Submit your work to present at the 2008 GCWS Graduate Student Conference!

• Call for Proposals:
250 word proposal abstracts Due 2/15/08

Jokes, satire, parody, and comedic performance can be powerful tools for challenging the status quo or for conforming to it. They have the potential to transform discourse, yet it is in these forms that our most troubling and violently disfiguring assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexual orientation can find their longest life. “Humor” can both enable and disable speech; it is available to some and prohibited for others.

How can or do we as scholars, teachers, activists, and persons use humor to create and build awareness?  What are the roles of irony, satire, parody, and comedic performance in oppression and resistance to oppression—historically, in the present, and possibly in the future? How does humor work with/against ideas of free expression? Who has the right of free expression and who does not?  To what extent does “humor” rely on an us/them mentality and what kinds of social, cultural, and political portraits does it create?  

We invite proposals for presentations on humor as a political tool or subversive strategy.  Graduate students, advanced undergraduates, practitioners, performers, artists, and activists are encouraged to examine, reflect upon, or demonstrate the uses of jokes, irony, satire, parody, and performance from a literary, theatrical, multimedia, historical, scientific, sociological, anthropological, or interdisciplinary perspective. Hands-on workshop proposals also accepted.

We encourage submissions that represent cross-disciplinary exploration in content, concept, and structure. 

Submission Topics:

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

• Humor as a coping mechanism (tragedy, history, political or social change)
• Humor, freedom of expression, and civil liberties
• Identity politics and performance (drag, "slumming", culture and fashion trends)
• "Accidental" or "performative" forms of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia
• High Culture vs. Low Culture
• Inventing or reclaiming the language of gender, race, class or generation
• The Art of Humor: Guerilla theater, street performance, Slam Poetry, fine art and 'high' theater, etc.
• Exploring meaning: Humor, Pop Culture and Globalization
• Humor/satire and the "reemergence" of visible racism
• Linguistic or philosophical examinatioins of humor, satire, and irony
• Politics as comedy/comedy as politics
• Historic, contemporary, international, and United States interperetations of any of the above

And questions such as:

• Where is the humor in feminism, or the feminism in humor?
• When are jokes appropriate? Who decides?
• Who "owns" language?

To read more about proposal guidelines and to submit your proposal online click•Submit•

For more information, contact Andi Sutton, GCWS Program Coordinator at:

Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Building 16-287
77 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
Tel: (617) 324-2085
Email: gcws@mit.edu