Laughing Mothers, Speaking Subjects: Abjection and Maternal Subjectivity in Stand-Up Comedy and Contemporary Art

Contemporary American culture often renders the corporeal realities of maternity, such as birthing and breastfeeding, socially taboo, as evidenced for example by Facebook censoring breastfeeding selfies. This paper compares the strategies used by stand-up comedians, such as Ali Wong and Amy Schumer, and artists, such as Megan Wynne and Kasey Jones, to transgress that taboo through humor that explicitly addresses mothers’ embodied experiences. Defying idealized images of maternity, Wong jokes, “Breastfeeding is this savage ritual that just reminds you that your body is a cafeteria now!” and Wynne in her video My Puppet moves her sleeping infant’s mouth like a ventriloquist's dummy while offering sweetly voiced apologies on the baby’s behalf such as, “Thank you for letting me suck your nipples raw all hours of the day and night whenever I want it...”; both give expression to maternal realities usually repressed in "polite" discourse. Julia Kristeva has attributed the exclusion of the maternal body from the socially proper to abjection, a process which recapitulates the infant’s separation from the mother’s body to become his own subject leaving the mother in a subjectless state. Synthesizing Kristeva's theory with Jo Anna Isaak’s use of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, I argue these comics and artists establish maternal subjectivity and agency using tactics of humor to reclaim the abject. The communal laughter their works induce disrupts oppressive norms and invites audiences to rethink how society regards mothers.