The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter

Unruly women have been making a spectacle of themselves in film and on television from Mae West to Roseanne Arnold. In this groundbreaking work, Kathleen Rowe explores how the unruly woman--often a voluptuous, noisy, joke-making rebel or 'woman on top'--uses humor and excess to undermine patriarchal norms and authority.