Neoliberal feminisms, late-night comedy, and the public sphere, or: Samantha Bee takes on Ivanka Trump

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article analyzes the humor of a 2017 Full Frontal skit concerned with the publication of Ivanka Trump’s “feminist” self-help book Women Who Work. In the skit, Full Frontal’s host Samantha Bee takes issue with how the book misrepresents feminist (labor) politics, and calls out as politically dangerous the alignment of Ivanka’s neoliberal rhetoric of empowerment with the neoconservative or “retrotopian” politics of the Trump administration. The article suggests that the skit performs its critical intervention in two ways: on the one hand, by humorously appropriating Ivanka’s language in order to criticize her neoliberal resignification of feminist politics, and on the other hand, by highlighting the contrast between Ivanka’s composed, traditionally feminine behavior and Bee’s unruly comic bodily comportment. As the article shows, the skit creates humor around this contrast to call attention to the gendered mechanisms that have prevented women’s bodies from appearing both as comedians and as public speakers. The article closes with a caveat, pointing to the recent commodification of humor itself in neoliberal news media contexts, a development that severely curtails the transgressive feminist potential of Bee’s skit.