First Published in 1998. This lively volume explores comedy as a place where gender and sexuality, through performance, challenge sexist and heteronormative forces in Western culture. The contributors investigate the effects of gender, sexuality, sexual identity, race, class and nationality on humor and comedic performance. Each chapter, distinct in its voice and content, addresses how particular historical periods seem to affect who laughs at what, why, and with what consequences. This book not only spans a broad range of historical and literary periods, it also engages in a critical conversation with past and present thinkers to articulate the political, cultural and social effects of comedy.

An academic study of stand-up comedy performed by females. This will aid in the understanding of power structures in our society.

This book provides a unique panorama of this challenging area of Greek literature, combining literary perspectives with historical issues and material culture.

V. 1. Cognitions -- v. 2. Critical theories

Kohen assembles America's most prominent comediennes to piece together an oral history about the revolution that happened to (and by) women in American comedy.

First published in 1992, the twenty-one original essays in this volume explore the way women have used humor to break down cultural stereotypes between the genders, using examples from literature and the performing arts.

This volume addresses the growing obsolescence of traditional constructions of masculine identity in popular romantic comedies by proposing an approach that combines gender and genre theory to examine the ongoing radical reconstruction of gender roles in these films. Alberti creates a unified theory of gender role change in the movies that combines the insights of both poststructuralist gender and narrative genre theory, avoiding binary approaches to the study of gender representation. He establishes the current "crises" in both gender representation and genre development within romantic comedies as examples of experimentation and change towards narratives that feature more egalitarian and less essentialist constructions of gender.