges previous thinkers and philosophers alike: “What is the meaning of the ever-new appearance of these founders of moralities and religions, of these instigators of fights about moral valuations, these teachers of pangs of conscience and religious wars?” (GS: 1). Thus, the opening of GS proposes a radically different methodology of philosophy away from moral valuations, the “Oughts and Becauses” (GS: 1). Nietzsche also notes that these teachers do not want us to laugh: “To be sure, in

48 no way does he [philosophers and priests – the teachers of existence] want us to laugh at existence, or at ourselves – or at him” (1, original emphasis). Why this imperative not to laugh? It is because laughter disrupts these traditional valuations by making them absurd and ridiculous -- laughable. In arguing for a gay science that fosters laughter, Nietzsche writes: To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth – for that, not even the best have had enough sense of truth, and the most gifted have had far too little genius! Perhaps even laughter still has a future […]. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only ‘ gay science’ will remain. (GS 1:1) He envisions an alliance between laughter and wisdom that will alter the terrain of knowledge conventionally determined by priests and philosophers, the teachers of existence. This new terrain, permeated by liminal laughter, encourages a critical engagement that emerges from the body’s great reason. A “gay science” is a methodology for a future philosophy, one that questions and challenges, disrupts and destabilizes. Subsequently, Nietzsche writes, “Laughter still has a future” (GS: 1.1). In other words, this new alliance, formed through laughter and parody enables the transvaluation of values, challenging and creating. Specifically, by implementing this practice of liminal laughter, as evidenced throughout GS and Nietzsche’s other texts, feminism embraces a bodily method of examination that radically opposes the dictates of mind / body. GS not only advocates for a new philosophy (a gay science), but it is, in and of itself, that new philosophy, and as will be clear shortly, I argue feminism must embrace a similar method of critical parodic laughter. In order to showcase the laughter that I borrow for my feminist project, I examine GS a bit closer here. The thread of laughter that runs throughout the text in conjunction with the detailed questioning and examining, I argue, acts as an example of the transvaluation of values. In other words, throughout GS there are a variety of different places where laughter emerges subtly and not so subtly through comparisons, conjectures, and critiques. By inserting laughter, sarcastic, parodic, or humorous, into his writing, Nietzsche creates a new bodily philosophy that moves away from those approaches that are devoid and dismissive of laughter and are unable to

49 envision laughter as critical. This critical component of laughter, whether in a drag show or a parodic theater troupe, manifests a new type of engagement that demonstrates the interrelated components of mind, body, and analysis. The Epilogue of GS includes a laughter that is similar to yet distinct from the opening laughter. Nietzsche writes: But as I finally slowly, slowly paint this gloomy question mark and am still willing to remind my readers of the virtues of reading in the right way […] it strikes me that I hear all around myself most malicious, cheerful, hobgoblin-like laughter: the spirits of my book are themselves descending upon me, pulling my ears and calling me to order” (GS: 383) Nietzsche is called to order by a “hobgoblin-like laughter” in the final moment of GS, and I read this passage as an injunction to take the previous pages with a playful, lighthearted sentiment because the notions there might need to be overcome as well. In this closing moment of laughter, I envision Nietzsche laughing, chuckling to himself, and thinking about revaluation. This laughter, like the laughter from the first aphorism, further substantiates a philosophical practice that relies on laughter to keep the process of revaluing ongoing. Even the author, here Nietzsche, must remain at a certain distance in order to question his own words. The very end of the Epilogue concludes with a puzzling question: “Is this what you want?” The reader is left wondering: Who does the “you” refer to in this statement? Nietzsche? The reader? Regardless of the answer, the sentiment remains: Laughter is essential to a Nietzschean reading of any text as, if nothing else, by taking the object of inquiry a little less seriously, the reader is more open to new understandings and new knowledges. Though laughter remains a thread throughout GS, the epigraph concisely and coherently illuminates laughter as a requirement, an element essential to any textual engagement. The epigraph for Part I of GS includes the following: “This house is my own and here I dwell, / I’ve never aped nothing from no one / and – laugh at each master, mark me well, who at himself has not poked fun. / Over my front door” (1). Nietzsche, here, propositions the reader to laugh at not only the text (GS) that follows, but at any text or “master” who has not made fun of himself. Readers and learners alike, according to Nietzsche, must remain at a humorous distance, thus avoiding a doctrinal relationship and maintaining a critical perspective. The injunction, to me, is: Don’t take works too

50 seriously. By sustaining this practice of laughing with / at texts, the reader is able subsequently to not only question, but also to create new understandings. The above quote is only one part of a practice of laughter as evidenced throughout GS; however, it showcases a specific methodology that advocates for the body’s laughter as a moment of knowledge. In other words, laughter demonstrates how the body is part of reading and interpreting, two tasks usually held to exist only in the mental / mind realm. This bodily participation transforms traditional critical engagement, and this transformation alters the terrain of examination. The above example, of Nietzsche’s laughter, enjoins the reader to laugh – at texts, at Nietzsche, at the reader’s own writing. Again, this specific practice of laughter, an aesthetic practice, fosters an openness and fluidity toward texts, authors, and ideas that is important for continued contestation. My final examination of transvaluation and laughter, before moving to the interrelationship of elevation and overcoming as they relate to transvaluation, begins with “On Old and New Tablets” in the Third Part of TSZ. Made up of thirty aphorisms, this section, though not specifically mentioning transvaluation, further substantiates a practice of laughter as integral to revaluing or, in Nietzsche’s words, the breaking of old tablets (“Break, break me these old tablets, you seekers of knowledge!”) and the creating of new ones (7). I examine this practice to showcase a methodology for feminism to engage with the old tablets of patriarchy and heterosexuality. The section begins with: “Here I [Zarathustra] sit and wait, old broken tablets around me and also new tablets only partially written upon” (III, Old and New Tablets: 1). In some sense, this section is a re- examination of the First and Second Parts of TSZ, and laughter emerges as a technique of overthrowing, breaking, and ultimately creating: “And over clouds and day and night I even spread laughter like a colorful tent” (3). That is, as Zarathustra speaks his wisdom regarding the body, the conceit good and evil, among a variety of other topics, he simultaneously sprinkles a practice of laughter throughout his teachings. Nietzsche writes: “I told them to overthrow their old professorial chairs wherever that old conceit [good and evil] had sat; I told them to laugh at their great masters of virtue and their saints and poets and world redeemers” (2). Clearly, the mention of great masters, here in TSZ, mirrors the epigraph of GS as well as the above discussion on the teachers of the purpose of existence. Again, through laughter these old conceits, read values, that are

51 life-negating are radically questioned and challenged. In other words, those values that are associated with limiting knowledge, creativity, pleasure, and insisting on stability, coherence, and the importance of the mind over the body are all to be transvalued. Nietzsche subsequently writes: “I told them to laugh at their gloomy wise men and at any who ever perched in warning, like black scarecrows, in the tree of life. / I sat down alongside their great road of graves and even among carrion and vultures – and I laughed at all their yesteryear and its rotting, decaying glory” (2). While these visions appear abstract and complex, the point to take away is that laughter permeates the teachings of Zarathustra. This particular laughter enables the process of transvaluation to occur in order to tackle the professorial chairs, the great masters, the gloomy wise men, and the decaying values of yesterday. Moreover, this laughter often becomes, in some sense, a type of madness: “And often it [wild wisdom / longing] swept me off my feet and up and away, in the midst of my laughter” (2). The laughing, raucous Zarathustra, then, learns from his laughter; it is what gives him wisdom, a wisdom that comes through the body and is not beholden to reason. Toward the end of this section, Nietzsche writes: “And let each day be a loss to us on which we did not dance once! And let each truth be false to us which was not greeted by one laugh!” (23). In other words, each “truth” must be greeted with a laugh because that laugh fosters the transvaluation of values. That laugh is the catalyst for change, revision, and new tablets. Critic Russell Ford, in “Tragedy, Comedy, and Parody: From Hegel to Klossowski,” also notes the importance of laughter, specifically in relation to the doctrine of eternal return: “By taking simulation seriously in the creative contemplation of eternal return, Zarathustra plays upon this doctrine – upon all doctrines – and thereby affirms the impulsive laughter that shocks consciousness into new constellations of thought” (45). Granted the laughter I envision is a bodily laughter that moves away from the realm of consciousness, but I do agree that the impulsive laugher of Zarathustra offers a shock that propels the creation of new thought. The shock of laughter is also what I extend to my conceptualization of liminal laughter, and I show, in the subsequent chapters, how this laughing shock challenges binary thinking, authority, the subject, identity, and the idea of an original, which overall offers a way to destabilize the institutions of heterosexuality and patriarchy. Elevation and Overcoming

52 The below section examines how the transvaluation of values is an integral component to elevation and overcoming, two interrelated concepts of Nietzsche’s. I use TSZ and BGE, in my argument, to provide an in-depth examination of how these concepts work alongside transvaluation and are thereby also linked to laughter. I begin with a look at how the transvaluation of values brings about elevation and how laughter functions as a transformative element. To be more specific, Zarathustra, throughout the text, is weighted down by various constructions, good v. evil, the despisers of the body, and the teachers of sleep, among others. The weight, figured occasionally as the spirit of gravity or an abstract heaviness, blocks Zarathustra from creating his own values for himself. Nietzsche writes: “But only the human being is a heavy burden to himself! This is because he lugs too much that is foreign to him. Like a camel he kneels down and allows himself to be well burdened” (“On the Spirit of Gravity:” 2). That is, the various systems of belief, the Becauses and Oughts from above, force Zarathustra to think, act, and sense in a particular manner that fosters life-negating values, whereas he wants to locate a practice of affirmation. The concept of affirmation is rather difficult to pin down and articulate; however, the concept refers to an outlook or perhaps a perspective that affirms life, existence, the body, and it is also a position that refuses an afterlife, one that focuses attention on the here and the now. In other words, it is an adamant Yes! to life. While here I am not concerned with a thorough investigation of affirmation, it remains a crucial thread that is an integral part of elevation and overcoming. Through a re-valuation of narratives, “tragic plays and tragic realities,” Zarathustra, using laughter, challenges beliefs that denigrate the earth and the body, and ultimately, he becomes lighter. In this way, I want to re-value the narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality that similarly denigrate the earth and the body. Zarathustra says: I no longer sympathize with you; this cloud beneath me, this black and heavy thing at which I laugh – precisely this is your thundercloud. / You look upward when you long for elevation. And I look down because I am elevated. / Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time? / Whoever climbs the highest mountain laughs at all tragic plays and tragic realities. (28)

53 The black cloud, the heavy thing, is, according to the text, the system of values in place in the nineteenth century, specifically those associated with religion including the defining morality, including the conceptualization that the body is a vessel for the mind. While I am not, here, tackling the nineteenth century’s value systems, the above example provides a practice of laughter that investigates the life-negating values present during Nietzsche’s time. I contend that the values of patriarchy that perpetuate binaries of exclusion are also life-negating values, and thus, this practice of laughter, illuminated by Nietzsche, will force a reconsideration of these and offer new affirmative values. What occurs, regarding laughter, in this quote is two fold. Firstly, laughter is that which allows Zarathustra to recognize how the system of values of the nineteenth century is limiting and ultimately determined by ressentiment. Through laughter, Zarathustra is able to view the longing for heaven, an afterlife, as a particular conceptual framework that forsakes the present, the here and now, and the body. Therefore, laughter transforms the ideal of looking upward, to heaven, to, instead, valuing the earth and the body -- “You look upward when you long for elevation. And I look down because I am elevated.” Secondly, laughter is associated with elevation, an elevation which relates to the body and the transvaluation of values. Laughter, then, destabilizes and disrupts a tradition that negates the body as a source of knowledge and wisdom, and in doing so is also able to call into question all of the values associated with that particular tradition. Though Zarathustra is speaking to specific nineteenth century traditions, there is a correlation to my feminist project regarding liminal laughter. This laughter of elevation, of creativity, bespeaks a critique that stems from the body and that dares to laugh in the face of supposedly pre-determined and innate systems and structures. For example, the feminist laughter of A Question of Silence or the subversive laughter noted by Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble, are both examples of a daring, challenging, radical laugh that embraces the transvaluation of values. Similar to the previous idea of elevation, the concept of overcoming emerges clearly in TSZ specifically in relation to the overman. The overman (or more appropriately the overperson (ubermensch)) is a concept explored briefly at the beginning of TSZ, but, by the end, the overman dissipates because Nietzsche realizes he is simply substituting one doctrine for another. The practice of overcoming, though, remains

54 crucial. This practice relies on the ability to surmount traditional values and norms that disavow life.10 In Nietzsche’s context these values would include those associated with Christianity, specifically, values of good and evil that detract from life affirming values. In the case of this dissertation, the values that I envision interacting with the process of overcoming are those which silence, erase, and limit minority communities; those values associated with the narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality. One key component of the process of overcoming is the ability to view, with a critical eye, the diverse systems that construct and maintain notions of the self, consciousness, truth, and values. I suggest that laughter in the service of transvaluing is one possible way in which to create a practice of overcoming, and notably, this process never ends; there is always something to overcome. A theme that permeates TSZ is that of going under and going over, which I see as another way to articulate overcoming: “What is lovable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live unless by going under, for they are the ones who cross over” (Part I, Preface, 4). That is, once something is overcome, there is still a need to re-examine and revalue, to continue the process of overcoming. Overcoming, similar to the idea of elevation above, is transformative. In the below passage from Part III of TSZ, Zarathustra witnesses a process of transformation. The laughing, transformed being is, at least according to the text, the one who has grasped, through much toil, the concept of eternal recurrence. While the passage relates to the specific transformation that occurs after coming to the realization that all will return eternally, the idea of a transformed illuminated being applies to other instances. The transformed being, for me, is anyone who, through laughter, recognizes the need for a continued vigilance toward entrenched and limiting structures of oppression and who wants to destabilize foundational narratives in a life-affirming manner. This process of transformation is another component of liminal laughter. Zarathustra says: No longer shepherd, no longer human – a transformed, illuminated laughing being! / Never yet on earth had I heard a human being laugh as he laughed! / Oh my brothers, I heard laughter that was no human laughter – and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that will never be still. / My

10 For a specific example of transformation see TSZ’s “On the Three Metamorphoses.”

55 longing for this laughter gnaws at me; oh, how can I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die now! (127) The quote suggests that the shepherd is a transformed laughing being and that this new type of being is desirable, as Zarathustra longs for the laughter associated with the transformation. Overcoming, the process whereby one begins to question life-negating tradition and the truth of values and narratives, is one element of this transformation. To be more specific, at the beginning of TSZ, Zarathustra states that man is a bridge, which signals that the person is a continual becoming. The person is not a static entity, but is, instead, a morphing, transforming being, and this process known as becoming is encouraged through laughter. In the same way that Nietzsche enjoins his reader to laugh at masters and texts, the laughter here fosters a sense of continual growth, change, and openness. The shepherd becomes something other through his laughter. While this process is not specifically articulated nor are the consequences born out within TSZ, I argue that laughing, in specific situations, broadens the individual’s capacity for knowledge and demonstrates the body’s reason, by illuminating the potential of laughter to encourage alternative thinking. The transformation can occur in even the simplest of moments such as reading a parodic text or watching the stand-up comedy of Elvira Kurt. Correspondingly, a passage from BGE argues for a golden laughter, a super- human laughter that also helps to support my understanding of liminal laughter, and the following passage posits a clear definition and articulation of Nietzsche’s laughter by suggesting that philosophers who laugh should be ranked above those who do not. He writes: “I would go so far as to allow myself a rank order of philosophers based on the rank of their laughter – right up to those who are capable of golden laughter” (“What is noble?” 293). Thus, laughter, for Nietzsche, remains clearly linked to any type of philosophical endeavor; critique must include laughter. Subsequently, he writes: “And given that even gods philosophize (a conclusion I have been drawn to many times --), I do not doubt that they know a new and super-human way of laughter – at the expense of everything serious!” (BGE: “What is noble?” 293). These two notions of laughter, golden and superhuman, demonstrate how laughter meshes with Nietzsche’s concepts of affirmation and overcoming. Philosophy and laughter must go hand in hand, according to my reading of Nietzsche, because laughter, as noted above, initiates the process of the

56 transvaluation of values, which in turn supports a project of overcoming life denying values and ideals. The process of overcoming, breaking up the old tablets and writing new ones according to the phrasing in TSZ, substantiates Nietzsche’s concept of affirmation because the reactive forces of ressentiment are pushed out and the active forces of weighing and valuing are confirmed. A philosophy of golden and superhuman laughter, then, alters the terrain of philosophy by incorporating the body, the laughing body, and by fostering an alternative method of critical engagement that continuously revalues itself. This alternative modality of thought is exactly what I borrow from Nietzsche for a feminist practice of liminal laughter. Parody Nietzsche, in a very brief excerpt from BGE, discusses laughter and parody. Thus, in my final argument for this chapter, I look to the possibility of parody as offering a specific example of one way to initiate the transvaluation of values. This particular discussion will be further illuminated in chapter 3 when I discuss the Mickee Faust Theater troupe, an eclectic group of actors from the GLBT community and differently- abled communities in Tallahassee, Florida and in chapter 4 when I examine the works of Hélène Cixous. Nietzsche, in BGE, specifically mentions parody and laughter, which further solidifies my framework for thinking a practice of liminal laughter. He writes: Perhaps it’s that we still discover a realm of our invention here, a realm where we can still be original too, as parodists of world history or buffoons of God, or something like that, -- perhaps it’s that, when nothing else from today has a future, our laughter is the one thing that does! (BGE: “Our Virtues,” 223). The phrase “parodists of world history” appears to me as a call to action to invent and create parodies as they support a practice of laughter. Again, laughter is figured as essential to a future philosophy, but here that philosophy also includes parody as a mocking and joking project of value questioning. Similarly, Hicks and Rosenberg write: “The philosophers of the future are the ones who will be constantly looking forward, defining and redefining themselves in and through the immanent critiques and self- consuming parodies provided by the figurative exemplars they experiment with” (22). Thus, this new philosophy, one that I want to manifest through a feminist lens, must

57 embrace the form of parody as critique. Laughter, instead of offering simply a method of critique, offers a new aesthetic practice that embraces play because the body becomes a foundational element in this parodic laughter while reading, viewing, or thinking . In sum, parodic laughter is the future not only for Nietzsche but for a feminism of the twenty-first century because laughter, as an aesthetic practice of invention, helps feminism to move away from identity politics, reliance on consciousness and awareness, and writing to a space of sensation, parody, and play. To borrow Butler’s words, this practice of parodic laughter is a “local strategy for engaging the ‘unnatural’ [that] might lead to the denaturalization of gender,” and I extend this claim to include many other conceits that fall under the structures of heterosexuality and patriarchy (190). Prior to offering an example of how I envision laughter and parody functioning, I look to Nietzsche’s actual works as parodies themselves. In doing so, I maintain that, though Nietzsche did not write much about parody specifically, he embraced the overall project of parodic gestures. George McFadden, in his book Discovering the Comic, dedicates an entire chapter, “Nietzschean Values in Comic Writing,” to an analysis of how parody plays out in Nietzsche’s works. McFadden offers a succinct elaboration on parody: Critics have helped us to realize that parody – not a genre in itself but a reflective way of playing with genres that exploits a sure but critical sense of their generic characteristics – is the most prevalent formal principle in the comic writing of the modern age. (180) He supports this contention with examples from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to Eliot’s “Waste Land” to Cervantes’s Don Quixote. This analysis relates to the current discussion because McFadden argues that TSZ is itself a parody. According to McFadden, TSZ is a parody of: the ‘life and saying of holy men,’ Luther’s German Bible, the German language, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Last Supper (182). McFadden continues with: “Laughter is a sign of strength in Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (183). I suggest that through parody Nietzsche challenges the ethical valuations of the nineteenth century. McFadden’s following argument also supports my contention: Nietzsche [sets] up the laughter of Zarathustra as the laughter of freedom from all this [weight, spirit of gravity] […] This form of humor […] is

58 based on instincts that are pur and cru, that is primitively and puritanically destructive of the accretion of conventional modes of behavior; and it can be both crudely and cruelly ridiculous. (199) Thus, McFadden sees the laughter that permeates TSZ as a laughter of freedom from the restricting and restraining moral code in place. By parodying the wise men, the holy men, and the teachers of these valuations, readers (and Zarathustra) are able to laugh and mock an ethics that denies the body among other life-negating elements. Similarly, Smith, noted above, envisions GM as a parody: “On the Genealogy of Morals reads like a parody of the methodological procedures of comparative philology” (30). I look, here, to one outside example of a parodic rewriting of a traditional narrative in order to examine how laughter and the transvaluation of values function. I argue that one possibility for a practice of parodic laughter encompasses a probing of hegemonic narratives of gender. Let us take the narrative of Cinderella as conceptualized in the children’s story Cinderella and also in adult stories such as the film Pretty Woman as an example. The traditional narrative posits the passive female who waits, patiently, for the active male to rescue her. In an alternative humorous telling of the Cinderella story, The Paperbag Princess, the princess, Elizabeth, saves herself and the prince from the dragon and walks off by herself at the very end, subverting the dominant heterosexual and patriarchal narratives. This subversion, I contend, occurs through the laughter encouraged by parody. The act of laughing or the practice of laughing at this retelling fosters a position critical of the traditional boy meets girl narrative that includes the active / passive male/ female binary. The laughter that emerges, in this example, results from mocking and ridiculing the firmly grounded narrative traditions of heterosexuality and patriarchy. I suggest that it is the laughing body that initializes and sustains the subversion or, in Niezsche’s words, the transvaluation of values. In other words, it is the laughter emerging directly from the body, in this parodic moment, that initiates the disruption. And thus, not only does The Paperbag Princess story destabilize meaning and signification in relation to the written word, but it also challenges the very process of traditional investigation by locating that analysis within the body. Therefore, laughter and parody together, in this example, solidify a practice of the transvaluation of values that challenges patriarchy and heterosexuality while also simultaneously revaluing the

59 body. Yes, to a certain extent the laughter generated relies on recognizing a specific code; however, that recognition does not negate the possibility of destabilization. Butler notes, and I am in agreement with her, in her example of the parodic practice of drag, “Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization” (176). As suggested above, Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the transvaluation of values is essential to a feminist practice that is rooted in destabilizing the hegemonic narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy. Through the process of defining and redefining and then questioning those definitions (transvaluation), the “original” meaning emerges as constructed, opposed to natural and innate. This process has ramifications for a twenty- first century feminism that, for example, questions the natural v. unnatural binary regarding heterosexual and homosexual marriage, as heavily critiqued in the Elvira Kurt skit noted at the beginning of Chapter 1. Though not directly commenting on laughter, Cynthia Kaufman, in “Knowledge as Masculine Heroism or Embodied Perception: Knowledge, Will, and Desire in Nietzsche,” also suggests that Nietzsche’s theories can be accessed in order to critique systems of privilege. She writes: “In terms of other discourses of power, Nietzsche’s theory is helpful to theorists of sexuality by encouraging their suspicion of theories that privilege the agon of heterosexual binarism as a necessary foundation for passionate desire” (84). That is, Kaufman asserts Nietzsche’s writings, as they foment an analytical perspective regarding privileged systems of either / or, can be used, for example, to question the erasure of homosexual desire, and laughter, I contend, is at the core of this destabilizing of foundations. For example, the laughter exhibited during Kurt’s comedic performance, specifically, when she humorously reverses heterosexual privilege, offers at least one possible route to embracing Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values and conceptualizing alternative narratives. A Laughing Philosophy: Conclusion I conclude Chapter 2 with Elizabeth Grosz’s conceptualization of philosophy, via her interpretation of Nietzsche. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, Grosz’s analysis of Nietzsche clearly articulates philosophy as practice, and secondly, her frame mirrors my own desire for a practice of laughter. She writes, “Philosophy is not a

60 reflection on things or concepts from a transcendent position; it is a practice that does things, legitimizing and challenging other practices, enabling things to happen or preventing them from occurring” (59). In other words, philosophy is, to use Nietzsche’s words, an active creative force that affirms life. Grosz subsequently notes: “Far from being contemplative reflection, philosophy is a consequence of the drive to live, to conquer, a will to power that is primarily corporeal. Philosophy is a product of the body’s impulses that have mistaken themselves for psyche or mind” (59). Philosophy, figured here, is not an academic discipline that postulates from a safe tower somewhere. Instead, philosophy, according to Grosz and Nietzsche, is derived directly from the body’s impulses, from living, from becoming. A practice of laughter, similarly, is a consequence of the drive to live, a drive that encompasses transvaluation, overcoming, and affirmation. In closing, I point to GS, specifically a passage toward the end that sets the groundwork for my next chapter. Nietzsche writes, “Every , every philosophy can be considered a cure and aid in the service of growing, struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers” (GS, V: 370). That is, art and philosophy, though often thought of as distinct disciplines, together can create an aesthetic practice that supports elevation and overcoming, thereby affirming life. Moreover, a philosophy of the future will include laughter as a practice of that affirmation. Hicks and Rosenberg note that the philosopher of the future “is a comic substitute or stand-in a ‘comedian of the ascetic ideal’ – who generates laughter at what others take to be serious, and who embodies a lightness of being that […] provides the only antidote to date to the advent of nihilism” (26). Though I am not tackling the ascetic ideal here or nihilism, the comic, in a general sense, generates a laughter that tackles the weight of structures: patriarchy and heterosexuality. Critics Hicks and Rosenberg further suggest: Through their experimental figurative critiques and self-parodies, they [Nietzsche’s body of work] evoke the promise of alternative human possibilities – different ways of thinking and acting that enhance life, while simultaneously undermining these suggestion from within (via laughter and self-irony) so that we do not take them seriously in the wrong way as specific truths and dogmas to be embraced. (27)

61 Similarly, I contend that parodic texts such as those mentioned above and including The Mickee Faust Club and stand-up comedians, through a practice of liminal laughter, cement a possible transvaluation of values. A feminism of the twenty-first century, concerned with transvaluing patriarchy and heterosexuality and practicing overcoming and affirmation must embrace this aesthetic of laughter, as laughter fosters new languages and new narratives that disavow pure reason and logic and instead revolve around the body. Finally, a future feminism, somewhat similar to the philosopher of the future, with the aim of disrupting and destabilizing language, narratives, discourse, and truth must embrace liminal laughter as a political social practice.

62 CHAPTER 3 LAUGHTER AS TRANSVALUATION IN THE MICKEE FAUST CLUB

A typology of actions would clearly not suffice, for parodic displacement, indeed, parodic laughter, depends on a context and reception in which subversive confusions can be fostered. Judith Butler Here’s to THE BODY in all its messed up, mixed up glory. Pamphlet for Mickee Faust

Through an in-depth examination of Nietzsche’s works, the previous chapter argued for the feminist benefits of an implementation of a practice of liminal laughter. I argued that this specific type of liminal laughter, a bodily laughter configured in the margins, fosters the disruption and destabilization of patriarchal and heterosexual narratives, thereby calling into question language, discourse, narratives, and truth. This practice of laughter begins with the body, specifically the body as force, sensation, and drives as Nietzsche conceptualizes it in many of his texts. Moreover, my examination of Nietzsche’s TSZ demonstrated how laughter is one possible component of the body, and it is this laughter of the body that I extract, from his philosophy, in order to support my argument regarding the potential of laughter for feminism. Subsequently, I argued that a practice of laughter, a parodic practice of laughter, not only makes visible minority communities, but that it also enables a form of articulation that remains inextricably linked to the body, which, in turn, provides a methodology for denaturalizing language and values, the transvaluation of values. I pointed to a variety of examples of the transvaluation of values as envisioned by Nietzsche, and though many of the examples related to specifically nineteenth century issues and concerns, I argued that the process of laughter as the transvaluation of values can and should be applied to a feminist practice. I noted in the “Laughter as Philosophy” section of chapter 2 that laughter offers a possible way to rethink philosophical inquiry because laughter as transvaluation triumphs

63 over the spirit of gravity, the weight of life-negating values. The mocking, ridiculing, lightness of this laughter celebrates elevation, overcoming, and ultimately, affirmation. While this practice of laughter initially offers a destructive challenge to patriarchy and heterosexuality, it also contains an element of construction, creativity, and revaluation. That is, not only does liminal laughter offer a method of investigation for how these structures condition and determine, but it also suggests a possible alternative ethical framework from which to envision new values. Whether this practice of liminal laughter is in the moment of the parodic gesture of drag, as envisioned at the end of Butler’s Gender Trouble, or within a critical theory text such as Cixous’ rewriting of the Medusa myth in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” or within a literary example, it is a political gesture of resistance that stems from the laughing body as a moment of articulation. In order to cement my theory of a practice of liminal laughter, here in chapter 3, I turn to The Mickee Faust Club as an example. Prior to discussing the reasoning behind this example and how it demonstrates that very practice, I provide background information. The name derives from a combination of Mickee, spelled M-I-C-K-E-E, as to, the members say, not be sued by Disney, and, of course, Goethe’s Faust. The troupe, founded by Donna Marie Nudd and Terry Galloway, began in 1987 in Tallahassee, FL though Galloway, had started a number of other troupes, including Esther’s Follies and Shakespeare at Windale in Texas and a few small companies in New York. Originally, the troupe was a small grouping of individuals, meeting in different people’s living rooms to rehearse and perform at a local venue, The Warehouse, whenever a performance came together. Slowly, though, the Club began to attract more voices and a fan base, affectionately referred to as the Fauskateers. By 1998, the troupe had a clubhouse in Railroad Square, Tallahassee, a space consisting of art galleries, local shops, and restaurants. Faust now has regularly scheduled performances two to three times a year, each with a distinct title and theme. The members are an eclectic cast representing a broad cross-section of the Tallahassee community, from LGBT and disability awareness organizations to Florida State University professors and students. The Club and its leader, a cigar smoking rat, storm their stage with performances covering a variety of topics. For example, the spring 2010 show, creatively interpreting many of Shakespeare’s more well-known scenes, was “Sex, Beer, and Shakespeare,” and

64 the fall 2010 performance revolved around the elections and the BP oil spill and was appropriately titled “Apocalypse Faust.” Though these topics have come a long way from Galloway’s beginnings of parodic renderings of Bergman films, what they all have in common is humor and parody. As Nudd notes, through an email interview, the first shows had more of Galloway’s writing, including “Jake Ratchett, Short Detective,” a parody of film noir and detective fiction and “Women of Ravensmadd,” a parody of Gothic novels. Nudd remarks: “In the first half of Faust, there was always a variety of skits (some political, some literary, some pop culture, some just bonkers, some just silly). Each of those shows might lean a particular way, and when they did, it reflected mostly what was happening at the time” (Interview). Performances, from then till now, include parodies of films, televisions shows, and the occasional parody of feminist theorists, including Judith Butler and Camile Paglia. More recent performances have included parodic representations of Florida’s governors and numerous other political figures, including George W. Bush, Laura Bush, and Sarah Palin. Many skits also revolve around current concerns of abortion right, gay rights, the state of the economy, and funding for education. According to the article “Mickee Faust Club’s Performative Protest Events,” authored by Kristina Schriver and Donna Marie Nudd, “The group’s political messages range from the urbane to the banal, caustically critical of others to stingingly critical of its own” (197). The authors continue: “Even though the company’s political skits skewer both the left and the right, the politically ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ and everything in between, undeniably the Mickee Faust Club is perceived by the community at large as a liberal and progressive performance company” (197). Each summer, starting in 2008, the troupe puts on a “Queer as Faust” performance that engages with a variety of LGBT questions and concerns interspersed with personal anecdotes because, as Nudd notes, the personal narrative has theatrical power (Interview).11

11 The Mickee Faust Club does not limit itself simply theatrical productions on a traditional stage. They have also staged performance protests. One example of that is when they created a parade float in the Tallahassee Springtime parade in order to protest the parade’s figurehead, the controversial Andrew Jackson. See the “Mickee Faust Club’s Performative Protest Events” essay for further information regarding this performance. The club also staged a “bawl” which mocked the inaugural balls held for George W. Bush’s election. The “Inaugural BAWL,” a combination of skits, dance lessons, and socializing was held in response to the debacle of the 2000 election. See “The Left Rewriting America’s Best Historical Fiction Finalist: The January 20, 2001 ‘Inaugural BAWL’ in Tallahassee, Florida by Donna Marie Nudd for further information.

65 This chapter focuses on the “Queer as Faust” summer performances because each performance manifests a parodic laughter that, I argue, transvalues the narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality fomenting a moment of bodily critical and creative engagement. Though this argument is indebted to many of Butler’s remarks in Gender Trouble, I suggest expanding on her understanding of laughter and rooting it in the experience of the body. As noted in chapter 1, Butler concludes Gender Trouble with the example of subversive laughter in relation to drag queen performances where the norms of masculinity and femininity are parodied, a conclusion she comes to, in part, from looking to Frederic Jameson’s “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” I suggest that laughter works on a variety of levels simultaneously: as resistance, as critical engagement, as sensation and feeling, as phenomenon, as performance, and as excess. My understanding of liminal laughter is a moment of excess where the body remains linked to the critical investigation, and it is neither constructed as prior to discourse or totalized by signifying practices. Building on the definition of liminal laugher articulated in chapter 2, the laughter of Mickee Faust is of a very specific makeup: a combination of humor and the articulating of marginalized voices. A bodily laughter rises triumphantly, in a moment of resistance, from the violence done in the name of maintaining the norms of patriarchy and heterosexuality. The very act of laughing in this capacity is what I have termed liminal laughter. As I noted in chapter 2, the moments of liminal laughter are various, and I do not want to limit them to specific places, spaces, texts, moments, etc. Having said that, this chapter employs a very specific definition of liminal laughter: The liminal laughter manifested by the queer theater of the Mickee Faust club combines humor and subversive parody to foment a moment of laughing that overcomes the narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy, concluding in the transvaluation of values. Liminal laughter also, in conjunction with a project of destabilizing and denaturalizing, creates an alternative ethical perspective; it creates affirmative values. While this examination is seeped in my own personal experience as well as my observations of audience members, I maintain that liminal laughter, during these performances, foments a bodily inclusivity that challenges how the body is traditionally silenced and erased. In other words, as the body laughs at these performances, at the different skits, the very tradition of closed,

66 totalizing, narratives and structures that erase, silence, and dismiss the body is brought to the fore. The laughing body, then, is an active participant in these Faust performances, and it is this laughing body that: a. questions the validity and truth factor of specific narratives, b. demonstrates a new possibility for critical engagement that takes, as its source, the body, c. mocks and ridicules the traditional rules and norms of gender and sexuality, and d. promotes a feminist political project. I argue that feminism needs to locate and emphasize these moments. This type of laughter is evident in variety of contexts, and I aim, here, to shed light on one particular context in order to promote a future feminist practice of laughter. This chapter begins with a discussion of three Mickee Faust skits from the LGBT themed performances during the summer of 2008 and 2010: “The Gay Caballero,” “Alternative Family Values,” and “Gender Defenders.” Each skit is divided into its own section in order to offer a brief summary of the performance and secondly to discuss how each skit uses humor combined with the articulating of marginalized voices to shed light on the insidious paradigms of heterosexuality and patriarchy. The fourth section of this chapter examines various writings on queer theater in order to argue that queer theater is a uniquely appropriate medium for liminal laughter. The final section of the chapter focuses on parody and its relation to Mickee Faust and liminal laughter. I point to where and how liminal laughter adds a new element to already existing theories of parody. Overall, I argue that the Mickee Faust Club, through its parodic performances of the traditional narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality, engenders a liminal laughter that supports and maintains a project of the transvaluation of values as envisioned by Nietzsche. That is, it promotes a laughter that brings about a new aesthetic practice that holds the body as an integral component in critical revaluation. Revising the Narrative of the Western: “The Gay Caballero” “The Gay Caballero” functions to disrupt and destabilize the narrative of heterosexuality and its subset hegemonic masculinity through a parodic re-vision of the traditional Western narrative. Beginning with a pseudo-ballad, the skit opens with: “He rode from Tucson to the Louisiana levy / In a suit Liberace would envy / Armed with bullets and rhinestones a plenty / He is the Gay Caballero” (GC: Script). In sum, the skit details one episode in the life of the Gay Caballero. Basically, the plot is quite similar to

67 a more traditional hero narrative. The Gay Caballero must protect the sheep from Bob, Rory, and Calhoun, the “bad guys.” Bob, Rory, and Calhoun are met, at the very outset by the three things they hate most in the world: sheep ranchers, lesbians, and rape crisis intervention counselors. The bad guys decide immediately what needs to be done, and Bob says: “We have no choice but to kill you, take your land and ravage your flock. Ain’t that right boys? (GC: Script). In order to protect the sheep and lesbians (who also happen to be rape crisis intervention counselors), the Gay Caballero must dispense with the bad guys and he does so through a humorous combination of shooting and kissing. Though on one level, this skit embraces a humorous laughter at the absurd re- writing of the canonical narrative of “The Western,” I contend that “The Gay” also offers an example of liminal laughter. The liminal laughter in this skit emerges through the humorous dialogue that critically interrogates not only the norm of heterosexuality, but that of hegemonic masculinity as well. The following dialogue ensues among Bob and the lesbian sheep ranchers, Marie and Lisa: Lisa: What did we ever do to you? Bob: Nothin’, but this is my way of showing disapproval for your life style, not to mention choice of livestock. Marie: Oh, who can save us now? (GC: Script) The exchange is in relation to Bob’s plans to kill Marie and Lisa and ravage the flock of sheep. The pairing of the terms life style and livestock, as components of disapproval, by Bob marks one moment of liminal laughter within this skit. By suggesting that the choice of livestock (sheep, in this case) is on the same level as Marie and Lisa’s lesbianism, the laughter at this moment points to the absurdity and ridiculousness of that disapproval. The passage calls to mind how a general sense of disapproval permeates a number of conversations, from the trials of overturning “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to the back and forth decisions being made in California regarding who can and cannot marry. This language of disapproval (or outright hatred) marks the aforementioned lifestyle as deviant, clearly the opposite of the norm of heterosexuality, and thus, the end construction is: the “right” lifestyle verses the lifestyle of the other. What occurs, I suggest, in the above passage is a mocking of the binary norm (heterosexuality) / deviant

68 (homosexuality). The laughter at this moment of mockery, in disapproving life style and livestock, is liminal laughter. Another moment of liminal laughter occurs in the juxtaposition between the presentation of the Gay Caballero as hero and the image of more traditional heroes. Heroes such as those depicted in the Westerns of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood abide by hegemonic masculinity, a traditional masculinity that eschews femininity and homosexuality. Whereas in “Gay Caballero,” the hero donned in a heavily sequined pantsuit of vibrant colors, perhaps a size or two too small, embodies a reversal of hegemonic masculinity. The stage directions for his dress are that he should wear: “a suit a matador would think gaudy” (GC: Script). Moreover, instead of leaving behind dust at the end of the skit, what most often happens in traditional Western films, the Gay Caballero leaves behind a silver rhinestone (GC: Script). My laughter at not only the costume of the Gay Caballero but his effusive and affected gestures is liminal laughter because it is a laugh at the norms of masculinity and femininity and how those norms condition my own body, dress, and gestures. A professor of mine once proposed the question: Are there any activities that you perform that are not influenced, in some way, by the performance of masculinity / femininity? I remember thinking: Brushing my teeth? Much to my chagrin that was the only activity I could think of, for me, that perhaps did not perform a certain femininity. Then, though, the more I thought about it, I wondered: Perhaps the very way in which I tilt my head and hold the toothbrush manifests femininity? This is to say that the norms of masculinity and femininity are rooted in everyday practices, even the ones that are rarely considered. Engagements that, using laughter, parody those norms, whether it is the comedy of Elvira Kurt in chapter 1, or the reversal of the hero image through the character of the Gay Caballero, break up the supposed truth and stability of the norm / deviant binary. Tasked with protecting the sheep and Marie and Lisa, the Gay Caballero emerges onto the scene, and in the following passage his masculinity is immediately derided: Gay: I am the Gay Caballero. Ha! Bob: Rory, take care of this pansy. Rory: No problem boss. His wrist is probably too limp to shoot straight. (GC: Script)

69 Though the exchange ends with the Gay Caballero outdrawing Rory, shooting and killing him, the vocabulary used to describe him is bullying and demeaning. While this passage does not necessarily evoke liminal laughter, it does shed light on why skits, like “The Gay Caballero” are necessary. Incidences of bullying and name calling continue in schools across America, evidenced from the “It gets better” campaign, through youtube, to reach out and provide personal anecdotes, which, according to New York Magazine, has had over 9 million hits on youtube. From celebrities to the average citizen, the campaign records individuals’ stories and eventual triumphs over bullying. Granted “The Gay Caballero” is not going to end bullying, but what it does do is to create a moment where the tenets of masculinity and femininity are rendered comedic, and in those laughing moments a destabilization occurs that opens a space for performing genders alternatively. Instead, of suggesting that the traditional narratives are disrupted and destabilized through a new consciousness or awareness, I contend that the very process of challenge occurs through the body’s laughter. “The Gay Caballero” posits the shakiness of any original or authentic through the experience of liminal laughter. My laughter, a bodily action, is the catalyst for the critical moments of questioning the norms of masculinity and femininity. One way to envision this critical and subversive moment is to look to Butler’s book chapter on the documentary film Paris is Burning. Though she does not mention laughter in this particular essay, it offers a position on drag that I borrow for my own discussion of laughter. The essay is an in-depth look at drag culture in Harlem in the late 80s, and she argues, “Drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality” (125). While “The Gay Caballero” does not correlate specifically to the drag that Butler is discussing, there is an important similarity. Both performances, drag and “The Gay Caballero,” demonstrate the instability of gender by emphasizing the performative. The laughter elicited by the skit creates a liminal moment because we are laughing at the notion that all, traditional Western film heroes, the Gay Caballero, you and I, are caricatures.

70 One last component of “The Gay Caballero” that also supports my theory is that it is, overall, a laughing narrative as it is a humorous rewriting that plays with narrative conventions. After the initial ballad, noted above, the narrator says: We bring you now the thrilling and off-beat adventures of the gay caballero. The last surviving drag queen of the Tombstone massacre caused by an unfortunate booking error. Now, he defends sexual diversity in the Old West. Come as we revise history once again with the gay caballero. (Gay Cab skit) The announcement immediately suggests that the performance is a re-revision of history, a history dominated by hegemonic masculinity. Even the phrase “sexual diversity of the Old West” elicits a laugh from me, and that laugh combined with all of the examples from above supports the skit as a moment of liminal laughter as revaluation. As I laugh through the imagery associated with the gay caballero, his voice, actions, and gestures, I am participating in this practice of revaluing because I am: a. challenging the structures of gender and sexuality norms through a mocking and ridiculing laughter, and b. opening a space, inextricably linked to the laughing body, from which new values that are not necessarily determined through the narrative of patriarchy can emerge. Revaluing the Terms of Dominance: Alternative Family Values “Alternative Family Values,” from Faust’s 2009 summer production, embraces liminal laughter not only in its re-vision of the “coming out” story, but in its practice of revaluation. Again, as noted in the above discussion regarding “The Gay Caballero,” the moment of liminal laughter is figured as a complex moment where humor merges with a critical practice of denaturalization to offer a corporeal engagement. The skit goes beyond a simple reversal because, in the concluding moments, it offers a new valuing frame. The skit begins with a lesbian couple, Ann and Joan, who are excited about their son, Mike, returning from his freshman year at college. “Alternative” opens with Joan brushing off some of Ann’s dandruff: “Thanks, Joan. These all natural shampoos just don’t do the job, I guess. Oh, did Mike call? What time should I pick him up at the airport?” (AF: Script). Directly following, Ann and Joan reminisce about parenting Mike: “Joan: Do you remember the first pot luck we took him to? / Ann: How could I forget? I thought the turkey baster jokes would never end!” (AF: Script). The skit, then,

71 moves to Mike’s arrival after being dropped off by a friend who was on the plane with him. After the initial elation at having Mike home, the remainder of the performance revolves around Mike struggling to “come out” heterosexual to his Moms and their reactions when he does. The very premise of the skit embraces a practice of liminal laughter. The traditional “coming out” story is a narrative about the process of coming out to family, friends, and co-workers, among others; it is a “coming” out of the proverbial closet where many gays and lesbians reside. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick provides a clear picture of the closet in her chapter “Epistemology of the Closet”: The gay closet is not a feature only of the lives of gay people. But for many gay people it is still the fundamental feature of social life; and there can be few gay people, however courageous and forthright by habit, however fortunate in the support of their immediate communities, in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence. (68) “Alternative,” though, reverses the “coming out” story because Mike is to come out to his lesbian parents, Joan and Ann. Thus, instead of coming out gay, the traditional scenario, Mike must come out straight. Heterosexuality is, then, the minority position and homosexuality the term of dominance in this skit. Similar to the experience of gays and lesbians “coming out,” Mike is anxious and nervous. Though the audience member, perceiving Mike’s anxiousness, is not necessarily aware of why he is behaving in such a way, I argue that the members who have experienced similar moments of fear know where the performance is headed. The audience’s laughter, at the , is a moment of solidarity with a marginalized community. Mike, quite agitated, says: “Well, maybe we should sit down,” “Ah – gosh, I don’t exactly know how to begin,” “Well – uh, jeez,” and “You see – God, this is harder than I thought it would be” (AF: Script). After the build up, he states: “All right. Mom, Mom, I’m straight. [A pregnant pause]” (AF: Script). The responses of Joan and Ann are essentially the same as would be expected in the more traditional experience, and this sameness elicits another moment of liminal laughter. That is, as I laugh at the prejudice in their comments, I challenge the heterosexual presumption, which is reversed to a homosexual presumption in the skit. While this may seem simply a cathartic laugh, more in line with Freud’s

72 conceptualization of laughter, I suggest it is a laughter at the reversal of the terms of domination, which foments a moment of destabilization. Both Joan and Ann are visibly shaken by the news. Joan blurts: “You’re WHAT?!?!,” and Ann responds with: “No. I’m sorry. I must not have heard you right. Did you just say ---” (AF: Script). As the scene ensues, the discussion mirrors more and more the discussion many gays and lesbians have upon their attempts to come out: Joan: After all the sacrifices I made – How could you do this to me? Ann: Son, I’m sure this is just a phase. Joan: Just a phase? That’s what you said when I caught him watching Baywatch, Just a phase! Mike: Mom! Mom! Please! Look, it’s not a phase … I’ve known I was different ever since, ever since I can remember. Even in grade school – I’d listen to the other boys talk about Fabio, and I just didn’t feel that same way. Ann: But –but all boys go through a period of attraction to the opposite sex. It’s quite normal – you just have to grow out of it. (AF: Script) The more traditional exchange would suggest that heterosexuality is simply a phase and the individual will, most likely, grow out of it as s/he matures. The laughter that emerges in this reversal, where Joan and Ann contend that Mike will grow out of his heterosexuality challenges the binary that privileges heterosexuality. Again, then, the terms of domination are reversed in such as way as to call into question the placement of that hierarchy: heterosexuality / homosexuality. Butler notes that “an appropriation that seeks to make over the terms of domination, a making over which is itself a kind of agency, a power in and as discourse, in and as performance, which repeats in order to remake” sometimes succeeds (137). The Mickee Faust Club succeeds, especially in this particular performance, as it remakes and thus revalues the terms of domination. On another related level, stereotypes are used in this performance, in their reversed form, to create another moment of liminal laughter. I suggest that the laughter at these “new” stereotypes that somehow point to why Mike turned out heterosexual also disrupts a variety of narratives that usually surround homosexuality. At one point both Ann and Joan are disgusted (Joan screams “That’s disgusting.”) upon learning that Mike

73 and his girlfriend, Tina, have been intimate. Shortly, thereafter both attempt to locate blame, each faulting the other. Then they both blame his playing basketball and his perusing of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition as possible reasons why he turned heterosexual. More traditional narratives are: “Well, he played with girl’s toys,” or “You let him dress up in female clothes.” “Perhaps he had too much of an attachment to his mother and that is why he “turned out” gay?” These stereotypes are never-ending, and I could go on, but suffice it to say, that what occurs, through laughter, here, is the disruption of the associated stereotypes. Similarly, the psychoanalytic narrative that finds fault within the (m)other or religious narratives that advocate for reforming homosexuals are tangentially challenged in this part of the skit. Toward the end of the exchange, Ann blurts: “We try to be open minded. But… this is unnatural!” (AF: Script). Here, again, the binary is set up: natural / unnatural, though it is a reversal of the traditional binary. The laughter that emerges, similar to the laughter of “The Gay Caballero” focuses attention on how binaries (natural / unnatural – deviant / normal – heterosexual / homosexual) all create exclusion, shame and pain. I argue that “Alternative”, does not simply offer a reversal, though, because it does not idealize the lesbian couple as open, accepting, and tolerant. In other words, the skit actually demonstrates the need to create new ethical positions. A simple reversal, the performance suggests, will leave intact stereotypes, prejudice, and fear. The skit ends with Ann and Joan reluctantly deciding that Mike does not have to leave the house. Ann says, “I can’t believe it. Our son… It’s going to take a lot of getting used to. I still think we need to take a stronger stand,” and Joan replies, “Yes, but grandchildren.” The stage directions end with: “Ann looks at Joan, who smiles. Eventually, Ann smiles back” (AF: Script). The skit, through liminal laughter, challenges the heterosexual matrix. Butler defines the heterosexual matrix as “that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized” (194). The substitution of a heterosexual “coming out” for a homosexual “coming out” in “Alternative Family Values” radically challenges sexual norms, and it engages in a humorous analysis of the concept of the closet. Resisting Sexuality Norms: “Gender Defenders”

74 The final skit I examine, “Gender Defenders,” parodies a popular television show, Dora the Explorer in order to denaturalize the heterosexual narrative of many children’s programs, from cartoons to films. The skit, I contend, though eliciting laughter in relation to its humorous underpinnings, also offers a clear example of liminal laughter because it revalues the narrative of heterosexuality. That is, my laughter during this skit functions to open a space of resistance to the confining norms and practices of heterosexuality. In the television show, Dora and her friends learn Spanish words and phrases, travel around to a variety of places, and participate in other educational excursions. Using that as the framework, Faust’s writers wrote an episode for Dora, titled “The Gender Awareness Hour.” Dora and her friend, Mary, in this re-writing, travel through the forest meeting a variety of different characters and discussing sexuality. Faust’s re-writing opens with: Dora: We interrupt today’s episode of “Dora the Explorer” for a special treat: Hello, I am Dora! Mary: And I am Mary! Dora: Today in commemoration of “coming out day” we came up with out own little show, Mary: “Gender Awareness Hour” (GD: Script) Similar to part of the discussion on “Alternative Family Values,” “Gender Defenders” begins with a call to emerge from the closet: “Dora: Instead of hiding in a closet, instead of trying to disappear, lets not become endangered! Mary: but pro- gender” (GD: Script). In this very opening, I find myself laughing, in part, at the play on the words “endangered” and “pro-gender,” but, more significantly, it is a moment, for me, that brings to mind the heterosexual presumption, or as Butler writes, the heterosexual matrix in virtually all cartoons and young children’s films. Why do all children’s shows show only one relationship dynamic? Why is there only one formation that appears as natural throughout? The very premise of Faust’s re-writing embraces liminal laughter because the skit is an attempt to revalue homosexuality away from deviance and unnaturalness and toward something else.

75 The skit continues with a number of questions for parents to consider, which also elicits my laughter. I suggest this is another moment of liminal laughter, an ironic laughter. The script is as follows: Dora: Parents wouldn’t you like to know a bit more about your children to plan ahead as they grow up? Mary: the bottom line: don’t you want to be grandparents? Dora: if you knew your boy Mary: or girl Dora: or boy-turned-girl Mary: or girl-still-girl Dora: was going to turn out gay, wouldn’t you have wanted to spend all those years, Mary: while they were growing up, Dora: trying to overthrow the ban on gay adoption, Mary: (passionately) advocate same sex marriage for a safer household? Dora: (more passionately) equal rights for housing and employment? Like in Leon County. Mary: (sentimentally) or know that your gay daughter in the military is taken care of by her lesbian buddy and she won’t be expelled! (GD: Script) Again, there is a humorous component as Dora asks parents to disavow the heterosexual matrix / presumption and consider that their children might be gay or lesbian. During Mary and Dora’s back and forth regarding boy, girl, boy-turned-girl, girl-still-girl, I found myself laughing, and I just laughed again as I rewrote it. The above exchange provides an ironic laughter because it questions parents’ behaviors, actions, and beliefs in relation to the narrative of heterosexuality. How can these behaviors change? What needs to be done in order to alter the norm? What possibilities are available for alternatives? This particular section opens a space for revaluation. In the lighthearted conclusion, I argue liminal laughter surfaces again in the moment where the body laughs with the alligator and frog who, through Dora and Mary’s

76 coaxing have emerged from the forest (most likely a metaphor for coming out of the closet). Dora: (with sympathy) In song they come out, little ones, lets follow our buddies in the forest. Mary: from the frog, (frog starts coming on stage shyly) Dora: to the mighty alligator . . . (also shyly alligator enters) Both: Out of their fears! (Animals step up as if it break up in song) […] Frog: (singing, hesitant, encouraged by the mothers) I am gay! Alligator: (same manner) I am gay! (GD: Script) Can you imagine two individuals, one dressed as a frog and one as an alligator, prancing on the stage claiming that they are gay freely? Now, think: Would this be possible in an actual children’s cartoon? The answer, of course, is an emphatic “No.” I suggest that the laughter during this skit goes beyond the moment of laughing with the alligator and frog and their ridiculous costumes and posturing. Laughter also, in this skit, creates a bodily moment of sensation and feeling that refers back to the violence of silencing and the erasure of diverse sexualities, specifically the erasure that takes place in a variety of narratives, including cartoons and films. Queer Theater: A Brief History Why is the venue of queer theater uniquely appropriate to liminal laughter? As I argued above the three skits, “The Gay Caballero,” “Alternative Family Values,” and “Gender Defenders,” all, in one way or another, use a critical humor to denaturalize and destabilize binary norms of: natural / unnatural, subject / other, masculine / feminine, and heterosexual / homosexual. In this section, I turn to an examination of queer theater to argue that, by its very definition, tenets, and function as resistance, it embraces a practice of liminal laughter. More specifically, the queer theater performances, implementing characteristics of camp, cabaret, or a combination, which often include gender-bending, challenges to the norms of masculinity and femininity, depictions of the butch/femme aesthetic, among a variety of other manifestations of gay and lesbians themes. The laughter created by queer theater, whether in an actual moment of humor or not (who is to gage?), elicits a corporeal engagement where the body, through sensation, feeling, and experience, refuses silence and comes face-to-face with a moment of, what I

77 am terming, resistance-articulation. The manifestation of these moments is varied and includes not only the topics, content, and form of the performances, but also the lives and personal stories of the performers. Having said that, throughout my research on queer theater, I found little that specifically discussed its relation to laughter, but I will demonstrate, in the following paragraphs, how I envision queer theater, in relation to the Mickee Faust Club, as a decidedly liminal space of laughter. Queer theater is a broad and somewhat contentious term. Does it refer only to performances that are clearly steeped in the lives of gays, lesbians, bisexuals? Is queer theater only a recent phenomenon? Or, can critics return to previous centuries’ dramatic performances in order to offer queer readings? Critic Don Shewey notes that the term queer theater emerged in 1978 in Stefan Brecht’s book of that name (125). Shewey lists the main individuals participating in the queer theater of the sixties and seventies, including: Jack Smith, John Vaccaro, Ronald Tavel, Charles Ludlam, the Hot Peaches, the Ballets Tracadero, and filmmaker John Waters (125). Shewey uses queer theater to refer to specific theater practices that engage with overt lesbian and gay themes. However, I suggest that there are also theatrical performances prior to 1978 that could be considered queer theater. George E. Haggerty, would agree, and, in “The Man I Love: The Erotics of Restoration Theater,” he suggests that Dryden’s All for Love (1678) and Marlowe’s Edward II (1592) contain passages of a positive male-male desire (108-9). Though a specific definition of queer theater seems rather difficult to come by, it is important to have one in order to discuss Faust as queer theater, and I borrow Laurence Senelick’s definition from his essay “The Queer Root of Theater.” Senelick correctly ascertains the difficulty in creating a succinct definition of queer theater as it is a phrase in flux. He does, after that caveat, offer the following: To speak in general terms, queer theater is grounded in and expressive of unorthodox sexuality or gender identity, antiestablishment and confrontational in tone, experimental and unconventional in format, with stronger links to performance art and what the Germans call Kleinkunst, that is, revue, cabaret, and variety, than to traditional forms of drama. (21) “The Gay Caballero,” “Alternative Family Values,” and “Gender Defenders” all embody an “unorthodox sexuality or [and] gender identity.” As a matter of fact, the entire

78 summer performances that revolve around the theme “Queer as Faust” fall into this category of queer theater. From the personal anecdotes of “coming out stories” to the box performances from the summer 2010 performance where individuals discussed how their lives were / are conditioned by norms of heterosexuality and gender (the proverbial box) to the above skits, Mickee Faust portrays a variety of different sexualities and gender identities through dance, song, videos, and skits -- an experimental and unconventional format. The founders of Faust also envision their performances as queer theater. In the article “Is This Theater Queer? The Mickee Faust Club and the Performance of Community,” the authors, Nudd, Galloway, and Kristina Schriver, remark: “For the last decade the company’s local biannual cabaret shows have been filled with gender-bending performances with gender being bent for the most part by women; and its national performances in Washington D.C., and Miami have featured material with predominantly lesbian and gay themes” (104-5). Though “Alternative Family Values” and “Gender Defenders” do not necessarily fit into this particular component, “The Gay Caballero” clearly embraces a practice of gender-bending in order to transvalue, a process that occurs through my laughter with the skit, hegemonic masculinity. I turn to Alan Sinfield’s monumental work, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century. He examines the history of gay theater, from the time of Oscar Wilde’s trials and association with the theater up to pre-Stonewall, and I point to this text to demonstrate further how Faust fits into a tradition of queer performances. Sinfield writes: “The association of theater and queerness is longstanding” (6). And, he clarifies with: “The project of using camp and drag to disturb the sex / gender system materialized in Off Off-Broadway theater in the later 1960s in and around the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, with which John Vaccaro, Charles Ludlam and Ronald Tavel were associated” (333). One performance that Sinfield points to is Ronal Tavel’s Queen (1967). He notes that the play was designed to challenge stable categories and quotes from it: “Male! Man! Female! King! Queen! Human! Animal! Ape! – what are these terms except expedient, comforting designations” (333). The play, according to Sinfield, revolves around various characters that all embody a confluence of genders and sexualities. For example, he notes: “Sister Carries, the witch doctor, is a male actor in a

79 grass skit and a nun’s head-dress” (Sinfield 334). Mickee Faust, similar to Gorilla Queen, challenges these “expedient, comforting designations.” And, the laughter that manifests during the challenges is liminal laughter because it is a laughter of resistance, demonstrating the excess – what spills over /out of the norms of heterosexuality and patriarchy. Along with the actual content and form of queer theater, a key component, many critics note, is the relationship between the performances and the actual lives of the performers. I point to a few critics and their remarks on this matter because the intertwining of the lives and theatrical moments lends support to my contention that liminal laughter offers a moment of resistance-articulation. Senelick notes that the performers in queer theater are inextricably linked to the content and form: “Their lives provide the vitality and credibility for their art” (26). Similarly, Shewey writes: “Their [pioneer gay theater makers] making was inseparable from their personal identities, their lives, their social circles, their senses of humor, their need for love and companionship” (128). An example of this can be seen in David Román Acts of Intervention, a detailed examination of the role of theater and performance in bringing awareness to the AIDS crisis. He notes how gay men, in the 1980s, used theater: “The earliest of these plays set out to intervene on local fronts as specific community-engendered responses to the epidemic.” (45). Referring to early AIDS plays of 1983-84, Román discusses how many gay men created one man shows detailing their own personal relation to AIDS, including lovers’ and friends’ battles. Sinfield also offers another example in his discussion of Care and Control (1977). The performance portrayed three lesbian women, their disintegrating marriages, and the problems surrounding how to care for their children outside of the traditional nuclear family. The author of the play, Michelene Wandor, wrote, regarding the play, that she wanted to “[s]how hitherto suppressed lesbian experience as it really is” (Sinfield 331). Nudd, Galloway, and Schriver similarly note the importance of the relationship between the performers’ real lives and queer theater: “The members of our club are often outsiders in an insider’s world, but as, one commented, ‘I am the one who gets to intrude on that world and expose it, warts and all’” (112). In other words, the very foundation of Mickee Faust rests on those who are “outsiders,” and I argue that these outsiders, often

80 considered deviant, are those that refuse the strictures of the narratives of patriarchy and / or heterosexuality. The authors also comment: “We are a queer theater because we use theater in a particularly queer-conscious way that questions individual and cultural notions about ‘who we are’” (105). Through the Club’s performances and the audience’s laughter during these moments of intrusion and exposure, a space is opened where questions and challenges to hegemonic masculinity, norms of femininity, and “deviant” sexualities reign, where previously considered stable categories falter, and alternative ethical positions abound -- the transvaluation of values. Moreover, the authors envision their specific performance to be an engagement and an implication: “To be there [at the performance] is to engage in the work of the theater. To be there is to be implicated” (115). I see one component of this implication as emerging through liminal laughter. That is, as the audience laughs at the skits, there is a moment where the queer body “speaks” above the silence and erasure of the narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy and the norms that those narrative condition. The Gay Caballero “speaks” an alternative hero masculinity and the alligator and frog, from “Gender Defenders” “speak” a resistance to compulsory heterosexuality. The Mickee Faust Club offers one possibility for queer theater, among many variations. As noted above many queer performances embrace traditional narrative formats, including plot and characters. Others, such as Faust, use the cabaret format. Another example is the WOW (Women’s One World) troupe, which is currently housed in what was once a factory in Manhattan’s East Village (Davy 1). The theater group begin in 1980, and as Kate Davy remarks, it is “a lesbian women’s theater that signals vital lesbian sexualities and subjectivities and autonomous female-gendered subjectivities in general” (183). She also suggests that WOW: “Has been a player in providing its participant with a variety of contexts from which to imagine and therefore create alternative futures” (181). Regardless of the particular format, queer theater offers a space of contestation, at once questioning, challenging, and dismantling the narratives of gender and sexual norms. At the end of Sinfiled’s monumental text, he discusses queer theater as a dissident strategy, and I borrow that phrase for characterizing Mickee Faust. One component of dissident strategies is to denaturalize, and, as evidenced by my above discussion on “The Gay Caballero,” “Alternative Family Values,” and “Gender

81 Defenders,” the Mickee Faust Club, as queer theater, manifests a dissident strategy. In his conclusion remarks, Sinfield questions what the best dissident strategies might be? He writes: “[No] strategy emerges as the magical answer. The task is not to specify the one, true strategy, but to be flexible and cunning – as dominant ideologies are” (339). The Mickee Faust Club, however, emerges as a clear dissident strategy as the audiences, writers, and performers subvert the dominant ideologies of patriarchy and heterosexuality. In concluding this discussion, I turn to one final essay that, in my opinion, answers a critique often launched at queer theater performances. The critique usually offers the following questions: Does not queer theater simply preach to the converted? In other words, what is the subversive potential of queer theater if audience members are already couched in the resisting the hegemonic narratives? If that is the case, how subversive or radical is queer theater? David Román and Tim Miller, in “Preaching to the Converted,” argue that the phrase “preaching to the converted” is dismissive of the potential of queer theater to manifest rhetorical strategies of dissidence that challenge hegemonic norms. The authors write: The dialectical tension between the assumption that political artists are preaching a type of ideological redundancy to a group of sympathetic supporters and the possibility that community-based performers and audiences are participating in an active expression of what may constitute the community itself, obscures that fact that these very marginalized communities are themselves subject to the continuous rhetorical and material practices of a naturalized hegemonic norm. (222) Mickee Faust offers a dissident strategy through its performances that challenge the “coercive attempts to maintain hegemonic norms.” Moreover, I argue that part of Faust’s dissident strategy resides in a practice of liminal laughter. In other words, along with the performance, the reversals and parodies, the laughter foments a bodily engagement that roots critical focus within the body that has felt the violence and discipline of these very norms. Liminal laughter goes beyond the traditional argument regarding representation to a space that founds disruption and destabilization within the laughing body. The Parodic and Laughter

82 Why are the Mickee Faust parodic renderings of television shows and films, in so far as they denaturalize the narratives of hegemonic masculinity and heterosexuality, adept at creating moments of liminal laughter? I argue that all of the above skits discussed, “Gender Defenders,” The Gay Caballero,” and “Alternative Family Values,” embrace the play of parody in order to create a moment of liminal laughter. In this final section, I examine the critical discourse on parody to argue that my notion of liminal laughter is inextricably linked to valuing parody as a critical. The parodies of Faust, challenging the narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality through the parodic rendering of the natural / unnatural, normal / deviant, feminine / masculine, subject / object hierarchical binaries that maintain and support those two narratives, foment a moment of liminal laughter. I first examine, in this section, Frederic Jameson’s seminal essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” to situate my discussion within the critical tradition surrounding discussions of parody. Secondly, I examine critics’ conversations surrounding parody as a genre that is inherently critical not only in its play with intertextuality, but its function as subversive. Thirdly, I cover how parody is not only critical but creative and constructive. Into each of these subtopics, I include a further examination of the Mickee Faust Club and my argument that liminal laughter fosters the transvaluation of values. Without delving too far into Jameson’s essay, I mention a few key points of his argument in order to contrast them to my understanding of parody. He writes: “Both pastiche and parody involve the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles” (1962). Parody and pastiche are multifaceted forms that mimic not only other styles or styles of styles, but imitate, in a mocking and often playful way, powerful overarching cultural narratives. In other words, I take styles in a broad sense, here, to also apply to the narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy. For example, “The Gay Caballero” offers a clear parody of the Western film genre in relation to hegemonic masculinity. The crux, though, of Jameson’s essay is where he distinguishes pastiche from parody, and in concluding, he suggests that parody has become impossible due to the proliferation of styles, diverse language configurations, and a lack of a solid norm due to the rise of Postmodernism.

83 Contrary to Jameson, though, I argue that there remains a norm to be parodied. In the case of “The Gay Caballero” it would be the norm of hegemonic masculinity. As I laugh at the skit of “The Gay Caballero” and the others mentioned above, I am embracing a parodic, critical laughter. This is a specific laughter that, as noted, emerges from the moment of resistance to hegemonic narratives and humor. With this in mind, I argue that parody, as a genre, is particularly adept at mocking and ridiculing the narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy because it is inherently a critical, challenging medium. Critic Linda Hutcheon poignantly, in A Theory of Parody, asks: “What, then, can be parodied?” She replies with: “Any codified form can, theoretically, be treated in terms of repetition with critical distance, and not necessarily even in the same medium or genre” (18). In other words, any codified form, and I argue this includes the narratives parodied in all three skits, which, when repeated in a certain fashion and with a “critical distance,” can be construed as parody. To clarify, Hutcheon writes: “I see parody as operating as a method of inscribing continuity while permitting critical distance” (20). While her use of the word continuity might seem to derail the task of destabilizing and disrupting the structures of heterosexuality and patriarchy, it is an assertion that is essential to note as one of the arguments regarding parody is that it does not disrupt so much as it reinforces. My suggestion, however, is that though parody does have recourse to previous narratives and conventions and, in some sense, might reinforce them, ultimately its critical distance enables a moment of resistance that is disruptive and destabilizing. The disruptive and destabilizing moment of Faust performances emerges from not only laughter, but subversive parody as well. For example, “Gender Defenders,” is a subversive parody because it: a. challenges the silencing, in traditional children’s cartoons, of sexualities other than heterosexuality, and b. offers an alternative narrative that refuses to create the binaries and subsequent hierarchies of said cartoons. In a similar, though for different reasons, argument, John Gery, in “Subversive Parody,” contends that parody is subversive in so far as it is able to challenge categories of identity. Granted his argument is made for significantly different purposes, but there is a cross-over that relates to my own discussion. Gery examines the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, a mid-twentieth century author, to suggest that her parodic poetry reconfigures

84 social identity in such a way as to challenge racial assumptions. Through a textual analysis, Gery points to places where her poems embody a variety of parodic elements that speak to class and race. Gery writes: “Brook’s earliest poems that use parody to convey the deep ambiguities facing those who live in black ghettos are arguably the more politically charged” (54). For example, he points to the poem, “Sadie and Maud” which uses a balladic form but, he suggests, “its subtle use of parody reveals ironies in the social options available to a black woman from the ghetto” (49). Thus, this example helps to illuminate the potential of parody to disrupt and destabilize identity. Again, I point to this particular argument to showcase how parody is subversive in various manifestations. Though my argument does not necessarily revolve around class or race or specific identities for that matter, I do agree that parody is subversive in its ability to ironize certain supposedly fixed and static identificatory practices. The combination of comedy and subversive parody work together, throughout the performances of Faust, to create a moment of liminal laughter. For example, the skit “Alternative Family Values” revalues the heterosexual matrix through a parodic rendering of traditional coming out stories. Another element that also supports my contention that parody functions as subversive is in the idea of intertextuality. Again, as I laugh at the Western film genre, the reversal of the traditional “coming out” story, and the re-writing of Dora the Explorer, I am participating in a moment of fomenting an alternative articulation. Robert Phiddian, in “Are Parody and Deconstruction Secretly the Same Thing,” notes that: “Parody […] is already actively and consciously engaged in intertexuality” (679). Shortly thereafter he writes: “The meaning of parody is never a stable entity, even in theory. It is a matter of relation and constant cross-reference between the parody and its model, between the present text and a variety of other texts” (684). I am drawn to this idea of shifting movements because it jumbles notions of narrative and truth. The constant movement that Phiddian points to, and I supplement with my notion of laughter, suggests a constant re-visioning and re-writing which refuses totalizing structures that portend to an ultimate truth. Phiddian also argues that: “Parody is the parasite genre that can attach to any other, supplementing it dangerously, living off its mimetic, expressive, or rhetorical energy, and reminding it and us that we are facing words rather than things, rhetoric rather than pure ideas, language rather than phenomena” (689). The word

85 parasitic is not really useful in this context because it contains a negative connotation; however, the idea that parody acts as a dangerous supplement pointing to the contradictions and complexities of language, does, I suggest, support my project of liminal laughter in the Mickee Faust Club. As Faust parodies the norms of masculinity in “The Gay Caballero,” they foster new rhetorical practices that question those actions, gestures, and dress that maintain the norm. Because the narratives that support and maintain hegemonic norms of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, require logic, linearity, and seriousness, parodic re-writings that embody humor and laughter offer another level of challenge. This level is a challenge to the very notion of critical engagement. That is, parody is distinctly adept at breaking up the truth of these narratives as it is a form of play, lightheartedness, and it often mocks logic and the rational. Similarly, Phiddian, when analyzing Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, notes: “Parody does important critical work here that sober critique could never hope to achieve” (692). In other words, parody, for Phiddian, accomplishes a level of critical engagement that goes beyond traditional critique. I retain this idea of parody as accomplishing critical work in relation to subversive parody. Phiddian does not mention laughter specifically; however, I contend that the opposite of “sober critique” is a parodic laughter. Mickee Faust does “important critical work,” using subversive parody, through a laughter that mocks, ridicules, and plays with language and truth in such a way as to create holes in supposedly closed narratives. The important work of Faust is not relegated to simply offering a challenge, a destabilizing or denaturalizing. Their performances also offer a constructive and generative moment fomented by laughter. For example, “Alternative Family Values” through a subversive parodic rendering, opens a space for a resistant narrative. While it actually does not create or specify what that new narrative might look like, “Alternative” shows how a simple reversal, heterosexual matrix for homosexual matrix, will not function to detstabilize. The laughter during this skit, then, at the reversal foments a bodily moment of engagement that posits the possibility of a new narrative where the queer body will no longer be erased. Critic Margaret Rose, in her seminal text Parody // Meta-fiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror To the Writing and Reception of Fiction, contends that parody offers more than simply destruction, too: “Parody is not

86 only destructive, but it is also reconstructive” (30). Granted, Rose is discussing parody in a general sense and without as much as a nod to a practice of liminal laughter, but I am drawn to her idea of parody as reconstructive. And, I argue that parody becomes reconstructive / revaluative through laughter. In conjunction with “Alternative Family Values,” “The Gay Caballero” also offers a constructive and creative element in its rewriting of the Western film genre. Author Terry Caesar adds to this discussion by linking parody to revaluation. Discussing one of his examples, The Hucksters, Caesar writes “To parody The Hucksters is first of all to see it, isolate it for attention, and therefore grant it just enough value so that it can be revalued. The trick lies in the nature of the revaluation” (my emphasis, 75). While Caesar is not necessarily referring to the Nietzschean sense of revaluation, I borrow his phrasing for my own argument regarding how Faust offers revaluation. In other words, The Mickee Faust Club isolates a given piece of material in order to specifically revalue it in such away as to call attention to the dominant narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy and how the habits stemming from those often condition and constrain bodies. Conclusion The liminal laughter explicated in this chapter, a combination of subversive parody and humor used in such a way as to foment a challenge to the norms of patriarchy and heterosexuality will manifest differently for different individuals; it might or might not coincide with my own personal moments of laughter. What I suggest, however, is that the laughter during Mickee Faust Club performances is an experience of resistance- articulation. Michel Foucault notes in the journal Ideology and Consciousness: “Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is” (84). He broadens the idea of critique to include an array of possibilities for resistance, and I argue The Mickee Faust Club is one possibility for fighting the narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality that revolve around a variety of hierarchical binaries. They resist and refuse through parodic performances that are imbued with liminal laughter. Through these skits the members of Faust, embrace difference and complexity and destabilize traditional conceptualizations of gender and sexuality, ultimately

87 disrupting the pervasive narratives that condition our bodies, languages, discourses, and truths. The radical performers and performances meld together to form a queer community theater that offers a critical investigation. I note one more skit, here, “Robot Love,” from the 2010 summer performance. It is a parody of the religious doctrine used to justify hatred toward gays and lesbians. The skit revolves around the love between a robot and a man and whether it is an acceptable form of love, a clear parody of the gay marriage debate. One of the main components of the skit is a protest rally in which three “protesters” carry signs denying the legality of a man – robot relationship. The protestor signs read: “God hates robots” and “Adam and Eve, not Adam and R2D2.” Again, the combination of humor and subversive parody work together to create a moment of liminal laughter. All in all, The Mickee Faust Club offers a radical challenge to the narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality through their parodic renderings. A variety of binaries, including deviant / normal, natural / unnatural, heterosexual / homosexual, masculine / feminine, subject / object, among others are transvalued in these skits through liminal laughter. Similar to my discussion of Nietzsche’s “Old and New Tablets,” from TSZ, the Mickee Faust Club first destroys, by reversing, mocking, and ridiculing, the “old tablets” but it does not stop there because the Club also creates new metaphors for life-affirming values, values that do not negate or silence bodies. A feminist practice of liminal laughter finds and illuminates these moments in order to point to one possible method of resistance. It is a resistance that emphasizes a radical mode of critical engagement; it is a disavowal of the tradition that relies on logic, linearity, clarity, reason, and the mind, and instead asks audiences to laugh. At the end of Gender Trouble, Butler asks: What performance where will invert the inner / outer distinction and compel a radical rethinking of the psychological presuppositions of gender identity and sexuality? What performance where will compel a reconsideration of the place and stability of the masculine and feminine? And what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire? (177) My answer: The Mickee Faust Club.

88 CHAPTER 4 LIMINAL LAUGHTER AND HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing. Hélène Cixous “The Laugh of the Medusa” I relived roaring laughter months, still fearless exultations already sweetly tenderly greedy for themselves. Hélène Cixous The Book of Promethea

The previous chapter set out to demonstrate a specific example of liminal laughter in the theatrical performances of the Mickee Faust Club. I analyzed three different skits to demonstrate the places where laughter emerges in a challenging and critical moment that deepens and cements a practice of disrupting the narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy. Each skit discussed added to the conversation regarding how and why laughter articulates a bodily methodology of not only challenging but also of creating voice and alternative articulation possibilities. The varied voices of the queer theater troupe negotiate the silenced and erased voices of many minority communities. Ultimately, I argued that through liminal laughter, as evidenced within the Mickee Faust Club performances, the transvaluation of values occurs. More concretely, laughter acts to interrogate the language practices of binary formations: subject / object, male / female, heterosexual / homosexual and the narratives that rely on those dichotomies. By not only challenging but creating alternative narratives, the skits of Faust posit new values and ethical standpoints – the transvaluation of values. I move, in this final chapter of my dissertation, to two further examples of liminal laughter. Again, this formation of laughter cements a new feminist methodology of critical engagement as it substantiates a bodily practice of investigation that is rooted in the theories of Nietzsche and Butler’s subversive laughter. It is a practice that emphasizes the physical, corporeal, feeling, and sensing body in the moment of laughter.

89 Furthermore, feeling and sensing, for me, become the basis of an alternative method of critical interrogation of language, discourse, narratives, and truth. The theoretical framework of liminal laughter adds a new element to previous feminist analyses by concretely demonstrating an approach that relies not solely on the perceived mental capacities to read and to analyze, but that, instead, relies on the perception fomented by the physical body to initiate that critical engagement. I attempt to move the tradition of critical analysis out of its confines of pure thinking and into the realm of feeling and sensing, and I rely on Nietzsche’s understanding of the body as force and drive to do so. Overall, I add a new possible route to engaging critically with these large totalizing narratives that permeate our lives in ways we are unaware of as they work to condition the body. As laughter offers a shock of sorts that jolts the body, it opens a space for a new way of thinking that emerges directly out of a bodily engagement. This shock / jolt that laughter provides unlocks a variety of pathways for re-configuring a feminist intervention. I look to two examples that define and expand on the notion of liminal laughter in this final chapter. In the first section, I examine Hélène Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” because it provides a method and an example of liminal laughter. Cixous provides an illuminating look at the power of laughter to disrupt traditional myths steeped in patriarchal narrative conventions. Her re-writing of the Medusa myth (as well as its Freudian counterpart) radically challenges, through laughter, the original myth. Not only does the rewriting challenge the narrative of patriarchy, but it also sets up a possible method for thinking a challenging laughter. In other words, Cixous’ text, through a parodic engagement with the original Medusa narrative, outlines and supports a methodology for thinking the disruptive power of laughter. In the final section of this chapter, I turn to Cixous’ rather obscure novel The Book of Promethea, a complex text revolving around questions of the body, writing, sexuality, voice, and subjectivity. Read in conjunction with “The Laugh” as method and example, Promethea provides another case in point for the power of liminal laughter. There are a dozen passages that implement a bodily laughter within the text; these passages maintain the argument extracted from my reading of Cixous, but they also extend the discussion of laughter in a new direction by emphasizing the necessity for a laughing voice and a laughing text.

90 Together Cixous’ works substantiate my argument regarding liminal laughter as the transvaluation of values. The Laughing Medusa Why must readers envision the Medusa as laughing? Why does the title of Cixous’ essay have recourse to laughter? Why does the essay embrace a humorous and playful joking sensibility at specific junctures? Quite simply, it is because Cixous conceptualizes laughter, throughout “The Laugh,” as a methodology of challenge to phallocentric language, including history, the discourse of psychoanalysis, and, in a generalized sense, any narrative that relies on the conventions decreed by phallocentrism such as the myth of Medusa. Though most critics, and these will be discussed in the following section, envision “The Laugh” as an essay about écriture féminine, I argue that the focus should shift to the tenets of laughter as articulated by Cixous. Similarly, sexuality is an integral component to Cixous’ essay especially in light of the fact that she is writing in response to Freud’s interpretation of Medusa, “to decapitate = to castrate,” from his essay “The Infantile Genital Organization,” a further explication of his text Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Young-Bruehl 272). One of the main components that is most often emphasized in reviewing “The Laugh” is that of a feminine bodily sexuality which Cixous attempts to re-write out of its imprisonment in psychoanalysis, including the void, the hole, and the structure of lack. I agree that the essay revolves around (re)writing a bodily feminine sexuality; however, I also want to suggest that looking to her discussion of laughter, though of secondary status in the essay, might also offer a feminist strategy of articulation -- both of body and mind. The laughter within Cixous’ essay offers a theoretical paradigm for re-thinking criticism and, more importantly, how the body can be in that very process of criticism. That is, though she is often lumped into poststructuralist feminism, I suggest that Cixous is unique as she simultaneously tackles language and discursive practices through her critique of phallocentric language and history, including mythical conventions, without obfuscating the actual corporeal body. As outlined in chapter 1, much feminism has revolved around the body and how to theorize materiality and the discursive correctly. My understanding of Cixous’ laughter mediates these two extremes by moving beyond the body as biologically determined or the body as text; both of these perspectives

91 inevitably remain locked in a closed system, leaving little opportunity for resistance. Furthermore, though many feminist theories, and this is clearly articulated in chapter 1, are rooted in disruption, destabilization, and resistance through forms of writing, and Cixous is included here, “The Laugh” offers feminists other possibilities in the concept of laughter. The corporeal moment of a decidedly feminist laughter performs the critique through the body, thereby demonstrating a new way of knowledge creation. Again though, my conceptualization of liminal laughter is not a negation of previous groundbreaking feminist work. Nor do I suggest that liminal laughter answers all of feminism’s questions about the body or irreparably sunders all patriarchal and heterosexual narratives. Instead, I suggest that the liminal laughter of Cixous’ “The Laugh,” through a parodic re-visioning of the Medusa myth as well as her playful and humorous engagement with psychoanalysis, supports my theory of laughter as the transvaluation of values because laughter re-values those values associated with phallocentrism. The remainder of this section analyzes “The Laugh” and the role that laughter plays throughout. I begin with a brief summary of the essay, which is followed by a close textual reading of the various moments of laughter. Firstly, I tackle how laughter embraces a critical project to disrupt phallocentric language, specifically in relation to the example of the Medusa myth. Subsequently, I examine how my personal reading of “The Laugh” evokes one possible type of liminal laughter in the instances of play and humor that permeate the essay. The following section engages with Cixous’ critics and their varied commentaries on “The Laugh” in relation to écriture feminine, feminine sexuality, and the possibility of voice and speaking. Looking to Ann Rosalind Jones, Cecile Lindsay, and Alison Booth, I paint a complex picture of Cixous’ reception that then enables me to demonstrate where and how laughter extends and expands on these critics’ examination of écriture feminine. In sum, I rescue “The Laugh” from its totalizing association to écriture feminine, by encouraging a reading that emphasizes the power of laughter. This trajectory creates the basis for the final sections of this essay in which I engage with Promethea to provide a further example of liminal laughter. I begin, here, with a summary of Cixous’ “The Laugh” in order to detail her overall project and to articulate the main concepts that crop up throughout her essay.

92 “The Laugh,” written in 1975 and translated into English in 1976, remains an iconic essay and a must on any feminist theory syllabus in the Humanities. The groundbreaking essay critically interrogates structures of language, specifically phallocentric language, among other discursive practices while simultaneously offering a writing of feminine sexuality. This is, in part, due to the structure of language that erases and silences the feminine, a structure elaborated by the writings of both Freud and Lacan. One of the main thrusts of Cixous’ as well as other French feminists’ writings is a focus on linguistic structures, asking questions such as: How does the Symbolic support and maintain patriarchal practices that negate and erase female sexuality? How does language perpetuate a binary system of privileged terms of signification? If the feminine body has been erased through the phallocentric system, what are the possibilities of re-imagining it? More importantly, what would a re-imagining look like since our imaginations are inextricably tied to the phallocentric system? Women have, according to Cixous, been unable to write their bodies because they have been taught to be ashamed and uncertain, passive and obliging and also because “language” has remained firmly entrenched in phallocentric structures. She begins with: “I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal” (875). Thus, “The Laugh” sets out to examine women’s writing and also to attempt that very type of writing. In other words, the actual structure and form of Cixous’ essay provides both a method and an example of a moment of écriture feminine in which she undermines traditional philosophical practices by refusing logic and linearity and by attempting to link the body and writing. All of the above questions are addressed throughout Cixous’ essay as she meanders through the narrative terrain of psychoanalysis and the erasure of feminine sexuality. While, as noted above, her movement throughout the essay remains inextricably linked to thinking, sensing, and feeling a female sexuality, I also suggest that there are broader implications for thinking the body, and I, thus, turn to my examination of laughter, which theorizes these larger possibilities. Beginning with the very title of her essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” I am immediately struck by three questions: Why is

93 the Medusa laughing? What does this image accomplish? Why should readers envision a laughing Medusa?12 With these questions in my mind, I begin to envision an altered Medusa. She is no longer a snake-haired monster who turned men to stone, but is instead an image of play, of power, and of laughter. As a reader, I am placed within a position that immediately embraces the laugh as an instance of movement, specifically a feminine movement. She writes, in the first paragraph, “Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement” (875). This sentiment is often associated with Cixous’ notion of écriture feminine and rightly so as she mentions it in relation to writing a variety of times throughout the essay. Writing will “serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (879). While it is clear that the essay envisions movement in relation to writing, I also want to suggest that movement can be read in relation to laughter. Laughter, as it inserts the body into a given narrative, also offers a “movement of transformation” that challenges social and cultural structures. As laughter re-values the body, it bring woman into the text, the world, and history. The most pertinent example of this would be the laughter of the Medusa; however, the examples engaged with in the preceding chapters, including A Question of Silence, The Mickee Faust Club’s performances, Foucault’s laugh according to de Certeau, and even the subversive laughter of Butler’s drag, would also suffice. I am not suggesting that laughter will right all the wrongs perpetrated by the phallocentric system of language nor will it miraculously create the previously silenced and erased voices of individuals of the world and history. Instead, the space of laughter offers a momentary disruption, away from the space of writing, in which the body is able to articulate its resistance, refusal, and pain. Cixous’ re-imaging of the Medusa, a second order re-imagining of Freud’s discussion of Medusa and castration, revises the traditional narrative by revaluing Medusa. That is, Cixous’ playful engagement with the language of psychoanalysis and her deconstructive tendencies foster a decidedly different narrative in which the Medusa

12 Freud, in “The Infantile Genital Organization,” uses the myth of the Medusa to support his theory of castration anxiety. Pointing to the images of Medusa’s hair as snakes, he argues that her head and hair represents female genitals. He continues by arguing that as Medusa turns men to stone, she makes them stiff, which, for Freud, is symbolic of an erection. Thus, the boy is still in possession of his penis in the face of the horror of the feminine. For further discussion of this, please see Freud on Women: A Reader, Ed. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl.

94 refuses the space of erasure. In the following quote, Cixous asks a series of questions and concludes with the revised image: Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren't men, or that the mother doesn't have one. But isn't this fear convenient for them? Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing. (my emphasis 885) Cixous posits two questions that attack the confining and deterministic structures of the institution of psychoanalysis while simultaneously critiquing the historical rendering of female monsters. The first instance of this occurs in the statement concerning the Sirens, another form of female monsters. Cixous revalues the traditional narrative of the Sirens, creatures that lure mariners, to argue that the Sirens were simply an invention created by men. While this section does not relate specifically to laughter, it is of consequence because the passage demonstrates how, to use Nietzsche’s terminology, truth is nothing more than a “movable host of metaphors.” In other words, the historical understanding of Sirens as seductresses who steal men’s vitality is nothing more than a male fantasy, a concocted story. For transformation to take place, Cixous suggests, women must “stop listening,” and I add start laughing. Laughter foments a space that refuses silence, quiet, and the negative, by fostering an engagement of sound and the body, a refusal to remain object determined by lack. The passage also engages the reader on the level of laughter through the ironic and parodic re-imagining of Medusa. Instead of the Medusa of snakes and rage, the image is of beauty and laughter. Medusa, a Greek mythological figure beheaded for supposedly desecrating a temple, is, similar to the Sirens, a female monster. By transforming the snake haired woman into a laughing beauty, Cixous accomplishes two actions. On one level, this re-imagining destabilizes of the mythological Medusa (of Ovid, of Freud), thereby focusing a critique on how narratives manipulate images and characters for specific purposes. On another level, I suggest, Medusa laughs because laughter is not only critical but generative as well. Her laughter pokes at a tradition that

95 erases and silences, physically and mentally, women and their bodies (and maybe bodies in general). She is making noise, sounding out her pain and frustration, her containment. She substantiates a new narrative formation, a new way in which to create stories and memories through laughter. Medusa’s laugh ultimately initiates and conceptualizes an alternative possibility, a bodily practice of laughter that momentarily communicates by reversing the conventions regarding those bodies marred by phallocentric history. Thus, as articulated in chapter 2, this is another example of the laughter of transvaluation. Similar to how Nietzsche envisions the breaking of the old tablets and the writing of new tablets, Cixous breaks the old Medusa narrative as envisioned by myth and Freud, and creates a new narrative, infused with laughter, that fosters values of overcoming and affirmation. Overcoming and affirmation, components of the transvaluation of values, emerge at a variety of different points in “The Laugh,” and I argue that one component of overcoming evidenced within Cixous is in relation to the body. She infuses her writing with sensation, feeling, and pleasure in order to displace a writing that is devoid of those components, one couched in logic and linearity. Cixous writes: Text: my body-shot through with streams of song; I don't mean the overbearing, clutchy "mother" but, rather, what touches you, the equivoice that affects you, fills your breast with an urge to come to language and launches your force; the rhythm that laughs you; the intimate recipient who makes all metaphors possible and desirable; body (body? bodies?), no more describable than god, the soul, or the Other; that part of you that leaves a space between yourself and urges you to inscribe in language your woman's style. (882) This passage suggests that through laughter and song, the body is able to express, sense, and feel – a specific bodily articulation. The body is a force for Cixous, which is similar to the way in which Grosz and Nietzsche conceptualize it. Again, albeit described here in somewhat romantic rhetoric, the laugh becomes a generative force – “the rhythm that laughs you.” Laughter, in this passage, is one way to inscribe in language your women’s style. Thus, laughter, as a component of a bodily reason, foments a new relation to language that affirms the body’s power and potential to transgress the traditional

96 boundaries of language and knowledge creation. Though this passage might appear to revolve purely around a specific feminine sexuality, and it does to a certain extent, I draw attention to the element of laughter as inscription in order to supplement my argument regarding liminal laughter. To explain further how I envision liminal laughter as overcoming and affirmation, I look to a passage where laughter becomes a tool that breaks up “truth,” which harkens back to the earlier discussions of the Medusa myth, Nietzsche’s theories on laughter, and even Foucault’s laugh as described by de Certeau. Cixous notes, “There's no room for her if she's not a he. If she's a her-she, it's in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the "truth" with laughter” (888). Smashing, shattering, blowing up, and breaking up are all actions that laughter initiates to disrupt phallocentric language, a language that erases the feminine voice, sexuality, and sensation. For Nietzsche, laughter disrupts religious doctrine and other nineteenth century conceits, whereas, for Cixous, the disruption is in relation to phallocentric law and thus, tangentially, the narratives of psychoanalysis. This laughter questions the truths of those two institutions by making those truths a laughing matter. By laughing at the tenets of these institutions, their hierarchies and binaries become absurd, thus, a displacement of any notion of a fixed and / or stable truth occurs. However, this moment is more than simply cathartic because it is a moment of a bodily protestation that creates the revaluation of life-affirming values. The moments of laughter as critical analysis are diverse and distinct, but, examined on a continuum, they all demonstrate the body’s great reason and support a practice of transvaluation, including overcoming and affirmation. Granted these terms of smashing and breaking appear to embody a violent temperament, but this “violence” is necessary in order to tackle the violence done, through language, to a variety of voices and persons. In other words, this liminal laughter of smashing and breaking, in sum, destabilizes truths considered innate or natural, creates new values (the laughing Medusa), and offers a new practice of critique that is embedded within the body. The Laugh of the Text To provide another example of how I envision liminal laughter functioning, I look to two passages within Cixous’ essay that, I argue, add another level to my discussion.

97 That other level is the laugh of the text. “The Laugh” is, in and of itself, a laughing text because it laughs at the tenets of phallocentrism. Granted this particular component derives a particular engagement that embraces a somewhat humorous tendency; however, I pause her to explicate this other element. Certain passages within “The Laugh,” practice the overcoming of the values associated with phallocentric language while simultaneously affirming the body as a medium of critical engagement – the transvaluation of values. Cixous, by making psychoanalysis something to be mocked, mimicked, and laughed at, provides an example and method for a liminal laughter that revalues. In one of her many criticisms of psychoanalysis, she writes: “But at the same time, man has been handed that grotesque and scarcely enviable destiny (just imagine) of being reduced to a single idol with clay balls,” (884). Hilarious. I suggest that this is a moment where liminal laughter breaks up “truth” as Cixous mocks and ridicules the dominant phallic position. In this laughing critique of phallocratic ideology, she showcases the ridiculousness of castration anxiety, fear of being woman, among other psychoanalytic elements, which institutes a practice of revaluing. Another example of the laugh of the text occurs a few sentences later with: “Here we encounter the inevitable man-with-rock, standing erect in his old Freudian realm […] We don’t fawn around the supreme hole” (884). “Here we encounter” drums up a picture in my mind of Freud standing with a Trident-like spear, guarding a large phallic symbol perhaps a statue or building – a hilarious image that always garners a laugh from me. This engagement with / to Cixous’ essay affords a perfect example of a laughing parodic text quite in line with the discussion, in chapter 1, of the feminist humor Wollstonecraft employs to critique Rousseau. Also similar to the discussion in chapter 3 regarding the different Mickee Faust Club skits that parody hegemonic norms of gender and sexuality, this instance is a parodic rendering of the narrative of psychoanalysis. First off, the “old realm” needs to be revalued, questioned and challenged, and this process of revaluing occurs through Cixous’ ingenious play with language infused with laughter. Her comment regarding the refusal of the feminine to fawn around the supreme hole is a brazen statement of resistance. This resistance is to the doctrine of psychoanalysis which conceptualizes the feminine as lack – a hole, literal and figurative. The laugh of the text, in this instance, disavows the exclusive positions of psychoanalysis by “speaking,” by

98 refusing to be quiet, subdued, and rational. Laughter, as theorized here, enables a radically new method for the critique of narratives that stems from the body. Cixous’ Critics Having illuminated Cixous’ essay as well as conceptualizing the role of laughter within the essay, I move to an examination of her critics. This examination demonstrates where I see limits to the current criticism, and it also elaborates on the above discussion of laughter. The main themes that circulate throughout the scholarly literature on Cixous are: discursive practices, the body as it relates to écriture féminine, the formation of desire, and the hysterical narrative as an alternative discourse. Cixous’ critics, though covering a variety of her more well-known texts including “Laugh,” Portrait of Dora, Sorties, and The Newly Born Woman, mainly focus on two aspects: hysteria and écriture féminine. The following questions often emerge: Does the hysterical narrative offer feminism a potential discursive alternative to phallocentric language? Similar questions also adhere to the concept of écriture féminine. The majority of critics’ engagement with Cixous’ “The Laugh” remains entrenched in a discussion of écriture feminine as either a liberating or limiting notion, and I point to these in order to demonstrate how laughter moves this discussion to another space. Even summaries of Cixous’ essay, including Marilyn Schuster’s chapter: ”Écriture Féminine: Writing and Theory,” focus solely on how the essay -- conceptualized as a manifesto, or a poem, or a little bit of both -- revolves around how writing becomes a freeing agent that ultimately disrupts the reign of the phallus. Other critics, such as Francesco Pontuale, apply “The Laugh” in order to locate a site of feminine writing within novels, poems, and other artistic endeavors. For example, Pontuale, in his essay “The Awakening: Struggles Toward l’ écriture feminine,” employs “The Laugh” in order to suggest that Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is an example of écriture feminine through her discussions of motherhood, the imagery of flight, and the notion of a specifically feminine sexuality. While the criticism surrounding Cixous’ canon is quite diverse, I limit the below discussion to critics’ analyses of écriture féminine within the “The Laugh.”13 I look to Ann Rosalind Jones, Cecile Lindsay, and Alison Booth in order to illuminate one trajectory of criticism that

13 List articles on hysteric that I will not be covering?

99 contends Cixous’ utopian vision of a feminine writing14 maintains an essential feminine (sexuality). After examining these criticisms, I move to the subsequent section, “How Does a Text Laugh?,” which examines two radically different critics, Suzanne de Villiers Human and Yung-Sing Wu, who all engage with the concept of either laughter or humor in their respective essays. As noted above, the main critique launched at “The Laugh” is that it supports a utopian vision that is unrealizable and pervaded by an essential femininity. While I understand how one could envision this argument by taking, out of context, snippets of the essay, I do not agree that Cixous offers a utopian vision or an essential femininity, and this will be clear shortly. Critic Booth writes: “It [écriture feminine] is an avowedly utopian dream of a common language that would undo the deadly myth for which Medusa stands” (280). Similarly, Lindsay writes, “I side with those critics, both French and American, who see in Cixous’s écriture féminine a dangerous version of a peaceful, ocean future for females, and who for various reasons and with certain reservations prefer Wittig’s hyperbolic projections of overthrow and violence aimed at bodies and language” (5). First off, in regards to écriture feminine as undoing the deadly myth of Medusa, yes, I believe Cixous wants to undo the myth. However, she is not replacing the original myth with a utopian vision of perfection and community. Instead, as she re-writes the Medusa myth through the image of laughter, Cixous creates a complex critique of language that does not suggest the possibility of a commonality. What her rewriting suggests to me is a call to action to listen, hear, and laugh. Furthermore, the critique of language, as I argued above, does embrace, to a certain degree, an element of violence, a necessary violence that refuses to legitimate phallocentric ideology. Throughout my reading of Cixous, including her language of breaking, smashing, and tearing, I am surrounded not by a peaceful utopian vision but by a chaotic and tumultuous vision of the possibility of change through a practice of revaluation. This type of writing is not going to all of a sudden completely transform the phallocentric system, but like laughter, écriture féminine offers a plausible alternative language. That alternative, though, is often envisioned as relying on sexual difference, a

14 For a more in-depth examination of how the concept of écriture feminine changes across Cixous’ canon a helpful chapter is Marilyn R. Schuster’s “Écriture féminine: Writing and Theory” in Hélène Cixous, Ed. Lynn Kettler Penrod.

100 totalized ideal, and an essentialist notion of femininity. I pause here to examine Lindsay’s argument regarding écriture féminine in order to supplement the discussion and provide a further engagement with laughter’s similarities. Lindsay argues that écriture féminine relies on the foundation of innate sexual difference. It is sexual difference that “drives the different language that is écriture féminine” (2). According to Lindsay, écriture féminine is inherently tied to a specifically feminine desire that is rooted in the divisive binary: masculine / feminine. But, I wonder, if Cixous’ example of Jean Genet as an author who embraces this type of feminine writing, does not shed some new light on this particular quote? Lindsay continues with: “The tone of triumph and celebration in which these feminine givens are expressed make the female body perhaps too unproblematically totalized, and its access to pleasure too facile; that is, too utopian in the sense of impractically ideal” (5). In other words, for Lindsay, Cixous’ écriture féminine constructs the body as a totalized entity that relies on biological givens and purports to universalism. While Lindsay’s argument can be supported while reading certain passages of the essay, I argue that Cixous’ understanding of the body and its relation to writing is quite a bit more complex than Lindsay would have it. In other words, the critique that Cixous’ discussion revolves around an “unproblematically totalized” body does not bear out upon further scrutiny. Cixous’ essay elevates the body through writing, and I argue laughter, to create an image of complexity and creativity that will radically challenge phallocentrism through an understanding of the body as force. She writes: Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable lan- guage that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pro- nouncing the word "silence," the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word "impossible" and writes it as "the end." (886) This new bodily language, according to Cixous, will violently wreck partitions, classes, rhetorics, regulations, and codes, and it functions on two levels: form and content, similar to Cixous’ “The Laugh” which functions as an example. To be more specific, it is not simply the content of the essay, novel, or poem that must wreck, to use Cixous’ term,

101 but the actual form of the written word (sentences, punctuation, paragraph distribution, etc.) must be destroyed. While Cixous’ essay on its most obvious level considers this wrecking to occur through a decidedly feminine writing, I suggest that, on another level, it is a wild and raucous laughter that will also support this project of wrecking. Though feminine writing appears to be at the center of Cixous’ essay, laughter also bubbles to the surface as another possibility for creating a different type of language that also recognizes the body as drive and sensation – an affirmation of the body. The idea of laughter and writing also emerges in Cixous’ text La – The “Feminine,” a text that examines the traits of the feminine writer. Cixous writes: “Her art of crossing the whole of history and the little histories and the contests of the sexes, and of crossing unscathed the foul economies, in a spirited stroke, / from her inexhaustible source of humor / To vanquish the impossible each day and have always a yes in advance on chance” (59). Offering support for the above section regarding the laugh of the text, this passage cements Cixous’ vision of writing as one that embraces humor. Cixous also writes: “She [the feminine writer] will become so robust during her lives that it will be easy for her to make sickness sick, to find in injuries the healing virtue that resides there, to thwart the thread of death of which the mask covers nothing. / She will heartily laugh” (61). Again, laughter offers a method for overcoming and creating life-affirming values that demolish the life-negating values of phallocentrism. In a slightly more complex criticism of Cixous’ essay, Jones is both open to the possibilities of écriture feminine and also critical of the project. Her essay, “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of ‘L’Ecriture Feminine’” begins with the suggestion that Western thought “has been based on a systematic repression of women’s experience,” and she views écriture feminine as a challenge to this system of “male- centered thinking” (247). However, Jones, similar to both Booth and Lindsay, is leery of an essential feminine, which she sees emerging from Cixous’ text. Jones writes: I myself feel highly flattered by Cixous’s praise for the nurturant perceptions of women, but when she speaks of a drive toward gestation, I begin to hear echoes of the coercive glorification of motherhood that has plagued women for centuries. If we define female subjectivity through

102 universal biological / libidinal givens, what happens to the project of changing the world in feminist directions? (255) The argument for biological determinism does not hold up upon close scrutiny of “The Laugh.” As noted above, at least two of the authors mentioned throughout the essay are male, which again suggests that the possibility for this writing transgresses the simple binary of masculine / feminine. Also, if, as Jones suggests Cixous is calling for simply a reversal, a new economy that has recourse to a biologically determined essentialism, then Cixous would simply be reaffirming the hierarchy already in place. In other words, if Jones is correct, then Cixous’ entire argument would keep intact, in some sense, the divisive structure of phallocentrism – the centrism would stay the same and the “phallo” part would simply be replaced with feminine sexuality. I firmly believe that that is not Cixous’ argument. Moreover, in another essay, “Extreme Fidelity,” written after “The Laugh,” Cixous explains her understanding of the terms masculine and feminine: “If we resign ourselves to keeping words like ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ it is because there is an anchoring point somewhere in a far distant reality. But I believe we must do our utmost to reduce this heritage. Let us try as quickly as possible to abandon these binary distinctions which never make any sense” (135). Clearly, then, Cixous does not want to, as Jones would have it, replace a masculine economy with a feminine economy. In her conclusion, though, Jones makes a point to mention what feminists can gain from “The Laugh,” and I agree with her assessment. She notes that: “American feminists can appropriate two important elements, at least, from the French position: the critique of phallocentrism in all the material and ideological forms it has taken, and the call for new representations of women’s consciousness” (261). It is this final point that I am most interested in as she accurately represents one of the most important components of Cixous’ essay -- that of the need for a critique of phallocentrism. This critique, usually noted to occur within feminine writing, I argue, can also occur, and my reading of Cixous above supports this, within the moment of liminal laughter. I do not want to replace Cixous’ idea of écriture féminine, but, instead, to suggest that a possible addition, to the disruptive elements of écriture féminine, is laughter. I build on the idea of écriture féminine to suggest that laughter holds a similar place. It is at once language and speaking, but in a way that denies the traditional notions of language and speaking by

103 inserting the laughing body into a realm reserved for the mind, thinking, and the intellect. By revaluing these traditional understandings, laughter, in this feminist context, disrupts narratives of closure and erasure. By bringing the body’s great reason, in the form of laughter, to the narratives of the Medusa, the Sirens, and psychoanalysis, those stories are made to appear ridiculous and absurd. Moreover, it is the body, as it laughs, that radically engenders a new method of investigation – a bodily resistance. More importantly, laughter demonstrates that silence and erasure will not pervade, instead, the sounds of a triumphant and creative laughter will. These texts are shattered, broken up, and smashed through laughter. As this engagement engenders a new relation to the text, it also speaks, and in speaking, challenges those structures, here psychoanalysis and in the previous chapter the regime of patriarchy and heterosexuality, that have dismissed the body. Laughter affirms the body as a source of knowledge. How Does a Text Laugh? This final section of the Cixous analysis examines how critics have envisioned laughter within “The Laugh” and to what purposes they have employed that laughter in subsequent critical engagements. Human points out that the humor of Cixous is often ignored: “Although the humor of Cixous’ ‘manifesto’ often goes unrecognized, we contend that it is in exactly these carnivalesque and exaggerated metaphors of explosion, outburst, laughter and wildness that the of the text lies” (182). Yes, Human is correct in her assertion that the “manifesto” is about much more than simply feminine writing. I agree that these metaphors of explosion, as she calls them, are manifested within laughter. This particular type of laughter is reminiscent of de Certeau’s analysis of Foucault. In other words, these explosions of laughter are creative moments that foster a new sense of knowledge and creativity, stemming from the body. They open an untreaded space in which, for the purposes of Cixous’ essay, an illuminating critique of phallocentrism emerges. Similarly, critic Wu writes, “The Laugh” “ends with not so much a bang but with raucous glee” (220). And, I see this “raucous glee” as my moment of liminal laughter, a playful moment that supports my contention regarding laughter as a critical endeavor of disruption and destabilization. The Promise of Promethea

104 Cixous’ The Book of Promethea, a novel of love and laughter, functions as the final example of liminal laughter. The novel is a complex picture of vying positionalities in the incarnations of “I,” “H,” and Promethea. The “I” “character” functions most often as the narrator, mediating, in some sense, between “H” (possibly Hélène) and Promethea, a modern goddess-like figure who morphs into different animal visages but also participates in exercise “to the tune of Jane Fonda’s Workout” (172). At the most basic of levels, the novel details a love affair among the three positions. There are erotic moments of caressing tongues as well as petty arguments revolving around the inability to communicate, articulate, and write. For example, in the very last pages of the novel “H” and Promethea argue about the title of the novel: “What if we called it: Promethea Disappeared / H shuddered: No / Promethea in Russia? Promethea has Problems. Promethea in a Ballooon. Promethea in the Theater / […] Promethea said: wrong style” (210-11). The novel offers a new paradigm for thinking myth and the larger notion of narrative in relation to voice, subjectivity, heroism, and sexuality, among other conceits. I refer to Promethea as a novel throughout this section; however, whether the text is, in fact, a novel, is up for debate. Traditional narrative conventions are not adhered to; it has no actual beginning, end, or climax, nor does it contain traditional characters or plot. It is a radical rewriting of Aeschylus’ Prometheus myth, though the character of Promethea is often associated with fire and ash in a variety of passages. However, Promethea does not bring literal fire to “I” and “H;” instead, she figures as a muse, a sexual being, a writer, a body, knowledge, and conflict. The very first page contains the following: “I was saying: Promethea has already put in much that is hers and more, she drew unstintingly on her organs, her desires, her memory; the text can be said to be made physically, morally, nervously, and above all virtuously, mostly of her” (5). The novel, along with manifesting a love story, is also a journey through writing by questioning notions of the body, language, representation, and signification. Promethea, similar to “The Laugh,” fosters a new language and style that refuses phallocentrism and hetero-patriarchy and conceptualizes a bodily articulation. The new language and style, though, is complex, contradictory, and always becoming: “But I have my doubts, about myself and about

105 words as well: I am not sure my written language can faithfully translate all the many living, original, cosmic personal languages” (21). Though laughter only crops up at a dozen or so places, I argue that the novel Promethea establishes a practice of laughter. There are a variety of different laughs within Cixous’ text, and all of them coincide with my theory of liminal laughter. Laughter functions to initiate an awakening that supports creativity and writing through a burst quite similar to how de Certeau envisions Foucault’s laugh. In this instance, laughter is a force, emerging from the body that then allows something new (thought, sensation, feeling, writing) to come to the fore. On a second level, laughter is a life- force, an affirming moment where the past, present, and future coalesce into a bodily moment of articulation. Within this second level of laughter, traditional phallocentric language, including what is often considered “unsayable,” is undermined by the force and drive of the laughing body. The below paragraphs first analyze how laughter is used within the text to support the above contentions, and included in that section are two critical analyses by Liedeke Plate and H. Jill Scott. In the final discussion, I turn to examining how laughter maintains overcoming, affirmation, and becoming. Laughter, in Promethea, helps the “I” of the novel find her body and embrace it in such away as to be able to create and write it. Discussing the difficulties surrounding writing, the “I” states: “After all, I can’t just write from life, can I? […] I open my notebook, I open the window, I call, and my heroine is there, really. I am overwhelmed. I warn her: ‘I am writing on you, Promethea, run away, escape. I am afraid to write you, I am going to hurt you” (15). The “I” of the novel is overwhelmed and caught within a matrix of fear because she has always figured as the hole, absence, and lack. How can she write as a subject when the dominant narrative of phallocentrism has excluded her voice and sexuality? How can the “I” overcome her dismissal? The answer, in part, derives from laughter: “But rather than run away, she [Promethea] comes at a gallop. Through the window she comes, breathing hard, and alive as can be, she flings herself into the book, and there are bursts of laughter and splashes of water everywhere, on my notebook, on the table, on my hands, on our bodies” (15). These “bursts of laughter” are similar to de Certeau’s vision of Foucault’s laugh. They help the “I” forward, beyond her impasse. The moment of laughter is not one of healing some irreconcilable difference or

106 transcending the very process of writing. Instead, this burst demonstrates the interweaving of the processes surrounding an alternative vision of articulation that emphasizes the body. Promethea supplants phallocentric doctrine of exclusion and erasure by: a. pointing to pervasive language structures that have recourse to hierarchical binary thinking, and b. positing laughter as a way to challenge those language structures that disavow articulation. The “I” remarks: “Sometimes, like most people I know, I speak not-quite. This is a thoughtless, fickle, superficial language, likely to flip over to its opposites, one that does not really care at all about what it says” (154). The passage, implicitly invoking phallocentric language, characterizes it as “superficial” and apt to “flip over to its opposites.” The “I,” maneuvering throughout Promethea between subject and object positionalities, fosters a critical engagement with the dichotomous tenets of that language. Laughter, in the passage below, helps to cement a possible practice of critical engagement. As “I” is discussing how phallocentrism disavows a bodily articulation (“but on paper all one can reproduce is colors – with an occasional descent into hell one gets to go through real bodily passages”), she comments: “And what else? Everything unsayable: laughter. Our cosmic mental geography. Our joyful megalomania, our coronations, our dates with the gods. Our humors” (111). Similar to one of my first examples, A Question, this passage envisions laughter as a mode of articulation that breaches the “unsayable.” The women’s laughter at the end of A Question functioned as protest and resistance to hetero-patriarchal narratives. Similarly, the laughter of the above passage helps to articulates what is unsayable. Laughter, throughout the novel, promotes overcoming. The vision of Promethea is one of overcoming; it is an overcoming of the silenced and erased body conditioned by the narratives of hetero-patriarchy. The “I” of the novel constantly attempts to surmount a variety of obstacles relating to the body and writing. At one point, she notes: “I put in all the stars, but I can’t convey the sky” (111). And later in the text, the “I” comes up against further language difficulties: “And I, I don’t know how, slipping up on a few words that are too polite, too polished, I skid sometimes, I miss the point of what I meant to say, I miss the truth. Or is it maybe a question of weight? Because I am too light to stay in the depth of language, I rise to the surface” (155). What is the “I” referring to in

107 this statement regarding the “depth of language?” She suggests that language, traditional phallocentric language, cannot and will not, any longer, function as containment. The “I” rises up and overcomes the depth of language through laughter. Before, though, she can overcome, there is a questioning and challenging of those mechanisms of language: I want this: slowly to sink into her body, slow and breathless to go down inside her heaving breast, to let my soul sink down far from duties, from conversations, so far from myself, toward her, far from me toward “the” “source,” far from History, far from weapons, far from sciences, toward she-who-does-not-know-she-knows-more-than-everything.15 (101) The “I” wants a new voice, a new method of speaking that does not remain entrenched in the narratives of His(s)tory or any system, psychoanalysis, hetero-patriarchy, or modern scientific narratives. Promethea’s laughter helps the “I” (and perhaps “H”) to be / write that alternative: “[…], she is a child crawling out of the river on all fours and shaking with laughter” (152). At the outset of the novel, there is a dynamic play among the three: “I feel so close and yet know I am so different from H and from Promethea” (5). Shortly thereafter, “I am merely an author. A minor character. But I am, at least woman. My aim is to slip as close as possible to the two real makers’ being until I can marry the contour of these women’s souls with mine […]” (5). The spontaneous moment of bodily laughter is what enables Promethea, “H,” and “I” to write the contours, to devise an alternative writing that embraces an articulation of plurality and the corporeal. The image of the above passage, similar to the previously quoted material about rising from the depths of language, offers a clear picture of overcoming through laughter. Though reminiscent of a birth or the birthing process, the imagery of this passage demonstrates an emergent state, inextricably linked to laughing. From this new state, the “I” observes: “I waken the earth by caressing all its surfaces, and the earth hums to itself, still dreaming, sings its own awakening, awakens welling up in celebration, wakes up rejoicing, and turns into a river that flows between rocks, her face turned toward the sky, humming to herself” (152). This is a moment of awakening and overcoming in the sense

15 In H. Rider Haagard’s novel She, the Queen is also called She-who-must-be-obeyed. A further investigation would need to examine this reference in light of his novel.

108 that a new relation among the body, the earth, language, and writing arises. It is a moment of affirmation, which is discussed further shortly. Prior to discussing how Nietzsche’s conceptualization of affirmation emerges within Promethea, I turn to two critical analyses that also discuss the function of language and the place of the body in relation to subject and object / other. Scott, in her article “Loving the Other,” embraces a similar stance as she also suggests that the novel revolves around the impossibility of representation (30). Though her analysis centers on examining the novel as a postcolonial text that tackles the structure of the Other, Scott offers a commentary on the body, language, and writing: “Cixous […] manages to avoid essentializing words by keeping them moving through the body, bridging the gap between the language of representation and the material circumstances of the other” (33). Scott correctly assert that Cixous avoids essentializing words as she “keeps them moving through the body.” The “I” explains: “Luckily, Promethea is untranslatable. That is my one consolation; she races on in an out-of-breath language […]. Her vocabulary comes always from the guts, hers or the earth’s” (23). There is no essential feminine language of the body, instead, it is the experienced and living moment of Promethea’s body, which (re)writes, revises, and laughs. In concluding, Scott offers a further accurate commentary: “She [Cixous] allows her characters to express contingent social configurations outside of a heterosexual contract” (34). Scott’s contention is in line with my argument above regarding how Promethea challenges the narratives associated with hetero-patriarchy. Moreover, I add that these “contingent social configurations” that the characters are able to express depends upon an embrace of an awakening and affirming laughter – liminal laughter. I turn to Liedeke’s “‘I come from a woman’: Writing, Gender, and Authorship in Hélène Cixous’s The Book of Promethea” because she not only offers support for my suggestions regarding writing, language, and the body, but she also marks the novel as containing life-affirming values. Regarding language, she writes: “Cixous works at the limits of language in order to approach her subject in all her truth, excess, and violence” (167). Yes, Cixous does work at the limits of language, and one way to envision these is through the novel’s consistent recourse to laughter, which, I contend, demonstrates the failure of traditional language to signify. Liedeke argues: “We can now see why Cixous,

109 whose writings continually emphasize life and presence over death and absence, separation and castration, steers the question of the author away from its post-structuralist movement toward death and disappearance” (166). Though Liedeke’s analysis revolves around examining Promethea in light of poststructural criticism regarding authority and authorship (Barthes and Foucault), she correctly illuminates Cixous’ emphasis on life and presence. I assert a practice of liminal laughter, as evidenced through the textual analysis of the above passages in conjunction with Liedeke’s argument, substantiates affirmation, life-affirming values. A variety of passages embrace affirmation: I want what I have had, I want what I will have: I want to be royally human, I want to cry some more, I want troubles, discouragements, dreaded ordeals, whatever I don’t want, I want it too – even sicknesses? – I don’t want to say no, I want to flee nothing, I want to live you through fatigue, money problems, the stupid mountains that overwhelm us when we wake up as moles. (196) The “I,” as she laughs her resistance to the structures of hetero-patriarchy and phallocentrism, sustains a Nietzschean practice of affirmation. The text, as a whole, similarly embraces this notion as it consistently and constantly questions the possibilities of language, representation, and signification. More than simply questioning, though, the novel is a new method of articulation, an articulation of the laughing body. Toward the end, the “I,” stricken initially with “malevolent plagues” (read limiting language structures), awakens to: “I am standing here, in the midst of my quivering and laughing life, shouting like the Other, ‘I want to be queen,’ […]” (196). Cixous’ Promethea is a life affirming novel of laughter, elevation, and overcoming – the transvaluation of values.

110 CONCLUSION I have illuminated my theory of liminal laughter, here, in this dissertation in order to suggest that a feminism of the twenty-first century, one concerned with challenging discourse, narratives, language, and truth would benefit from an engagement with laughter. The main benefit included is a challenge to the hegemonic narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality, which continue to condition the body’s thoughts, actions, sensations, and practices. To be more specific, liminal laughter destabilizes the binary systems of mind / body, subject / other, natural / unnatural, masculine / feminine, heterosexual / homosexual. It is the laughing body, sensing and feeling, that engages with these structures by maintaining the body as a source of knowledge. Not only does liminal laughter offer a questioning of hegemonic narratives, but it also clearly revalues the body. This revaluation combined with the challenge to hegemonic structures manifests in a third component that of fostering a creative and generative moment where new values and ethical positions can emerge – the transvaluation of values. I began with a thorough discussion of poststructural and phenomenological feminisms, including the theories of Gloria Anzaldúa, Monique Wittig, Simone de Beavoir, and Toril Moi. In examining these theorists, I contended that liminal laughter, as a bodily practice, foments a theory of the body that roots investigation and resistance within the corporeal. From there, I moved to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, in chapter 2, to argue for the body as force, energy, and drive and to illuminate laughter as the transvaluation of values. That is, the laughing body as articulated by Nietzsche cements an alternative practice of analysis and investigation. One of the major strengths of this theory is the evidence provided in chapters 3 and 4. Using the Mickee Faust Club’s skits “The Gay Caballero,” “Alternative Family Values,” and “Gender Defenders” combined with the examination of queer theater and the genre of parody in chapter 3, I argued that the binaries of natural / unnatural, masculine / feminine, subject / object, and mind / body are thoroughly destabilized through liminal laughter. The laughing body not only offers a challenge, but it also substantiates new narratives of alternative values by challenging the life-negating ones perpetuated by the hegemonic narratives of heterosexuality and patriarchy. Chapter 4 argued for liminal laughter in the genre of critical theory and literature, specifically in the works of Hélène Cixous. Her essay and novel offered a method for thinking laughter as a way to challenge phallocentrism, and

111 she also provided examples of this disruptive laughter in her rewriting of the Medusa myth and in the laughing creativity of Promethea. All of these examples, from the Mickee Faust Club through Cixous, helped to cement my theory of liminal laughter. A further investigation of liminal laughter would need to tackle a number of other components. Questions would include: What are the physiological components of laughter? How might these relate to my discussion of the cultural phenomenon of liminal laughter? Similarly, a further examination of my idea of liminal laughter would ask: Is this type of laughter more applicable to performances, to novels, to theory, to comedy? What other genres might evidence liminal laughter? Regarding my analysis of Mickee Faust there remain the following questions: Would a heterosexual audience have the same experience of liminal laughter? How might liminal laughter function differently depending on the individual laughing? I would also extend and expand my discussion to inquire: How might Luce Irigaray’s Marine Lover, a parody of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, support a practice of liminal laughter? Also, could parodic retellings of children’s fairy tales, as they challenge gender and sexuality norms, function as an example? In the meantime, though, I ask that you join me in laughing, liminally, of finding spaces where laughter foments a challenge to narratives, discourses, languages, and truths that silence and erase minority communities. Laugh your resistance.

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117 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Sarah E. Fryett was born August 26, 1980 in Falmouth, Massachusetts. She packed up everything in the summer of 1998 and moved to Tallahassee, FL to attend Florida State University. She double majored in General Communication and English Literature, and she received her BA in the Spring of 2002 from FSU. Upon completion of her BA, she decided to pursue an MA in English Literature at FSU. Sarah E. Fryett was awarded her MA in Summer 2005. Subsequently, she began her PhD studies in the Program of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Fall of 2005. In the Spring of 2011, she was awarded her PhD after completing her dissertation titled Liminal Laughter: A Feminist Vision of the Body in Resistance. She continues to pursue her interests in various fields including feminism, gender and queer studies, and philosophy.

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