Global Laughingstock: Citing and Reciting White-Anglo Subjectivity in Visual Humour: 1870-1900
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Authors
Potter, Erika
Date
2024-06-05
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
comic history , body history , fashion history , fat history , queer history
Alternative Title
Abstract
Global repetitive humorous visual communication called into being embodied subjectivities under the guise of fixity and naturalism. Fin de siècle cultural cartooning of the White Anglo comic press simultaneously exposes and rejects the construction and mutability of race, gender, class, and embodiment. The production of the White Anglo embodied subject is revealed through the analysis of humorous scripts and visual codes. Ridicule and abjection of racialized Others and the disciplining of marginal White bodies were essential to laughing the White Anglo subject into being. Humour’s ability to disguise and deny its exertion of power necessitates a critical exploration of what it means to get the joke, particularly when the joke was retold, recited, and rearticulated incessantly throughout the White Anglosphere. This thesis analyzes the racist cartooning and the imaged imagining of fashionable ladies, New Women, Dudes, queers, Mimics, and body modifiers to access the provincialized history of White visibility.