We’ve all heard the one about the angry feminist killjoy. But what about the angry feminist killjoy who also cracks jokes? While a rich vein of enraged feminist humor currently proliferates in popular media, the use of comedy is divisive in feminism. In addition to being framed as potentially diluting righteous feminist anger, such levity could all too easily be dismissed as a surface-level “popular feminism” performance facilitating commodified individualism rather than sufficiently collectivist action. Yet in this essay I show that joking can be shot through with rage. I also argue that it can play a critical role in transmuting harrowing personal experiences into effective activism as well as building the resilience required for sustained activism. Situating debates about activist humor as part of broader intrafeminist dispute and division, I raise the possibility of a type of feminist anger not discussed in the contemporary discourse on women’s rage: namely, feminists’ anger at each other. While tensions between feminists and feminisms are often subterranean, tacit, and difficult to conclusively prove, denying, underplaying, or ignoring these frictions may risk a type of gaslighting—even though this is unintended. Relatedly, my case is that sharp feminist critiques of ideologies and hegemons might inadvertently cause offense to and alienate individual feminists who interpret such critiques as personal attacks. This highlights a broader tension between theory and praxis that, by my account, might be mitigated partly by furnishing a larger number of concrete suggestions about how collectivist action could manifest at the level of individual practice.

中文翻译：

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在欢乐中崛起：关于愤怒的女权主义幽默以及为什么亲自接受它是政治性的

我们都听说过关于愤怒的女权主义者 killjoy 的故事。但是愤怒的女权主义者 killjoy 又会开玩笑呢？虽然目前流行媒体中充斥着愤怒的女权主义幽默，但喜剧的使用在女权主义中是分裂的。除了被认为可能会冲淡正义的女权主义愤怒之外，这种轻率很容易被认为是表面上的“流行女权主义”表现，促进了商品化的个人主义，而不是充分的集体主义行动。然而，在这篇文章中，我表明，玩笑可以被愤怒击穿。我还认为，它可以在将令人痛苦的个人经历转化为有效的行动主义以及建立持续行动主义所需的弹性方面发挥关键作用。将关于激进主义幽默的辩论作为更广泛的女权主义内部争议和分裂的一部分，我提出了一种在当代关于女性愤怒的话语中没有讨论过的女权主义愤怒的可能性：即女权主义者对彼此的愤怒。虽然女权主义者和女权主义之间的紧张关系通常是隐秘的、默契的，并且难以最终证明，但否认、轻描淡写或忽视这些摩擦可能会冒着一种“煤气灯”的风险——即使这是无意的。与此相关的是，我的案例是，对意识形态和霸权的尖锐女权主义批评可能会无意中冒犯并疏远将这些批评解释为人身攻击的个别女权主义者。这凸显了理论与实践之间更广泛的紧张关系，据我所知，可以通过提供更多关于集体主义行动如何在个人实践层面体现的具体建议来部分缓解这种紧张关系。