bell hooks: I was thinking about what you were saying earlier -- that I am funny. A lot of people think I am, but most people don't. [Laughs] I was telling you that when we first met. That's a pretty big stereotype about feminists, that we're not fun, that we don't have a sense of humor and that everything is so serious and politically correct. Humor is essential to working with difficult subjects: race, gender, class, sexuality. If you can't laugh at yourself and be with others in laughter, you really cannot create meaningful social change.
From: Emma Watson and bell hooks... http://www.papermag.com/emma-watson-bell-hooks-conversation-1609893784.html
HUEMOOOOOOOOOOOUR!
ReplyDeleteWho're you calling funny??
…the humourless feminist/s asked to no-one-in-particular, silently wondering if their breast binding bandage was indeed too tightly wound this morning. The rub was palpable, but more likely a result of the long hours that they had spend researching and writing their Tinder call out: Grrrl in need of catharsis requires relaxed but alert top for essentialising gender and race role-plays, optional BDSM scenes, optional satire, must have GSOH. Safe words to be mutually scripted.
Performing their own stereotype, they worked with the tools of glamour and wit to undo the pathologising of their bodily bits, their sex, identity, race, class and cultural orientations, shaking the ground of coordinates, destabilising the normative notions of a fixed originality.
They wanted to push into and past the slurs and negative stereotypes and thought to claim them - on the knifes edge of pains flipped and reversed, limitations exposed, turned into liberations through wordplay, the F plussing an alchemy of humour and mutual wink wink same paging, an acting out to the beyond possible. They needed to be joined in this, to surpass their own self.
In the throws of such liberatory passions, fights for resistance, such experiments, hey, they always found a new limit, here they paused and put their feet on the ground, took a breath and opened their eyes to find a new landscape of coordinates, previously unseen. Some places they couldn't go, some jokes were not for them to make and some things just weren't funny.
****
Postscript excerpt:
"One afternoon at the call centre, one of my [Samoan] co-workers found out I was Māori, and suddenly everyone started stand-up comedy routines that I still laugh about years later. I recall them asking me what I was doing for the weekend and before I could answer, I was surrounded by a quartet all singing me the entire Once Were Warriors soundtrack. I know I shouldn’t have laughed but the Samoan side of me had to. When they started saying I was probably drunk and they were surprised I wore shoes to work ... well, the laughs sort of dried up for me."
~ Jessica Hansel, http://e-tangata.co.nz/news/where-you-from
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ReplyDeleteFrom a recent interview with Jessica Hansell in The Saturday Paper (Australia):
ReplyDelete"I tell her I laugh a lot when I’m with her, and that Aroha Bridge is hilarious.
“I guess maybe it’s like… I don’t feel particularly good-humoured often,” she says. “I don’t feel light and buoyant out in the world. I’ve always associated that with funny people. That they go around with warmth in their heart, and a rose-tinted lens, and of course the truth is that the darkest motherfuckers are perceived to be funny. And it just so happens I’ve only just found out I’m one of those people. I just make everything into a joke, literally to survive.” She talks about “smuggling things in through the disguise of lighthearted humour”.
“The world I live in – if you’re Māori, Pacific Island mixed-race woman who aligns with a lot of the ideals of feminism, mana wahine, I align myself heavily with queer ideals, too – it’s a pretty brutal time to be alive. I feel like my default is broken-hearted, but yeah, and then you use comedy to help yourself to get on with it. It’s a tool. It’s the tool of the masses, for real. I think I’ve only just realised that being able to make people laugh for better or for worse, I can do it, so I’ve got to go hard.”
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2016/02/20/building-bridges/14558868002898
:) nice!
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