Ludics and Laughter as Feminist Aesthetic

Ludics and Laughter as Feminist Aesthetic marks a timely shift in Carter’s scholarship by brilliantly addressing humor and play as possible feminist strategies. Collectively, the chapters theorize how humor and play can write new possibilities into language, thus opening spaces to reimagine new ways of being. The contributors show that “knowing laughter” and “serious play” embody a double commitment to aesthetic pleasure and social materialist feminism. The book comes in three parts. Jennifer Gustar’s widely researched prelude theorizes language and humor as part of Carter’s feminist aesthetics. As a disguised form of protest, ludics and laughter can destabilize the dominant discourses and initiate unheard-of possibilities. The first part explores joyful, furious, lewd, or bilious laughter as part of Carter’s feminist aesthetics. Martine Hennard analyzes Carter’s “transcreative” engagement with Baudelaire’s “On the Essence of Laughter,” the Surrealists’ humour noir, and Samuel Beckett’s absurdist tradition. Insightfully, Hennard highlights Carter’s use and

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Feminism · Laughter · Literature · Materialism · Pleasure · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Resistance (ecology · Scholarship · Sociology · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · Theatre and Performance Studies · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy