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

In this folkloric examination of mass-produced material culture in the United States, Jeannie Banks Thomas examines the gendered sculptural forms that are among the most visible, including Barbie, Ken, and G. I. Joe dolls; yard figures (gnomes, geese, and golfers); and cemetery statuary (angels and figures of the Virgin Mary, soldiers, politicians, and sports-related images). Taken together, Thomas argues, these commonplace items elucidate a larger picture of gendered society than each is capable of doing alone. Images of females are often emphasized or sexualized, whereas those of the male body are clothed and armored in the trappings of action and aggression. Thomas locates these various objects of folk art within a discussion of the post-women's movement discourse on gender. In addition to the items themselves, Thomas explores the stories and behaviors they generate, including legends of the supernatural about cemetery statues, oral narratives of yard artists and accounts of pranks involving yard art, narratives about children's play with Barbie, Ken, and G. I. Joe, and the electronic folklore (or "e-lore") about Barbie that circulates on the Internet.