Mothers and Whores

This article examines two public controversies that arose in quick succession in 2018 around the routines of two female comics: Michelle Wolf’s monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and Samantha Bee’s segment on the policy of separating children from their immigrant parents at the border, which contained a crude insult about Ivanka Trump. Both incidents attracted attention and commentary far beyond the reaches of the performers’ usual audiences. In the wider conversation that myriad voices participated in, a much broader discursive struggle took place over ideals and norms. I argue that it was fundamentally a battle over conceptions of femininity and motherhood and, ultimately, over how to be a respectable woman in the public sphere. Not incidentally, defense of the jokes’ victims revolved around their status as “wives and mothers,” while disavowals of the joke tellers focused on the vulgarity of their use of profanity and sexual innuendo. Overall, these incidents ultimately drive home the way female performers have become hot spots in the “culture wars,” themselves sites of battle over ideals of gender, power, and public space.