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.

At the heart of the book are detailed analyses of two highly successful unruly women-the comedian Roseanne Arnold and the Muppet Miss Piggy. Putting these two figures in a dee...