goo:ga (2016) is a performance practice research project within the
discipline of stand-up comedy that investigates the potential of a
dissonant manifestation of the comic and the erotic by pregnant
artists to challenge heteronormative, postfeminist and patriarchal
configurations of ‘funniness’ vis-à-vis ‘sexiness’
- Submitting institution
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Kingston University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 33-01-1784
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Camden People's Theatre, London, U.K
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first performance
- April
- Year of first performance
- 2016
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- goo:ga (2016) is a performance practice research project within the discipline of stand-up comedy that investigates the potential of a dissonant manifestation of the comic and the erotic by pregnant artists to challenge heteronormative, postfeminist and patriarchal configurations of ‘funniness’ vis-à-vis ‘sexiness’. It was also a feminist reclamation of fertility-as-spectacle, a queer resistance to the guilty pleasure of binary foetal gendering, and a neo-burlesque attempt to exploit multiple aesthetic modes of sexiness (Lintott and Irvin, 2016), while harnessing the comic abjection of pregnancy. It investigates pregnant embodiment and subjectivity in the context of live comic performance. The comic novelty in the unconventional approach to prurience staged by a pregnant performer allows the practice to intervene in a wider discourse around the comic and the maternal that mainstream stand-up comedy is only beginning to address; for example, the commercial success of Ali Wong’s two stand-up specials that coincided with the late stages of her pregnancies. goo:ga (2016) pre-dates the release of Wong’s work and draws upon additional disciplines to investigate further the potential for pregnant comedians to deploy the erotic in service of the comic; neo-burlesque, alt-cabaret, and live art form a lineage for the work. The praxis also articulates new devising methods, as the artist grapples with what Iris Marion Young termed the ‘doubling’ of the pregnant subject. Devising performance with/about a body that is rapidly changing affords complex insights into the lingering embodied practitioner knowledge of the pre-pregnant body, as a heavily pregnant artist attempts to access comic/erotic proposals in the studio and on stage.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
