Feminist humour’s disruptive potential: Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood and Rupi Kaur’s ‘I’m taking back my body’

Abstract

Using Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood and Rupi Kaur’s TEDxKC performance, ‘I’m taking back my body’, as case studies, this article examines how feminist humour is used by celebrities and public intellectuals to tell personal stories of oppression, trauma and inequality. Building on humour theory, feminist humour theory and affect theory, this article examines the potential of feminist humour as a rhetorical device to help storytellers tell difficult stories, to engage in acts of community-building and world-making, to challenge social inequalities and to enable social change. Ultimately, this article asks what we can learn from these examples, and how we can employ feminist humour in our own storytelling practices not only to disrupt power relations and establish solidarity, but also to imagine new, more equitable, worlds.