Omschrijving
Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorized and demonized, suppressed and exploited.
A "Most Anticipated" Book of 2024
Just about everything in this book is a delight. Writing with ferocious wit and drawing from an extraordinary archive, Hennefeld historicizes the significance of laughter for gendered and racialized bodies in modern media culture. This is what feminist cultural theory and history looks like at its very best.
A tour de force of feminist historiography through cinema’s early archive of hysterical laughter! In a time of perpetual carnival, what promise can laughter still hold? Moving us beyond both capitalist gimmick and revolutionary excess, Hennefeld carefully excavates the affective cluster held in tension by a burst of laughter on the brink of death.
This stunningly original and altogether insightful book had me in stitches. At times, I giggled quietly, and other times, I laughed out loud. But, time and time again, I was left with new and thought-provoking ideas while reading this side-splitting mash-up of film history, feminist theory, and cultural criticism.
Death by Laughter is an astonishing and astonishingly rich plunge into the stormy waters of laughter. Focusing particularly on hysterical laughter in its political dimension, the book presents us with a remarkable amount of fascinating material, including the extremely interesting but almost forgotten archives of early cinema. Hennefeld navigates this material both boldly and carefully, masterfully relating it to our contemporary social, political, and cultural context.
This book achieves the rare feat of being both enlightening and thoroughly entertaining . . . [Hennefeld's] historical analysis is compelling and revelatory, with the fluidity of her style making light work of the detail whilst gleefully leading us on to the most interesting of conclusions.
Maggie Hennefeld is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia, 2018), co-curator of the silent film collection Cinema’s First Nasty Women (2022), and coeditor of Unwatchable (2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (2020).