Liquid Laughter: A Gendered History of Milk & Alcohol Drinking in West-German and US Film Comedies of the 1950s

2025/08/01 by Perinelli, Massimo, Stieglitz, Olaf
#gender history #gender subversion #laughter

paper · doi:10.18716/ojs/gefo/2006.2935

Abstract

This paper aims to present a Gender History of the social dimension of laughter. It intends to demonstrate, by scrutinizing several West-German and US film comedies of the 1950s, that romantic comedies of that era firstly served as a tool in a process of (re-)establishing heteronormative and patriarchal gender systems; secondly, we will outline that this development was highly contested and depended on constantly referring to forms of gender subversion and deviance.

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