SESSION: Laughing From all Our Mouths

Jokes reveal deeply held collective ideas about national identity, gender, race, and class. Although they can be wielded as a cudgel by the majority, caricature and parody can also be powerful subversive tools in the soft armory of the oppressed, as illustrated by Richard Powell in his recent book Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020). Yet, as he explains, audiences often require special cultural competencies to decode and appreciate satirical critique.

Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray both acclaimed the subversive potential of laughter and satire. When ‘laughs exude from all our mouths’, Cixous told us, we cease to accept or believe the myths that have defined us. ‘Isn’t laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression?’ Irigaray asked rhetorically. So why is feminism so rarely considered a laughing matter? There are some conspicuous examples of funny feminism as visual praxis from Florence Claxton’s The Choice of Paris: An Idyll (c. 1860) and Barbara Shermund’s cartoons for the New Yorker to posters by the Guerilla Girls (who celebrated forty years of visual arts activism in 2025). Yet across histories and cultures, definitions of feminism and senses of humour vary widely. This means that feminist satirical critique might be difficult to decode.

This panel addresses the connected histories of feminist art and visual satire broadly conceived. It seeks to uncover and explore how women artists, caricaturists, cartoonists, and/or illustrators have laughed at misogyny and sexism. It will unpack images within political, social, and cultural contexts to reveal how intersectional, situated competencies can sometimes be needed to decode feminist meanings.

Session Convenors:

Jennifer S. Griffiths, Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute

Session Speakers:

Jennifer S. Griffiths, Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute

Adrì: Funny Futurism and Italy’s First Female Political Cartoonist

Adriana Bisi Fabbri(1881-1918) was associated with the Futurists and has often been proclaimed one, but, like so many modernist women, her position was marginal and ambivalent. Her cousin, Umberto Boccioni, invited her to exhibit at the first Futurist group show in 1911, but didn’t fully appreciate her caricatures. She found an admirer in fellow satirist Luciano Folgore, who warned her that Marinetti was too snobbish to do much in support of her humorous art. At the start of 1915, she became Italy’s first female political cartoonist working for Mussolini’s newly founded Il Popolo d’Italia. She signed her cartoons with the gender-neutral sobriquet “Adrì” and attended Milanese editorial meetings in masculine attire.

This paper will address a series of caricatures she made poking fun at the Futurist avant-garde: A Taste of the Futurist Program, Mafarka’s Son, Let’s Kill the Moonlight!, To the Conquest of Light, The Hygiene of the World, and Futurist passéists. All of these were exhibited at the first international exhibition of caricature art in Italy, held as part of the Turin World Fair in 1911, where she was the only Italian woman represented. They were listed in the catalogue, but only one has survived through newspaper reproductions. Insisting on the layered dimensions of Adrì’s cartoons in relation to the so-called woman question, I argue that she used visual satire to expose the hubris and chauvinism of the avant-garde.

Emma Jane Davis, University of Sussex

Performances in pink lustre: the silent satire of Thérèse Lessore (1884-1945)

By 1920, Thérèse Lessore was established as an ‘important member of the modern school’; co-founder of the London group and widely acclaimed for her boldly figurative oils. Over the next decade, however, she turned her brush to porcelain, decorating the most elegant of tableware shapes. This was a period in which ceramics entered the arena of fine art as critics hailed vessels as abstract sculpture, and the pottery of Bernard Leach was elevated to gallery plinths. Lessore, conversely, emphasised the utility of her wares, hosting studio sales in which visitors sipped from delicately lustred cups. Her daintiness of touch, however, was not matched by her subject matter, which was dominated by commercialised popular entertainment. Her vessels invaded the tea tables of ‘high’ culture critics with both ‘low’ culture subjects and derided decorative clichés.

Linda Nochlin observed that for realist painters ‘mockery proved a formidable weapon for tearing away the protective covering of conventional sentiment’. Accordingly, Lessore reserved her most incisive visual commentary for the rituals of her upper-middle-class patrons themselves. Exploiting ceramics’ performative potential, scenes of flirtation and domestic trysts unfold around a vessel’s surface. As Virginia Woolf observed, the effect is that ‘we laugh, but not with the muscles we use in reading’. Lessore operated from a marginal position of gender and class and, lacking the education to express herself in words, has resisted feminist recovery. This paper will adopt an alternative approach, employing histories of humour to reassess the silent satire performed by Lessore’s ceramic art.

Georgiana Uhlyarik, Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and University of Toronto

Love, lips & laughter: Joyce Wieland’s erotic politics

This paper discusses the work of Canadian artist Joyce Wieland (1930-1998) and the way in which her distinctive visual wit and wicked sense of humour pierced deeply held ideas about national identity, gender, sexuality and nature. Wieland seduced her viewers out of complacency, deploying erotic satire as a potent strategy. Lips, flora, fauna, quilted and embroidered texts, limp penises and romping naked women populate her imagery and mock phallic power and politics. Wieland invented her own visual vocabulary, drawing on clandestine motifs and elements of secrecy.

Defying Toronto’s prudish society of the 1950s, New York’s cultural machismo of the 1960s, and Canada’s infectious nationalism of the 1970s, Wieland produced transgressive images that unravelled the authority of patriotic symbols and history. Through painting, film, embroidery, quilting, plastic hangings, and, hilariously, in her Arctic Passion Cake and Sweet Beaver Perfume (both 1971), she undermined ideas of progress and colonial notions of land and the North. Aqui Nada is an erotically explicit cartoon strip that tells the adventures of Lapin, an arctic hare, and Tuktu (caribou), who are in love. Shithead Von Whorehead, “tool of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex,” attempts to violate Lapin, but Tuktu destroys the “tool.” The last frame reads: LONG LIVE NATURE. In other series, she infuses the pastoral and the allegorical with a jolt of convivial interspecies relations, producing fauna-centric origin stories. Wieland’s singular audacity creates a space of joy and generosity that defines her own feminine and feminist imprint as a call to action.

Temma Balducci, University of Utah

Melissa Ichiuji’s Uncomfortable Truths: Feminism is not for Sissies

Melissa Ichiuji’s multi-media Venus Envy #2 (2013) humorously mocks the social pressure women feel to be on display. In this case, the envy of the title is stirred by a voluptuous Venus who is not only aware of her appeal but also seems to revel in it. She poses in an exaggerated contrapposto that emphasizes her substantial curves; if she had a face, it would glow with self-satisfaction. The fabric Ichiuji uses to cover Venus adds to her coquettishness with its floral exuberance. The largest flowers – naturally, pink – are positioned on her face, breasts, and buttocks/hips. That someone is envious is not surprising. She is all attitude.

The title of the piece, Venus Envy #2, is obviously a play on Sigmund Freud’s much-maligned theory of penis envy, and Ichiuji is certainly not the first artist to reference it or mock it. Envy, more generally, is defined as a “feeling of . . . resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities, or luck.” In this case, the envy manifests in the material form of voodoo pins, positioning Venus as a voodoo doll being used to wish ill will upon her real-life counterpart.

This paper examines how the feminist artist Ichiuji uses humour to address the sometimes thorny issues of female sexuality, exhibitionism, and self-reflection. Here she parodies not only the pressure women feel to show off their bodies, but also the resulting competition this engenders. The unseen voodoo artist represents all women who feel judged and found wanting.