This panel examines the sounds of laughter in relation to queer, non-binary, and transgender identities. Sounds tend to play an important role in performances intended or perceived as humorous—tone of voice, bodily noises, contrived sound effects, and the laughter (or silence) of either the audience or performers are often just as or even more significant than the semantic value of words, gestures, and other modes of communication. In this panel, participants will discuss the sound laughter as it relates to queer, non-binary, and transgender identities in a multiplicity of genres (including texts and performances) from the medieval period to the present.

Kortney Stern's paper "Between Silence and Laughter: Le Roman de Silence’s Melody of Sonic Disruption," to the thirteenth-century French romance, Le Roman de Silence, in order to explore the text’s marginalized characters’ relationships with the sounds and silences that their bodies make and which they strategically deploy. It extends Vincent Jungkunz’s theory of “unsaying,” in which he argues that “silence can be a way...for disengaging subjects...to pull away from participation in meaning construction” to include sonic expressions, specifically Merlin’s laugh. Ultimately it argues that it is through Silence and Merlin’s strategic commingling of silence and laughter that their characters vocalize their queer, sonic resistance. Emily MacLeod's paper, "'Laughing Sport': The Cacophony of Race, Disability, and Class in Early Modern Dramatic Depictions of Vulcan" focuses on the character of the Roman god Vulcan in a range of early modern dramatic performances from Tudor entertainments and Elizabethan children’s plays to Jacobean court masques. It will explore the sounds associated with Vulcan as they relate to the performances of his blackened, disabled and laboring body, arguing that Vulcan, by bringing these identity formations together into one dramatic figure, also creates an abundance of critical noise that necessitates an intersectional approach. Finally, Christina Baker's paper "Aliens, Chewbaccas, and Crypt Keepers, Oh my!: Trans and Non-binary Performance, Humor, and the Sounds of Otherworldliness in Cuentos de la Tumbona by Mariano Ruiz," makes a radical departure from the previous two papers to consider a teatro-cabaret performance from contemporary Mexico. Showcasing how Ruiz and non-normative bodies feel like outsiders, even in their own skin, Cuentos de la tumbona filters poignant humorous commentary through the sounds of otherworldly encounters with Aliens, Freaks, and the Mistress of Death herself. Employing scholarly considerations of freak performances (Santana) and ruminations on monstrosity as part of the trans experience (Stryker), the presentation analyzes sonic expressions like the menacing, flat-affect laughter employed by la Tumbona (paying homage to the U.S. series, Tales from the Crypt) and Elon Muskites (an extraterrestrial parody of Elon Musk) and musical accompaniment, such as the cumbia-fied X Files theme song played during dance interludes by Chewbacca, a shadowy Alien, and a Demgorgon. Despite the radically different context, this paper resonates with certain aspects of the first two, particularly in the centrality of non-human elements.

This proposed session, co-sponsored with the Sound Studies Forum, is meant to complement two guaranteed sessions submitted by the Drama and Performance Forum that relate to humor and humorlessness (Humor and Humorless Before 1900 and Humor and Humorlessness After 1900). Given the importance of laughter and other sounds in the performance of humor, a coordinated effort with the Sound Studies Forum is logical and will hopefully pave the way for future collaborations between our two forums. Like the calls for the Humor and Humorlessness panels, the call for this session garnered a plethora of proposals, and we expect that these three related panels - along with a fourth on Race and the Sounds of Laughter that our forum will also submit as another non-guaranteed session - will attract considerable attention at the MLA and generate a more sustained dialogue than a single session would produce.

Each presenter will deliver a paper of 12-15 minutes, which (allotting time for introductions) will leave nearly 30 minutes for discussion.