The Power of Women’s Laughter in Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High”

Abstract

Previous scholarship on Carol Ann Duffy has focused on the enactment of humor in her poetry as a useful vehicle for feminist subversion, but the effects of women’s laughter have not been scrutinized in critical terms. My argument takes up “The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High” in Feminine Gospels (2002) to explore how women’s laughter arises and spreads, and what it reveals. By tracking the ways in which women’s laughter frustrates the masculinist discourse and enacts the feminist order, this essay will demonstrate how Duffy imagines a transformative space of laughter.