Unruly Women and Carnivalesque Countercontrol: Offensive Humor in Mediated Social Protest

Abstract

At the Women's March in January 2018, many protest posters featured offensive jokes at the expense of Trump's body and behavior. Such posters were shared widely online, much to the amusement of the movement's supporters. Through a close analysis of posts on Instagram and Twitter, we explore the role of "vulgar" and "offensive" humor in mediated social protest. By highlighting its radical and conservative tendencies, we demonstrate how we can understand these practices of offensive humor as a contemporary expression of "the carnivalesque" that is complexly intertwined with social change.

When protest humor is not all fun: The ambiguity of humor in the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption grassroots mobilization

“…However, taking the charge of ideological positivism seriously produces an alternative reading of protest humor as disciplinary and conservative. The progressive and conservative functions of protest humor coexist, marking this type of symbolic resource as inherently ambiguous (Graefer et al, 2019). Humor is both social and anti-social; in sharing laughter, people are brought together, but in making others the butt of the joke, people are excluded.…”

“…Laughing at the same jokes can create the feeling of a community and provide long-lasting, iconic symbolic resources for protest (Fominaya, 2007; Pizzolato, 2007). Additionally, the light nature of humor can create new opportunities for hard-to-reach groups’ participation (Graefer et al, 2019). This is even more so in digitally-mediated contentious collective action, as humor is more spreadable online (Jenkins et al, 2013), and as such, potentially mobilizing “young people, who may be inattentive to mainstream media but who are otherwise “wired” (Grabosky, 2016: 396; also Kutz-Flamenbaum, 2014).…”

“…Humor can misfire, jokes can be misunderstood, and people can be alienated from the cause. Some studies warn about the ambiguous nature of protest humor, which can simultaneously “contest and confirm normative assumptions” (Graefer et al, 2019: 172). However, overall empirical research on protest humor often celebrates its potential as a public voice or an enabler of civic action against power structures.…”

“…In protest humor, this use of sexuality ridicules politicians’ bodies or citizens’ (alleged) powerlessness. “[R]iddled with both transgressive and conservative tendencies” (Graefer et al, 2019: 179), such forms of humor subvert power by emasculating the targets of humor, and in doing so, reproduce the hegemonic status of heterosexual masculinity.…”

Carnival In Distance (Problems Of Communication In The Digital Epoch)

“…58-59;Wu, Fore, Wang, & Ho, 2007). Often, traditional forms of carnival are identified with Internet aggression (Zagoruyko, 2018, p. 119), offensive humor (Graefer, Kilby, & Kalviknes Bore, 2018), competition (Abbots & Attala, 2017).…”