Humoring Resistance

Analyzes the explosive connections among strategic uses of humor, women's bodies, and resistance in fiction by Latin American women writers.

Contextualizing theoretical debates about the political uses of gendered humor and female excess, this book explores bold new ways in which a number of contemporary Latin American women authors approach questions of identity and community. The author examines the connections among strategic uses of humor, women's bodies, and resistance in works of fiction by Laura Esquivel, Ana Lydia Vega, Luisa Valenzuela, Armonía Somers, and Alicia Borinsky. She shows how the interarticulation of the comic and comic-grotesque vision with different types of excessive female bodies can result in new configurations of female subjectivity.

“…[Niebylski’s] work is an important contribution to humor studies, to women’s studies, and to the study of Latin American literature. Her against the grain reading of a well-known work … reveals the rich and varied tradition of women’s writing in Latin America and forces us to ask new questions about the role of humor in challenging received notions of femininity and resistance.” — Humor

“This is a highly original and witty study.” — Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

“Simply put, Dianna Niebylski’s book Humoring Resistance is brilliant … Her book is an essential contribution to both humor studies and Latin American women’s studies as she maps out an entire new terrain for scholars to follow, especially in some of her less well-known examples.” — Letras Femeninas

"Niebylski's main thesis—that contemporary Latin American women writers resist 'machista'-gendered impositions through the creation of 'boundless bodies,' 'unruly voices,' and 'anarchic laughter'—is superbly original and has the potential to open new avenues in the fields of Latin American literary criticism, gender studies, and cultural studies. In addition, her treatment of bodily 'humors' makes us rethink the feminist theories of Irigaray and Cixous, as well as Bakhtin's theories of humor. This is a solid contribution to the study of Latin American fiction." — María Rosa Olivera-Williams, University of Notre Dame

"Humoring Resistance is an original book. It combines theories of female subjectivity and
feminist cultural critique with the thematics and politics of humor, and engages an impressive and varied array of writers and texts in the process. The double meaning of humor (comedy and psycho-physical disposition) is fully exploited in each of the chapters, and in interestingly different ways. This book has made me aware that there is very little writing about humor in contemporary Latin American literature, in either sense of the word, despite the fact that there is a lot to laugh at in García Márquez or Donoso or Vargas Llosa." — Lois Parkinson Zamora, University of Houston

Dianna C. Niebylski is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Social Theory at the University of Kentucky and the author of The Poem on the Edge of the Word: The Limits of Language and the Uses of Silence in the Poetry of Mallarmé, Rilke, and Vallejo.