| This project emerges from the intersections of feminist theory, postmodernism, and contemporary cultural studies, and aims to develop a vision of agency that is at once material, collective, and located both within and beyond the subject. Theories developed in the critical scenes of the 1980s posited agency as hyper-individualized, amorphous, and sanitized. These articulations also relied on a trope that situated the subject as entangled in various discursive, social, and technological webs. I have come to call that trope "indiscretions," particularly because it captures the sense of entanglement put forth by theorists of agency.; Expressions of agency that did not fit this mold were left unrecognized. Of those, I focus particularly on cultural and literary expressions of comedy by Anglo American and Ethnic American women. Comedy becomes an important site for the study of agency first of all because it has achieved an enormous sense of popularity in the past decade, and second, because its form, I argue, demands a move beyond the individualized entangled subjects common in theories of agency. Kathy Acker, for instance, redefines through a snickering sense of parody what counts as the body in the technoculture of the near-future. In more popular areas, women's performance and stand-up comedy has offered a strong, continually changing, mode of establishing group identifications. The work of Ellen DeGeneres, Paula Poundstone, Lily Tomlin, and Whoopi Goldberg form the base of this argument. From these arenas of study, I recognize a crucial link between an alternative frame for agency and the contemporary expressions of women in literary and performance comedy. |
