The Delightfully Scatological Humor of Ali Wong: Cringe Comedy and Neoliberal Maternal Discourse
Loading...
Links to Files
Permanent Link
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
2022
Type of Work
Department
Program
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
Rights
This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.
Access to this item will begin on 2/24/2023
Access to this item will begin on 2/24/2023
Subjects
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.