Pleasure, Play, and Politics: A History of Humor in U.S. Feminism

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 is an associate professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900-1933.