Philosophical Feminism and Pop Culture 1

This week we address some of the themes present in the first few chapters of Crasnow’s book titled Philosophical Feminism and Popular Culture. In chapter one, she addresses the erotic politics of humor in feminism. She talks about how humor and feminism are often viewed as mutually exclusive categories, in part due to the image that comes to mind when one thinks of a feminist (a no-nonsense serious faced woman) and also due to the implicit silencing that revoking humor from the feminist discourse does. In her words, “This common failure to recognize the importance of humor for feminism might be expected given that all too often feminists themselves have been treated as a joke while humor has seemed to belong to a more exclusively male terrain” (15).

The implication of this, she also mentions, is that the removal of humor from feminist discourse impedes upon the power that can be invoked if feminism were given its due credit in the erotic sphere and the comedic sphere. As whole groups of feminist comics are ignored, including Tina Fey and Roseanne Bars, in an effort to divorce feminism and humor, the confluence of both the erotic sphere and the comedic sphere cannot adequately produce the power they would otherwise garner and effectively disperse.