The Delightfully Scatological Humor of Ali Wong: Cringe Comedy and Neoliberal Maternal Discourse

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2022

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Citation of Original Publication

Tran, Sharon. The Delightfully Scatological Humor of Ali Wong: Cringe Comedy and Neoliberal Maternal Discourse. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 47 (2022) no. 3, 613-636. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/717710

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Abstract

This essay grapples with how Asian American women have been increasingly positioned as the idealized maternal subjects of a neoliberal world order. The “tiger mother,” as popularized by Amy Chua, can be considered a recent gendered, racial formation produced in direct opposition to the “Black welfare mother” as a figure of pathological reproductive excess and dependency. Yet this latest twenty-first-century incarnation of model minority discourse can be distinguished by the way it has been mobilized to discipline not only nonwhite populations but also a foundering white majority. I explore the limits and possibilities of comedy for disrupting neoliberal maternal discourse by examining Ali Wong’s Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife. Wong responsibly manages fertility, establishing stable career conditions before having her first child at age thirty-three, and performs both comedy specials visibly pregnant, exhibiting the feminine forms of bodily resilience that neoliberalism demands. Yet I demonstrate how Wong subverts neoliberalism’s biopolitics of reproductive respectability by deploying gross, cringeworthy scatological humor. As a genre of comedy defined by the response it elicits from viewers, cringe engenders an uncontrollable bodily contraction that also allows for another kind of inward reflective critical turn to take place. In her stand-up, Wong repeatedly redirects the cringe from the usual individual subject/object of humiliation to the gendered racial power structures that govern motherhood under contemporary neoliberalism. I elaborate how Wong’s cringe humor and aesthetic allow us to theorize a politics and ethics of lying down as a means of critiquing and countering the heightened demands for female labor, especially from women of color, that have become nearly impossible to refuse in today’s relentlessly aspirational neoliberal culture.