This essay grapples with how Asian American women have been increasingly positioned as the idealized maternal subjects of a neoliberal world order. The “tiger mother,” as popularized by Amy Chua, can be considered a recent gendered, racial formation produced in direct opposition to the “Black welfare mother” as a figure of pathological reproductive excess and dependency. Yet this latest twenty-first-century incarnation of model minority discourse can be distinguished by the way it has been mobilized to discipline not only nonwhite populations but also a foundering white majority. I explore the limits and possibilities of comedy for disrupting neoliberal maternal discourse by examining Ali Wong’s Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife. Wong responsibly manages fertility, establishing stable career conditions before having her first child at age thirty-three, and performs both comedy specials visibly pregnant, exhibiting the feminine forms of bodily resilience that neoliberalism demands. Yet I demonstrate how Wong subverts neoliberalism’s biopolitics of reproductive respectability by deploying gross, cringeworthy scatological humor. As a genre of comedy defined by the response it elicits from viewers, cringe engenders an uncontrollable bodily contraction that also allows for another kind of inward reflective critical turn to take place. In her stand-up, Wong repeatedly redirects the cringe from the usual individual subject/object of humiliation to the gendered racial power structures that govern motherhood under contemporary neoliberalism. I elaborate how Wong’s cringe humor and aesthetic allow us to theorize a politics and ethics of lying down as a means of critiquing and countering the heightened demands for female labor, especially from women of color, that have become nearly impossible to refuse in today’s relentlessly aspirational neoliberal culture.

中文翻译：

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Ali Wong 令人愉快的讽刺幽默：畏缩喜剧和新自由主义母性话语

这篇文章探讨了亚裔美国女性如何越来越多地被定位为新自由主义世界秩序中理想化的母性主体。蔡美儿所推广的“虎妈”可以被认为是最近产生的一种性别化、种族化的形态，与“黑人福利母亲”作为病态生殖过度和依赖的形象直接对立。然而，这种最近 21 世纪的模范少数群体话语的化身可以通过它被动员起来的方式来区分，不仅是非白人人口，而且是垮台的白人多数。我通过研究 Ali Wong 的 Baby Cobra 和 Hard Knock Wife 来探索喜剧破坏新自由主义母性话语的限制和可能性。黄负责管理生育，在 33 岁生第一个孩子之前建立了稳定的职业条件，并表演了两部明显怀孕的喜剧特辑，展示了新自由主义所要求的女性身体弹性形式。然而，我展示了黄如何通过部署粗俗的、令人毛骨悚然的粪便幽默来颠覆新自由主义关于生殖尊严的生命政治。作为一种由观众引起的反应定义的喜剧类型，畏缩会产生一种无法控制的身体收缩，这也允许发生另一种内省的批判性转折。在她的站立会议中，Wong 反复将畏缩从通常的个人羞辱主体/客体转向当代新自由主义下支配母性的性别种族权力结构。