The Gender of the Joke: Intimacy and Marginality in Murri Humour

ABSTRACT

Murri Aboriginal humour performances are expressive events in which bodily experiences of policing and agency are discursively commented on in ways that expose Australia's naturalised rationalisations of indigenous governance. Drawing on the ‘out-of-the-way’ position of an indigenous minority encapsulated in the body of the nation-state and the Murri body's intimate ‘out-of-the-way’ folds and crannies, Murri humour delimits and mocks the marginal location Murri people are imagined to spatially and morally occupy within Australia. This work examines how gendered humour renders the Murri individual and social body legible to and for a Murri audience. Such humour performances engage the local and the global, the modern and the traditional, and the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic in ways that link intimacy, bodies and embodiments to these macro-processes. Unraveling such binaries produces a nuanced analysis in which embodied social actions and sly social critique are captured as they are experienced and expressed through humour.

KEYWORDS:

• Humour
• out-of-the-way
• intimate partner violence
• embodiment
• marginality

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the care and friendship of the many Murri people I have known the past 20 or so years. I remain indebted to you for your warmth, your wit and your generosity of spirit. My original research was supported through a grant from AIATSIS and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Special thanks to Fred Myers and Francoise Dussart. I would like to thank Jan Brunson and Jennifer Aengst for their help. I greatly benefited from the comments of Holly Wardlow and Susan Seizer as well as two generous anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank the current editors of Ethnos for their support of this special issue.

Notes

1. The Flying Doctors refers to the Royal Flying Doctor Service which evacuates Cape York patients to the Cairns Base Hospital for medical treatment beyond the capacity of local health care centres.

2. I am indebted to Holly Wardlow for this observation and her emphasis on the importance of the phrase in her comments on my paper at the 2010 AAA meetings.