Abstract
In the midst of what some have dubbed “the golden age of comedy,” many of the most popular female stand-up comics working today employ what Joanne Gilbert terms a “bitch” or “bawd” persona onstage, simultaneously rejecting and reinventing notions of female power through their unique performance of marginality. Focusing on the humor of comics Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman, this chapter explores the way these performers construct rhetorical postures that both contest cultural constraints historically used to contain female agency and reify stereotypical feminist characterization. By aligning the “bitch” and “bawd” personas with an explicit and intentional emphasis on difference, Schumer and Silverman consistently critique hegemonic structures through strategies of confrontation and celebration. The impact and implications of this particular comedic discourse are critical to discussions of gender, power, and fourth wave feminism.
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Gilbert, J. (2017). “My Mom’s a Cunt”: New Bawds Ride the Fourth Wave. In: Fuchs Abrams, S. (eds) Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56729-7_11
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