Laughing Back: Women’s Stand-Up Comedy as a Site of Gendered Resistance

Abstract

This article examines female stand-up comedy as a discursive site of gendered resistance through a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) and intersectional framework. Focusing on performances by Hannah Gadsby, Nawell Madani, and Hanane El Fadili, it investigates how humour operates as a socially situated practice through which gender norms, power relations, and cultural ideologies are negotiated and contested. Rather than treating humour as a universal or purely affiliative strategy, the study demonstrates that comedic resistance is shaped by intersecting structures of gender, culture, and social positioning. The analysis reveals three distinct modes of feminist humour: confrontational refusal and discursive rupture (Gadsby), hybrid negotiation between critique and relatability (Madani), and culturally embedded indirect resistance (El Fadili). These variations challenge dominant humour theories that associate women’s humour primarily with self-deprecation and affiliation. Findings further indicate that humour in stand-up comedy functions as both a site of ideological struggle and a mechanism for managing social intelligibility within specific cultural contexts. The study contributes to feminist humour scholarship by extending FCDA to performance comedy and by demonstrating how intersectionality reshapes comedic agency across different sociocultural environments.