Embodied abject play: women “sex comics” and abject feminism

ABSTRACT

We analyze the performances of comics Whitney Cummings, Nikki Glaser, Amy Schumer, and Ali Wong that address topics that patriarchal culture has deemed abject about women’s bodies. These routines destabilize the patriarchal grounds of abjection through what we have termed embodied abject play: the shocking yet humorous re-presentation of bodies and bodily excesses that have been relegated to the margins, repressed, disavowed, or otherwise expelled in the name of stabilizing the symbolic order. By destabilizing the grounds of abjection, abject play creates a space for women to write themselves and their humanity back into the symbolic order.

KEYWORDS:

• Stand-up comedy
• abjection
• embodiment
• feminism

Acknowledgements

This manuscript was presented during the 2019 National Communication Association’s annual convention for the Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division. The authors wish to thank Chris Gilbert and Joshua Barnett for their suggestions in drafting this essay.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Feminist standup’s turn to bodily abjection is indebted to several decades of avant-garde performance art in confronting spectators which explicit embodiments of bodily pleasure and excess. Scholarship on performance artists such as Annie Sprinkle (Carlson; Williams, Hard Core), Karen Finley (Bean), and Carolee Schneeman (Johnson) evince how unruly, sensual, evocative displays of feminine abjection resist the normative constraints on the body and the limits of sexual conventions. We attend to the possibilities of mainstreaming embodied abject play, particularly as it is adapted in standup comedy by normative bodies but against masculine heterosexual desire.