Latina Humor in the Works of Sandra Cisneros

The paper discusses three works written by Sandra Cisneros, namely Woman Hollering Creek, The House on Mango Street and Caramelo, from the point of view of women’s humor. With the help of these works, it is argued that Cisneros uses Latina humor in order to highlight intersectional problems concerning her identity and to reveal important facts and features about/of Latino/a existence. The point is made that Cisneros uses comedy and humor to redeem the pain and suffering through laughter instead of utilizing the tragic mode of artistic expression, hence she is able to secure survival and solutions to problems instead of a tragic wallowing in negativity (which interpretive way could also have validity concerning the occurrences which are narrated). Keywords: Latina humor, Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek, The House on Mango Street, Caramelo

“A Very Dangerous Talent”: Wit for Women in Hannah Webster Foster's The Boarding School

Hannah Webster Foster's eighteenth-century novel The Boarding School shows how conduct literature and the republican culture of politeness create gender expectations for women's humor in the early United States. Foster teaches readers about the social effects of wit and guides them in using satire and irony to influence public opinion.

Women’s Work, Women’s Humor

Nettie Arthur Brown’s The Red Fan (1896) was typical of the humorous spoken-word compositions in twentieth-century America. Due to female elocutionists’ performance traditions, women became the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, including a few modernist composers, such as Ruth Crawford Seeger and Marion Bauer. More typically, comic “musical readings” satirized gender expectations. Courtship, marriage, and domesticity were portayed as less than ideal. Performers sometimes adopted a rebellious boy persona, allowing for women’s further expression of gendered satire. Some compositions depicted grandmothers, and moral and religious works continued and modified nineteenth-century ideals. Piano accompaniments humorously quote well-known compositions and feature closing gestures that punctuate the narratives’ climactic “punch lines.” Ultimately, female composers feminized melodrama, creating genres to speak for and to women.

Laughter in times of uncertainty: Negotiating gender and social distance in Bahraini women’s humorous talk

This paper explores three interrelated aspects of young Bahraini women’s laughter: the subjects and genres of their humor, the social relationships between the women involved with a particular focus on homo-social friendships, and their humor’s potential as an instrument of resistance or social control. After discussing local ideals of femininity, the paper analyzes three distinct genres of humorous conversation: self-mockery, mutual teasing, and joking about absent third parties. The data show that the ambiguity of humour allowed for great freedom regarding women’s play with gendered identities and the expression of critical views on Bahrain’s gender hierarchy. Simultaneously, different kinds of humor were employed to negotiate closeness or distance in social relations. Among women friends, humor was often drastic, intimate, aggressive, and revelled in the taboo subjects of Bahraini society. Through humor, women questioned existing gender ideals and played with alternative identities. Their laughter, however, also served to maintain conventional ideas about “proper” women and confirmed existing social hierarchies. Thus, Bahraini women’s humor captured the contradictions and ambiguities of their fragmented and hybrid social environment replete with the uncertainties accompanying rapid social change.