Stripping the Skin off Humour
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Date
2011
DOI
Open Access Location
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Volume Title
Publisher
Massey University
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Abstract
Culturally specific hegemonic processes produce authority
over meaning and exclude possibilities for authentic
ethical encounters. Contingent on a binary relationship
between ‘self’ and ‘other’, humour holds social tensions
in particular ways. Where contemporary understandings
of humour tend to posit humour as self-evidently desirable
(Billig, 2005), there is an absence of psychological attention
to the social power relations that constitute the
“performativity” of humour – or as Butler (1993, p. 2)
suggests, “the reiterative power of discourse to produce
the phenomena that it regulates and constrains”. This paper
draws on the experience of living the contradictions
of hegemonic discourse that produces social positions
where laughter is enacted to enable a ‘safe’ encounter. If
humour occurs on the boundaries of social convention
then what does that mean for the complex relationships at
“the hyphen” (Fine & Sirin, 2007; Jones & Jenkins,
2008) between us/them? Is it possible that rather than
simply maintaining a particular social order, humour may
also enable a re-defining of the contours of social relations?
Could humour open spaces at the boundaries
through recognition of multiple competing political discourses
and make it possible for an ethical response that
seeks authentic encounters with the ‘other’?
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
Keywords
Ethical responses, Humour, Hegemony, Ideological positivism, Performativity, Hyphenated selves