| Using the novels of Margaret Atwood, Suzette Mayr and Miriam Toews as case studies, this dissertation examines literary feminist humour in Canada. Influenced by Judith Butler's theories of gender performativity, Susan Purdie's work on humour's articulation in language, and the insights of various humour theorists, I argue that feminist humour is a textual and discursive strategy designed to redistribute allocations of power. Although humour is neither inherently liberating nor inherently conservative, both humour and feminism have the potential to disrupt accepted ideologies, destabilize assumptions, and alter perceptions, and their combination is a potentially potent means of political intervention in literary texts. This intervention is particularly significant in a Canadian context where humour is prevalent and recognized as a means of questioning authority, but is not frequently associated with women.;By broadening my focus from the generic confines of comedy to humour as a discursive strategy, I am able to examine a variety of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century novels by three Canadian female writers. Atwood, Mayr, and Toews express their feminist humour through juxtaposition, irony, wit, wordplay, parody, satire, burlesque, hyperbole, tall tales, and jokes. The authors in this study use feminist humour in tandem with various motifs and strategies, which I identify as the body, performance and performativity, and ghosting. In the first chapter, I consider discourses about female embodiment, and I suggest that Atwood, Mayr, and Toews use humour to theorize the relationship between agency and the female body. The second chapter examines feminist humour's relationship to feminist theory, looking specifically at the interrelated concepts of performance and performativity. And the third chapter explores how these authors use the trope of spectrality in tandem with various techniques of literary humour to uncover repressed histories and ideologies in a distinctly Canadian context. Overall, this study argues that Atwood, Mayr, and Toews use humour not only to create enjoyment for their readers, but also to deconstruct received assumptions about gender and to position women as symbolically and socially powerful. They employ feminist humour to reveal social inequities in a way that provokes laughter, demonstrating that humour can be both serious and seriously funny. |
