Rise Up in Mirth: On Angry Feminist Humor and Why Taking It Personally Is Political

We’ve all heard the one about the angry feminist killjoy. But what about the angry feminist killjoy who also cracks jokes? While a rich vein of enraged feminist humor currently proliferates in popular media, the use of comedy is divisive in feminism. In addition to being framed as potentially diluting righteous feminist anger, such levity could all too easily be dismissed as a surface-level “popular feminism” performance facilitating commodified individualism rather than sufficiently collectivist action. Yet in this essay I show that joking can be shot through with rage. I also argue that it can play a critical role in transmuting harrowing personal experiences into effective activism as well as building the resilience required for sustained activism. Situating debates about activist humor as part of broader intrafeminist dispute and division, I raise the possibility of a type of feminist anger not discussed in the contemporary discourse on women’s rage: namely, feminists’ anger at each other. While tensions between feminists and feminisms are often subterranean, tacit, and difficult to conclusively prove, denying, underplaying, or ignoring these frictions may risk a type of gaslighting—even though this is unintended. Relatedly, my case is that sharp feminist critiques of ideologies and hegemons might inadvertently cause offense to and alienate individual feminists who interpret such critiques as personal attacks. This highlights a broader tension between theory and praxis that, by my account, might be mitigated partly by furnishing a larger number of concrete suggestions about how collectivist action could manifest at the level of individual practice. © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press.