A01=Kirsten Leng
activism
Affect and activism
American feminism
American feminists
American studies
and comics
and sexuality studies
Author_Kirsten Leng
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSF11
Category=NHB
comedy
Cultural activism
cultural studies
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Feminism
feminist history
feminist humor
feminist studies
gender
gender studies
Histories of emotion
Histories of feminism
Histories of gender and sexuality
Histories of social movements
history of emotion
Humor
humor and comedy
humor history
humor in feminist media
media studies
modern U.S. history
National Organization of Women
performance studies
reproductive health
social movement studies
Sociological and Anthropological Studies of Social Movements
the history of feminism
U.S. history
women
Women Gender and Sexuality
women's history
women's studies
Product details
- ISBN 9781496244789
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jan 2026
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Pleasure, Play, and Politics is the first book to examine the roles humor played in U.S. feminism during the late twentieth century. Based on extensive archival research, it brings to light the stunning, moving, and frankly hilarious ways feminists have used satire, irony, and spectacle as they worked to build a better world. The story it tells includes activism and music, political mobilization and cartooning, stand-up comedy and demands for change.
Kirsten Leng explores the ways culture and politics feed one another and shows how humor contributed to movement-building by changing hearts and minds, creating and maintaining a sense of community beyond a single issue, and sustaining activists over the long haul. The fascinating individuals, groups, and objects examined here – including the sex workers’ rights group COYOTE, the Guerrilla Girls, Florynce Kennedy, and the Lesbian Avengers – don’t just provide entertaining anecdotes or unsettle lazy assumptions that feminists are perennially dour and censorious: they offer a lesson or two for contemporary feminists and social justice activists. Taken together, they remind us that laughter can move us, that humor and anger can coexist, and that play and pleasure have a place in struggle.
Kirsten Leng explores the ways culture and politics feed one another and shows how humor contributed to movement-building by changing hearts and minds, creating and maintaining a sense of community beyond a single issue, and sustaining activists over the long haul. The fascinating individuals, groups, and objects examined here – including the sex workers’ rights group COYOTE, the Guerrilla Girls, Florynce Kennedy, and the Lesbian Avengers – don’t just provide entertaining anecdotes or unsettle lazy assumptions that feminists are perennially dour and censorious: they offer a lesson or two for contemporary feminists and social justice activists. Taken together, they remind us that laughter can move us, that humor and anger can coexist, and that play and pleasure have a place in struggle.
Kirsten Leng is an associate professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900–1933.
