- Maker: Cailin Rolph
- Genre: Manifesto
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5340: Studies in Multimodality and Digital Media
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Winter 2023
Description
For my manifesto, I wanted to create a piece of media that embodied the anarchic/pervasive nature of feminism. The topics of feminist comedy, and female laughter, are in and of themselves niche, almost genreless topics, which is why I felt the subculture of a zine suited this topic well.
I used quotes from scholarship and from feminist comedians themselves, juxtaposed against the backlash they receive as such. The images depict comedians who I felt were strong representations of and embodied female laughter.
Reflection
For project two I created a Zine, which was a direct result of having read chapter one, ZINES AND THOSE WHO MAKE THEM: Introducing the Citizen Bricoleur, from the book After The Public Turn by Frank Farmer. Farmer discusses Zines as an act of resistance, using the term bricoleur to define the process of making do, of using the resources at hand to make something different. Zines in this sense exists as a counterculture. Knowing that I wanted to focus on feminist comedy and female laughter for my projects in this course, I felt like a Zine was just the right amount of angsty counter-public to be the medium of the manifesto. Reflecting on the process of composing a feminist comedy and how discursive in nature a feminist comedy must be, the act of making a Zine felt like it paid head to this kind of activism. During the writing process I used several pieces on feminist comedies to inform my manifesto, however, the piece that I chiefly cited and referenced was Kathryn Keins “Recovering Our Sense of Humor,” Kein discusses the role that women play in the genre of comedy and the expectations that follow thereafter. Kein directly references the gap in scholarship in feminist humor studies. This work influenced much of my manifesto as well as my final project.
Farmer, F. (2013). After the public turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the citizen bricoleur. Utah State University Press. Farmer, Frank. After the Public Turn (p. 21). Utah State University Press. Kindle Edition
Kein, K. (2015). Recovering Our Sense of Humor: New Directions in Feminist Humor Studies [Review of All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents; Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics; The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner, by Rebecca Krefting, Linda Mizejewski, & Jennifer Reed]. Feminist Studies, 41(3), 671–681. https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies.41.3.671
