Who’s Laughing Now?: Feminist Tactics in Social Media

What role can humor play in battling online harassment, shame, and misogyny and in building a different kind of world, especially in our post-#MeToo moment? This question is at the heart of Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media. As Jenny Sundén and Susanna Paasonen explain, online hate and harassment toward subjects “coded as female or feminine” thrive on affective mechanisms like shame and fear (1). Paying particular attention to the dynamics of shame and the “potentialities of shamelessness,” the authors examine humorous online responses to misogyny, some well known (having gone viral) and some more fleeting (1). Ultimately, they argue that online humor, specifically shameless or absurd humor, can disrupt and reshape affective circuits of shame and misogyny.In the first two chapters, the authors provide groundwork and framing, beginning with the barriers to productive, world-(re)building feminist humor. Starting with a set of linked, if shaky, premises, the authors argue that because the impetus of the #MeToo movement was pain and anger, it has been “remarkably nonhumorous” (1). While it is true that most accounts of #MeToo narratives from a cultural perspective have focused on pain and anger, the authors’ broader claim about the movement’s humorlessness deserves some scrutiny because it positions much of the humor that the book discusses as separate from the movement, which it clearly is not. Their second premise, that “the most successful . . . feminist online initiatives prioritize gender differences over other embodied differences and social relations of power” (6), is more compelling. Crucially, in these cases, the authors use the word “successful” to indicate popularity or virality—a kind of breaking through to the wider culture. In other words, online feminist responses (including humorous responses) to misogyny have tended to reach a wider audience through a heteronormative gender binary. Moreover, this binary, which is often shaped by white femininity, fails to “accommodate intersectionality” and tends to reify the existing order (21). For instance, the “Congrats, you have an all male panel!” Tumblr account calls out sexism and male-dominated discourse but also reifies the gender binary in doing so and leaves other questions of intersectionality unexamined (133). The authors argue that together these factors threaten to leave “successful” (that is, popular or viral) responses to online misogyny stuck in cycles of shame and shaming and foreclose wider cultural and political change.Given their premises, Sundén and Paasonen offer what should be to American readers a radical and refreshing perspective, one shaped by both writers’ Nordic background (Swedish and Finnish), which they argue is more secular and less puritan than American culture. Such a perspective can foreground “sexual agency and playfulness” and a kind of persona that reads as performative “sluttiness” (10). This “chosen personality,” they explain, “strides confidently through our writing as a vital reminder of how claiming a space for and indulging in pleasure—and laughter—for its own sake is a political act” (10, 8). This perspective, along with the Nordic examples of feminist humor they provide, is the strongest part of the book.From this pleasure-centric position, Sundén and Paasonen cover a wide range of humorous responses to online misogyny, some of them more familiar than others. Chapter 3, which considers the “ambiguous affective dynamics of humor when it makes its way into the #MeToo debate” (45), is perhaps the most intriguing section. Through three examples—Hannah Gadsby’s comedy special Nanette, Lauren Maul’s (nonviral) #MeToo musical, and the 2018 scandal at the Swedish Academy—they “argue for the political importance of affective ambiguity, difference, and dissent” in these examples’ tactics while also highlighting “the risks involved when a movement . . . comes to be organized through expressions and expectations of homogeneous feeling” (15). Especially intriguing is their concept of affective homophily, a love of feeling the same way as others, which can end up short-circuiting ways of understanding and responding to misogyny. However, their reading of Nanette as a work that provokes this dynamic is less than convincing, as it ignores some of the nuances of Gadsby’s work and reactions to it from viewers. On the other hand, especially for American readers, their treatment of the scandal that led to no Nobel Prize in literature being awarded for 2018 is illuminating, particularly their analysis of how Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Academy, chose to respond, which was by performing an absurdist persona named Gittan P. Jönsson, a “blonde Valkyrie with big, lacquered helmet-like hair, and sensible shoes” (57). The chapter concludes with an argument for affective heterophily, which they define as “the love of feeling different or of feeling differently” and a way to counteract shame, escape the demand for homogeneity, and imagine new tactics of resistance (67).Indeed, in later chapters—which treat subjects as diverse as Stormy Daniels’s humorous tweets, Swedish women’s playful reclamation of misogynist language, and the “man who has it all” satirical Facebook and Twitter feeds—they explain how shamelessness, absurdity, and linguistic reappropriation can serve as modes of feminist resistance: “Feminist absurdist humor has a lightness to it yet it remains grounded in something considerably heavier—a paradox that forms a tactic for dealing with a ludicrous reality” (95). Sundén and Paasonen’s discussion of shamelessness in particular is compelling; shamelessness is not the opposite of shame but “plays with shame and attempts at shaming by intervening in the affective dynamics of operation—turns them around and knowingly ignores or ridicules attempts to shame” (116). The authors do note, though, that the ability to engage in this kind of resistance is “underpinned” by racial and class privilege not accessible to everyone (117).Overall, Who’s Laughing Now? argues successfully for the potentially transformative power of laughter in the face of oppression and attempts at marginalization. Filled with strikingly contemporary examples and exciting connections to Nordic perspectives, Sundén and Paasonen’s book engages and challenges readers, even if their classifications and examples are at times overdetermined. “We firmly believe,” they write, “in the value and worth of a shameless, irreverent giggle” (17). I predict that by the end of the book readers will too.