- 284 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
About this book
Pleasure, Play, and Politics is the first book to examine the roles humor played in U.S. feminism during the late twentieth century. Based on extensive archival research, it brings to light the stunning, moving, and frankly hilarious ways feminists have used satire, irony, and spectacle as they worked to build a better world. The story it tells includes activism and music, political mobilization and cartooning, stand-up comedy and demands for change.
Kirsten Leng explores the ways culture and politics feed one another and shows how humor contributed to movement-building by changing hearts and minds, creating and maintaining a sense of community beyond a single issue, and sustaining activists over the long haul. The fascinating individuals, groups, and objects examined here—including the sex workers’ rights group COYOTE, the Guerrilla Girls, Florynce Kennedy, and the Lesbian Avengers—don’t just provide entertaining anecdotes or unsettle lazy assumptions that feminists are perennially dour and censorious: they offer a lesson or two for contemporary feminists and social justice activists. Taken together, they remind us that laughter can move us, that humor and anger can coexist, and that play and pleasure have a place in struggle.
Kirsten Leng explores the ways culture and politics feed one another and shows how humor contributed to movement-building by changing hearts and minds, creating and maintaining a sense of community beyond a single issue, and sustaining activists over the long haul. The fascinating individuals, groups, and objects examined here—including the sex workers’ rights group COYOTE, the Guerrilla Girls, Florynce Kennedy, and the Lesbian Avengers—don’t just provide entertaining anecdotes or unsettle lazy assumptions that feminists are perennially dour and censorious: they offer a lesson or two for contemporary feminists and social justice activists. Taken together, they remind us that laughter can move us, that humor and anger can coexist, and that play and pleasure have a place in struggle.
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Pleasure, Play, and Politics by Kirsten Leng in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & 20th Century History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Praise for Pleasure, Play, and Politics
- Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Recovering the History of Humor in U.S. Feminism
- Part 1. Humor and Feminist Activism
- Part 2. Humor and Feminist Culture
- Conclusion: Humor in Troubled Times
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index