Neoliberal feminisms, late-night comedy, and the public sphere, or: Samantha Bee takes on Ivanka Trump

ABSTRACT

The article analyzes the humor of a 2017 Full Frontal skit concerned with the publication of Ivanka Trump’s “feminist” self-help book Women Who Work. In the skit, Full Frontal’s host Samantha Bee takes issue with how the book misrepresents feminist (labor) politics, and calls out as politically dangerous the alignment of Ivanka’s neoliberal rhetoric of empowerment with the neoconservative or “retrotopian” politics of the Trump administration. The article suggests that the skit performs its critical intervention in two ways: on the one hand, by humorously appropriating Ivanka’s language in order to criticize her neoliberal resignification of feminist politics, and on the other hand, by highlighting the contrast between Ivanka’s composed, traditionally feminine behavior and Bee’s unruly comic bodily comportment. As the article shows, the skit creates humor around this contrast to call attention to the gendered mechanisms that have prevented women’s bodies from appearing both as comedians and as public speakers. The article closes with a caveat, pointing to the recent commodification of humor itself in neoliberal news media contexts, a development that severely curtails the transgressive feminist potential of Bee’s skit.

KEYWORDS:

• Late-night comedy
• neoliberal feminism
• public sphere
• body
• trump

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As my primary interest is in the cultural work performed by the public persona “Ivanka,” I will refer to Ivanka Trump as Ivanka throughout this article.

2. See, for instance, Michael Warner’s (2002) critique of Nancy Fraser’s (1992) influential description of a “feminist subaltern counterpublics” (123). Warner faults Fraser for not challenging the rational-critical mode of the Habermasian framework that excludes bodies, affect, and aesthetics.

3. Andrew Stott (2014, 84–104) provides a good overview of the misogynist stereotypes that constrain women’s bodies and women’s comic speech, on a spectrum ranging from “silent women” (96) to “fast talking dames” (99); for a more specific discussion of the female body in comedy, see below.

4. For the “cognitive play” (241) generally involved in humor, see John Morreall 2009; for a good overview of the overall tropes and targets of political humor in the U.S. from the 1990s to the Trump years, see Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter (2020, 1–25).

5. For an astute survey of the gender politics of contemporary right-wing populism in many parts of the globe, see Gabriele Dietze and Julia Roth (2020).

6. The idea that incongruence of whatever kind can be harnessed for humorous effect is one of the three classic theories of humor. See, for instance, Simon Critchley (2002, 2–3).

7. Admittedly a curious choice of text, as Lee’s novel is not really a feminist book, and its take on race and racial justice is, to say the least, doubtful (the novel features a paternalist white-savior plot and is full of African American stereotypes). For a recent critique of To Kill A Mockingbird and its status as prominent “liberal race fiction” (488), see Gregory Jay 2015.

8. See Ian Bogost (2018), who argues that even though Alexa, if asked, affirms that it/she is a feminist, the voice software is still embedded in the “broader structural sexism of the Echo devices” that connects femininity to (domestic) service labor.

9. Arpad Szakolczai (2013) describes “commedification” as the current pervasiveness of comedy in both the public and intimate spheres, engendered by “a clever and persistent confusion stimulated between real events, commercials, and comedy shows” (xii).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leopold Lippert

Leopold Lippert teaches American Studies at the University of Münster. He holds a PhD in American Studies (University of Vienna, 2015), and is the author of Performing America Abroad: Transnational Cultural Politics in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism (Winter, 2018). He has recently co-edited (with Katrin Horn, Ilka Saal, and Pia Wiegmink) a volume entitled American Cultures as Transnational Performance: Commons, Skills, Traces (Routledge, 2021). E-mail: [email protected]