That’s just absurd! On feminist humor in social media

Abstract

Feminist humor in social media regularly draws its appeal from the dynamics of binary gender that it pokes fun at, reverses, and comments on. By focusing on the tumblr “Congrats, you have an all male panel,” the Twitter and Facebook accounts of “Man Who Has It All” and the Twitter account “Men Write Women,” this article asks how these projects re-perform the power asymmetry of binary gender through repetition and reversal, drawing their appeal from the very logic that they critique for disruptive effect. It further asks how the different platform dynamics of social media help to assemble networked laughter sociability and critique, and addresses the importance of affective lifts and the affective diversity opened up when laughing at the absurdity of things. We argue that, in refusing and eschewing the logic most offer, and by turning things preposterous, ludicrous, and inappropriate, absurd humor generates productive zones of ambiguity and unruly laughter where tensions and differences refuse to be resolved.

Keywords: Absurd. Feminist humor. Social media.