Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2011 Liminal Laughter: A Feminist Vision of the Body in Resistance Sarah E. Fryett Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS 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 Friedrich Nietzsche 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 philosopher, 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