Interested in preserving her family folklore, Jeannie B. Thomas
recorded detailed oral histories from her mother and two
grandmothers. While analyzing tapes of these sessions, she noticed
the way inappropriate laughter often accompanied the retelling of
painful stories. The topics of the narratives she recorded include
natural disasters, family dissolution, child abuse, sexual
harassment, and suicide. In Featherless Chickens, Laughing Women.
and Serious Stories, Thomas combines these personal accounts with
original scholarship to uncover the meaning behind the startling
presence of unconventional laughter in women's histories.
Going beyond conventional theories of humor, Thomas demonstrates
how Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas of carnival laughter can apply to
narratives about gender and the female body, and she finds in Julia
Kristeva's notion of abjection a key to understanding the
significance of laughter in a nonhumorous context. The author
offers close readings of traumatic subject matter: a child
witnessing her aunt attempt suicide with strychnine, a tornado that
not only strips the feathers from chickens but compels a husband to
leave his wife, a young woman watching her mother and grandmother
being institutionalized against their will. The laughter that
accompanies some of these stories expresses feelings of horror and
the sense that boundaries are being transgressed. By studying the
origins of this laughter, she suggests, we can reveal obscured
meanings and gain a fuller understanding of painful family
narrative.
Thomas offers a fresh perspective on women and laughter that has
implications not only for the study of oral histories but for the
written word as well. Equal parts solidscholarship and engaging
personal narrative, her book is an important contribution to
women's studies, folklore studies, and humor theory and should
interest a wide academic audience.
"Featherless Chickens, Laughing Women, and Serious Stories
provides a rich intersection of personal narrative, gendered
experience, and folk tradition. Thomas's application of postmodern
theory to the nuances of oral performance in family traditions is
one of the most cogent articulations I have ever seen, and her
treatment of humor as an index to more complex levels of meaning is
fully persuasive. This book represents an impressive stride in the
movement toward full utilization of women's perspectives in the
discussion of traditional narrative forms". -- Barre Toelken, Utah
State University
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