Arts, Faculty of
Anthropology, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Zeng, Lin
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Since 2022, Chinese-language queer feminist diasporic stand-up comedy communities have emerged internationally, mostly in major cities in North America and Europe, places where there has been the presence of Chinese immigrants and/or international students and which allow for a certain degree of civic engagement. These communities are organized by grassroot Chinese diasporic queer feminists, most of whom are in their twenties or thirties and self-identify as first-generation immigrants, queer, and/or women. This thesis focuses on UniCome, one of these stand-up communities based in Vancouver, Canada. Drawing on textual analyses of skits, semi-structured one-to-one interviews, and auto-ethnographic accounts, this thesis explores how community members at UniCome use stand-up comedy as a creative medium to deconstruct and satirize their lived realities, to build and share their immigrant/queer/feminist humour, and to exhibit incredible resilience, deep reflection, connection, and a sense of humour that is sharp, moving, sophisticated, and raw. Situated at the conjunction of anthropological studies of humour and parody, migration studies, and queer and feminist theory, this study examines how humour functions as a form of self-directed reflection, resistance, and refusal in response to normative orders of authoritarianism, patriarchy, borders, and cis-heteronormativity, foregrounding diasporic connections, deeper forms of solidarity, and the reimagination of alternative futures.
Humour and the Making of Queer, Feminist and Diasporic Belonging: A Study of a Mandarin-Speaking Stand-Up Comedy Community in Vancouver by Lin Zeng B.A. (Hons), The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2022 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Anthropology) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2025 © Lin Zeng, 2025 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Humour and the Making of Queer, Feminist and Diasporic Belonging: A Study of a Mandarin-Speaking Stand-Up Comedy Community in Vancouver submitted by Lin Zeng in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Anthropology Examining Committee: Dr. Helena Zeweri, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia Supervisor Dr. Elif Sari, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Irene Bloemraad, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Bernard Perley, Associate Professor, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, University of British Columbia Additional Examiner iii Abstract Since 2022, Chinese-language queer feminist diasporic stand-up comedy communities have emerged internationally, mostly in major cities in North America and Europe, places where there has been the presence of Chinese immigrants and/or international students and which allow for a certain degree of civic engagement. These communities are organized by grassroot Chinese diasporic queer feminists, most of whom are in their twenties or thirties and self-identify as first-generation immigrants, queer, and/or women. This thesis focuses on UniCome, one of these stand-up communities based in Vancouver, Canada. Drawing on textual analyses of skits, semi-structured one-to-one interviews, and auto-ethnographic accounts, this thesis explores how community members at UniCome use stand-up comedy as a creative medium to deconstruct and satirize their lived realities, to build and share their immigrant/queer/feminist humour, and to exhibit incredible resilience, deep reflection, connection, and a sense of humour that is sharp, moving, sophisticated, and raw. Situated at the conjunction of anthropological studies of humour and parody, migration studies, and queer and feminist theory, this study examines how humour functions as a form of self-directed reflection, resistance, and refusal in response to normative orders of authoritarianism, patriarchy, borders, and cis-heteronormativity, foregrounding diasporic connections, deeper forms of solidarity, and the reimagination of alternative futures. iv Lay Summary This thesis studies a Mandarin-speaking stand-up comedy community named UniCome organized by Chinese queer feminist immigrant volunteers in Vancouver, Canada. Through analyzing the skits, interviews, and the authorâs own experiences, this thesis explores how members of the community use stand-up comedy and humour to share and reflect on their experiences of immigrating to Canada and living in China as people who identify as queer and/or women. Stand-up comedy as a less serious form of public expression allows individuals to conduct self-directed inquiries regarding the difficult and open-ended questions of their identities, aspirations, and sometimes messy but real-life experiences as immigrants, queer people and/or women. In the process of doing so and sharing these experiences with others through humour, participants find a sense of empowerment, healing, and build connections and a sense of belonging. v Preface This thesis is an original intellectual product produced by Lin Zeng, based on research conducted by the author, and under the supervision of Dr. Helena Zeweri. The research design, program, data collection, and analysis were completed by the author. Generative Artificial Intelligence was not used for any aspects of the work. Fieldwork and interviews were conducted in-person in Vancouver, Canada and on Zoom from January to June of 2025. Dr. Elif Sari and Dr. Irene Bloemraad served as committee members while Dr. Bernard Perley served as an external reviewer. Research was approved by the UBC Behavioural Research Ethics Board, certificate No. H24-00963. vi Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Preface .............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................1 1.1 Background ..................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Situating the study........................................................................................................... 3 1.3 Methodology and positionality ....................................................................................... 6 Chapter 2: The politics of humour .............................................................................................11 2.1 Humour as resistance against silencing ........................................................................ 13 2.2 Humour as transnational political engagement ............................................................. 21 2.3 Humour as resistance and refusal ................................................................................. 26 Chapter 3: Humour as queer, feminist, and Chinese? .............................................................32 3.1 Conceptualizing queer and feminism............................................................................ 33 3.2 Humour as feminist disruption...................................................................................... 35 3.3 Humour as queer AND feminist ................................................................................... 38 Chapter 4: Conclusion .................................................................................................................48 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................51 vii Acknowledgements I offer my sincerest gratitude to the participants of this project. Thank you for sharing with me so candidly about your stories, your thoughts, and your experiences. Thank you for your love and friendship. Moving to a new country can be scary, but I never feel alone because of you all. Special thanks to Chilli for participating in this project despite the circumstances. Thank you for always inspiring me as a friend, organizer, activist and artist. I am forever grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Helana Zeweri. Thank you for having me as your student and supporting me all the way through this program. Thank you for your guidance, kindness and encouragement; for every meeting, workshop, and opportunity; for bearing with my sometimes-fluctuating productivity; for inspiring me as a scholar and a person; and for showing me that an academic supervisory relationship can be so caring and fulfilling. I am grateful to my committee members, Dr. Elif Sari and Dr. Irene Bloemraad. Thank you, Elif, for your insightful comments on this thesis and for inspiring me as a queer migration scholar. Thank you, Irene, for your interdisciplinary insights and for joining the committee under the dire circumstances. I am so happy and honoured to have you on board. This committee is the best I could ever dream of. I would like to thank the scholars and friends I have met in the Anthropology Department and the Centre of Migration Studies. Thank you for making graduate school more bearable. Special shoutouts to Alix who sat through countless days and nights with me in the library writing our theses. This would be so much harder without you. I sincerely acknowledge that this research is conducted on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. I am forever indebted to the land and the peoples as an uninvited first-generation settler and a migration scholar. I dedicate this work to every POC queer and/or women immigrant friend I have met down the path. This work is for all of you. Thank you for giving me a glimpse and reminding me of how the world could be despite its atrocities. I love you all. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Background Since 2022, the scene of Chinese-language diasporic queer feminist stand-up comedy collectives has been flourishing overseas. As of July 2025, there are around fifteen Mandarin-speaking, volunteer-run, queer and/or feminist diasporic stand-up comedy collectives. Most of them are based in major cities in North America and Western Europe, in places that allow for (at least to a certain degree of) freedom of expression and civil organizing, and that have been popular destinations for Chinese immigrants and students. This research focuses on one of these stand-up comedy communities, UniCome, based in Vancouver, Canada. It was founded in early 2023 and has been organized by grassroots Chinese diasporic queer feminists, most of whom are in their twenties or thirties and self-identify as first-generation immigrant, queer, and/or women. The community was born out of specific contexts in China and in Canada. Historically, Vancouver has witnessed a significant presence of Chinese immigrants. In addition, the surging emigration of Chinese political dissidents and the establishment of communities like UniCome have emerged in response to a number of trends within China, including but not limited to: (1) exacerbating crackdown and retaliation against civic society by the Chinese government since the âWhite Paper Protestsâ;1 (2) the Chinese governmentâs enforcement of traditional gender roles and familial structures in response to dropping birth rates, leading to growing social and familial pressure against unmarried young women; (3) the continuing harassment and silencing of feminist and queer activists and organizations, whom the government 1 In November 2022, in response to inhumane measures taken by the Chinese government during the implementation of its âZero-Covidâ policies, a series of protests broke out in China and soon spread internationally. 2 associates with âWestern hostile ideologiesâ and treats as destabilizing factors of the society; and lastly, (4) the ongoing erasure, stigmatization, and discrimination based on gender and sexuality in China. These intersecting conditions led to the emergence of communities like UniCome, which was initiated by queer feminist activists âin exileâ who met in one of the White Paper Protests in Downtown Vancouver in late 2022. Although there has been a significant presence of Chinese immigrants in Vancouver, most local communities consist of older generations of immigrants who exclusively speak Cantonese, a language that is incomprehensible to most Mandarin-speaking immigrants from mainland China who have arrived in recent years. âAlthough there are many Chinese communities in Vancouver, most of them are centred around cultural heritage. There were very limited discussions of social and political issues, not to mention the experiences of queer people and feminists in China,â recalled Chilli,2 the producer of UniCome, who has been living in the city for ten years. This sentiment was confirmed by Fang, another founding member of the community. âThe birth of communities like UniCome is a âpost-White-Paperâ phenomenon. People had so much to express after the protests, but couldnât find any community for Mandarin-speaking activists.â Therefore, feeling the need to have a Mandarin-speaking community and to explore possibilities around diasporic mobilization in a time when many Chinese activists were scattered overseas, this group of activists launched their first stand-up performance in March 2023. Using stand-up comedy as a creative approach to diasporic activism, UniCome has become one of the major communities for younger generations of Chinese diasporic activists in Vancouver. Since its establishment, UniCome has organized eight Mandarin-speaking stand-up comedy shows (with each show 2 All names mentioned in this thesis are pseudonyms. 3 having around ten amateur performers and anywhere from sixty to ninety audience members) and four virtual workshops on beginner-friendly skit-writing and performance techniques. Most volunteers, performers and audience members are first-generation immigrants, and many of them had limited, if any, knowledge or experience of stand-up comedy. On the stage, performers share personal journeys, many of them for the first time, to an audience with whom they feel safe. Drawing on ethnographic research with community members, this thesis shows how writing and performing stand-up comedy become a process of reflection, empowerment, and critical engagement around experience of living under intersectional structures of authoritarianism, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity, and borders as queer and/or women immigrants. 1.2 Situating the study A growing body of queer and feminist migration scholarship has highlighted the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and immigration, which has been nevertheless ignored in immigration-related knowledge production (Luibhéid, 2004). By documenting their lived experience, scholars have demonstrated how women and queer immigrants are more prone to being captured and penalized by immigration bureaucracies and everyday violence during immigration, which is often imbued with racism, misogyny and cis-heteronormativity (Allen, 2021; Luibhéid & Chávez, 2017; Manalansan, 2003; Nawyn, 2010; Parreñas, 2001). However, when reading these accounts, I could not help but think, âtheyâre all so heavy, and so sad.â On the one hand, these accounts are heavy precisely because immigration and displacement are difficult, especially for women and queer people who must deal with omnipresent forms of violence, and especially at this peculiar moment when xenophobia, the deprivation of womenâs rights, and transphobia are on the rise. 4 But there is another side to the story. In spite of their experiences of authoritarianism, displacement, patriarchy, discrimination, marginalization, and the violence embedded in immigration systems, women and/or queer immigrants around me are the wittiest and the most creative human beings I have ever met. This side of their experiences and personalities, however, is often overridden in narratives of immigration violence and trauma, albeit for good cause. When asked about why they chose to organize a stand-up performance, Chilli, the organizer, replied, âBecause I thought people needed some laughter to distract them from the heavy mood of the protest, of everything that had been happening during Covid. Also, it was more because I know every Chinese queer/woman and immigrant can effortlessly put up at least a ten-minute stand-up comedy.â Why? Because gender-based biases and binaries are funny; patriarchy and heteronormativity are full of ironies; authoritarianism and dictatorship are sustained by lies and man-made melodramas; xenophobia reveals ignorance; and immigration bureaucracies are ridiculously tedious. It is this part of the story that this thesis sheds light on. On the other side of violence and fear, this thesis argues that community members at UniCome use stand-up comedy as a creative medium to deconstruct and satirize their lived realities, to build and share their own immigrant/queer/feminist joy, thereby exhibiting incredible resilience, deep reflection, connection, and a sense of humour that is at once sharp and moving, sophisticated and raw. In investigating the question of what happens to humour when individuals who deploy it cross borders, this study expands beyond the nation-state focus of existing studies of humour, as well as queer feminist studies of stand-up comedy. Humour functions as a tool of reflection, resistance, and refusal in response to normative orders of authoritarianism, patriarchy, borders, and cis-heteronormativity, cultivating diasporic connections and the reimagination of alternative futures. 5 Although this study is a celebration of queer/feminist/diasporic joy and belonging through the medium of stand-up comedy, it also emphasizes the ambiguity and ambivalence of humour (Ortner, 1995), and that of immigration, queer and feminist discourses, and the forms of identity and power dynamics they generate. Given that participants are first-generation immigrants, queer, and/or women, they inevitably find themselves embedded in different political and social structures in China, Canada, and in between. The differences and intricacies of the systems and the âin-betweenâ status can lead to both possibilities for and profound uncertainties around political and social aspirations (Anzaldúa, 1987). Moreover, the processes of writing about, sharing, and being exposed to deeply personal and contentious narratives are fundamentally risky, for the results can be unpredictable and triggering, and the reaction from the audience can be unexpected. Diving into the ambivalence of humour is not about denouncing it; rather, it is to acknowledge the complicated and sometimes messy realities lived by queer and/or feminist immigrants under different and intersecting orders of domination, which serves as the first step to envision what kinds of connections and alternative futures are possible. This research is situated at the conjunction of queer feminist scholarship, migration studies, and anthropological studies of humour, with each field presenting powerful interventions into one another. It is divided into two chapters. The first chapter explores how humour can be used as a means of both resistance and refusal in response to the transnational extension of authoritarian violence and highlights how humour opens up new channels for political engagement in China, Canada, and in between. The second chapter investigates and analyzes how humour is both queer and feminist and discusses how oppression against queer people and/or women intersects with different orders of domination, an angle often downplayed in Western-centric studies on queer feminist comedy. As such, the second chapter explores how intersectional identities of being feminist, queer, and Chinese are negotiated by performers 6 through humour, and in doing so, how performers complicate linear, monolithic, rigid understandings of each of these identities and delve into uncertainties, ambiguities, and often invisible âugly feelingsâ like shame. As both chapters illustrate, stand-up comedy provides individuals with a more light-hearted medium for political expression, self-exposure, and aggression. Through jokes, individuals find it easier to share experiences of political violence and their messy yet authentic experiences as queer and/or women living under orders of domination, and in doing so, the authenticity and vulnerability carry political significance and provide conditions for a deeper form of belonging, connections, and solidarity. 1.3 Methodology and positionality I moved to Vancouver to pursue a graduate degree in anthropology in the fall of 2023. As a newcomer, naturally, I was yearning to know more about the city and connect with local communities. Shortly after my arrival, a friend sent me an Instagram post promoting a Mandarin-speaking stand-up comedy show run by Chinese queer feminists and said, âYou should definitely give it a try!â As a queer woman, a first-generation immigrant, and someone known for her sarcasm and dark humour, my encounter with UniCome seemed destined. I went to one of UniComeâs shows held in September 2023 and quickly befriended some of the community members. A month later, I joined UniCome as a volunteer and debuted my amateur stand-up journey. Since joining UniCome, I have participated in and helped organize six stand-up comedy shows and pre-show collective writing sessions, alongside other film screenings and community gatherings. The study was conducted from January 2025 to June 2025. It consists of text analyses of participantsâ skits and twelve individual and semi-structured interviews, supplemented by auto- 7 ethnographic accounts. 3 All excerpts from the skits were provided by the participants, who were subsequently consulted regarding the interpretation and translation of the skits. For the interviews, ten were conducted in person and two were held on Zoom due to the intervieweesâ preferences and availability. The in-person interviews were held in very cozy settings, such as participantsâ homes, cafes, and food courts, in places where participants felt comfortable sharing and engaging in personal conversations. All interviews were conducted in Mandarin and were recorded, transcribed, anonymized, uploaded, and organized on a Word document to highlight and identify common themes and keywords. For the selected vignettes, I confirmed with the interviewee prior to incorporating them into my thesis and translated all excerpts manually. This is followed by subsequent confirmation of interpretation and translation with the participants, to minimize the loss in translation and to guarantee that consent is maintained throughout the project. Ranging in age from the early twenties to thirties, the interlocutors all self-identify as queer and/or women and first-generation Chinese immigrants in Canada. Regular participants in the community often hold multiple positions. Among the twelve interlocutors, one of them is the organizer who has also performed in multiple shows; eight of them are regular performers and volunteers in some capacity (and by default, audience members), with the remaining three being regular audience members and, occasionally, volunteers. The immigration statuses of participants vary. Nine came to Canada on student visas and stayed on post-graduation work permits, with some of them eventually acquiring permanent 3 I use auto-ethnography but have assigned myself a pseudonym. As all skits include political expression and very personal information such as oneâs gender and/or sexual identity, I did so to protect my own confidentiality and to protect myself from potential surveillance. 8 residency or Canadian citizenship; two hold temporary work permits, and one came on a tourist visa and stayed on protected status. 4 To protect the participants from potential surveillance and to ensure confidentiality, all names mentioned in this thesis are pseudonyms. Additionally, I intentionally blur most participantsâ immigration status (so that readers cannot correspond the aforementioned immigration statuses to individuals) and only mention their age group, gender and/or sexual identities. Personal information, such as professions and hometowns, is only mentioned if they are relevant to the skits, and all participants were consulted prior to the incorporation of the identifier. Like most participants, before joining UniCome, I had very limited knowledge and experience of stand-up comedy. However, the more I come to know the people in the community and the more I participate in the writing and performance of stand-up comedy, the more I realize that stand-up comedy is not merely about being funny. Under the façade of humour, participants share and reflect on their open-ended journeys of immigration, being queer and/or women in China and in Canada and living in different political and social contexts. As such, the people I have come to know from UniCome and our experience of performing and writing stand-up comedy have inspired me to write this thesis project, with the aim of simply writing about our stories and showing a different side of immigration/queer/womenâs narratives that are often downplayed and erased. More importantly, I take this project as a valuable opportunity for in-depth dialogue with community members about their experiences and thoughts on writing comedy, immigration, identities, and political engagement. Although these topics are often reflected in their skits, it was meaningful and illuminating to learn about and exchange our individual reflections in detail. 4 All participants were consulted prior to the incorporation of this information. 9 This project, therefore, is inherently participatory, intimate, reflexive, and partly auto-ethnographic. For the participants, I am not only an outside researcher but, more importantly, a community member and a trusted friend. As such, this research exemplifies an experiment in intimate ethnography, which Reed-Danahay (2002, p. 423) defines as being âproduced by an âinsiderâ or ânativeâ observer of his or her own cultural milieuâ and autoethnography, which focuses on a person and their âever-changing relationshipsâ (Abu-Lughod, 1993). In some ethnographic writings, I admire the virtue of outsider perspectives in grasping what insiders have taken for granted. Nevertheless, for this research topic, I consider my positionality as a community member, a queer feminist Chinese immigrant, and an anthropologist, as well as the adoption of intimate and auto-ethnography to be necessary for the following reasons. First, my positionality allows me to navigate the gaps between Mandarin and English and to analyze the skits in relation to individualsâ relevant political and social backgrounds. In addition, it is because of my engagement in the community and the friendships I have cultivated with community members that they are willing to share their life stories. Because of my participation in wider queer feminist activist circles in China and internationally, participants were willing to dive into the ambivalences around community building and political engagement and were willing to candidly share opinions that are more contentious even within queer feminist communities. Lastly, intimate ethnography and auto-ethnography bring together the dualities of insider and researcher and capture the dynamics between the personal and the cultural, social, and political without presuming a completely repressive relationship between history and individuals (Waterston, 2005; 2019). On the other hand, despite our shared languages and political and cultural backgrounds, it is important to acknowledge that paths of migration, gender, and queer identities are inherently personal, 10 and the experiences of political violence often intersect with other socio-cultural variants. Although my positionality as a first-generation Chinese queer woman immigrant has afforded me access to the community, between the interlocutors and me, our differences â such as our immigration statuses, identities of gender and/or sexuality, socio-economic backgrounds, places of origin, relationships with homeland and different languages, as well as me as a researcher from a higher education institution â all require careful navigation and most importantly, an open heart to embrace personal experiences and avoid presumptions. As this study unfolds, it becomes clear that my positionality and an intimate and partly auto-ethnographic approach allowed me to convey the nuances of lived diasporic experience while contending with ongoing violence and repression. What's more, the research process itself illustrates the extension of community beyond the performance venues and mirrors the processes of navigating intersectional identities, which this thesis aims to present. Both the experiences of writing and listening to stand-up comedy represent the processes of personal and collective self-directed inquiry and reflection (Dyrness, 2020), through which, as Torre and Ayala (2009) suggest, experiences of in-betweenness, hybridity, and intersectionality become sources that enable empowerment, connections, and possible grounds for solidarity. 11 Chapter 2: The politics of humour Humour has always been a topic of interest for anthropologists. Classic anthropological literature investigates how humour structures social relations and how jokes reflect wider political and social structures (Douglas, 1968; Radcliffe-Brown, 1940, 1949; Young, 1977). Following this tradition, anthropologists have treated humour as an inherently political and social phenomenon. For humour to emerge and be understood, individuals must have shared contexts and sociality (Macpherson, 2008), which in turn constitute the essential part, as well as the major barrier, of humour. Among these factors, under the influence of Bakhtin, humour has been increasingly linked to concepts of power and politics, with scholarly attention being directed to relationships such as domination and subversion implied by humour (PetroviÄ, 2018). In this regard, apart from mirroring realities, the politics of humour lies in its capacity to exhibit, destabilize, and reproduce inequalities and tensions (Carty & Musharbash, 2008). In her book Laughter Out of Place (2013), Goldstein explores how residents of shantytowns in Rio de Janeiro use humour to manage the emotional weight of their daily lives surrounded by uncertainties, violence, and social neglect. Goldstein (2013, p. 6) describes their humour as a form of âshared oppositional aestheticsâ which allows them to endure and push back against entrenched social inequalities and marginalization. Apart from exposing inequalities, recent anthropological literature centralizes morality in investigating the politics of humour, highlighting how they open possibilities and spaces to imagine alternative moral orders (Creed, 2011). This is illustrated by Livingstonâs (2012) study of terminal patients in Botswanaâs only cancer ward, in which she captures how humour emerges as a vital social and moral practice shared by terminal patients to mitigate pain amid precarious conditions in the hospital. Instead of simply representing the lighter aspects of social life, scholars agree that humour is serious; the source of the most sophisticated and powerful humour is not comedy but tragedy, not harmony but tension. 12 Notably, anthropologists have also underscored the ambiguity and ambivalence of humour. Once a joke is told, the author loses control over how it will be interpretated, received, and circulated (Bogad, 2005), especially when the humour stems from deeply personal experiences and engages with contentious politics. The ambiguity of humour, however, can be deliberately articulated and politically generative, especially in authoritarian contexts where outright expressions of dissent is not allowed (Landreville, 2015). The other aspect of the danger of humour lies in its reliance of pre-existing stereotypes and categories. For example, in his work Portraits of âthe Whitemanâ (2015), Basso analyzes how the Western Apache joke about and imitate Anglo-Americans and how they use humour as a channel for dissent and juxtaposing their values and settler-colonial ones. On the other hand, Basso also points out the underlying danger of reproducing the Whiteman vs. Indigenous binary: by ascribing meanings of âthe Whitemanâ, the notion of âthe Indianâ is also articulated. Therefore, despite its symbolic and political power, humour should be understood as a fundamentally risky and ambivalent phenomenon. Whereas anthropological scholarship has long investigated the politics of humour, relevant studies are often bounded by national borders, with individuals from certain political or historical backgrounds described as âmore skillfulâ at employing humour and parody. Although there is virtue in underlining the correlation between political oppression/unrest and the proliferation of parody â as it is no secret that parody prevails under authoritarian regimes â the centralized and generalizing approach risks homogenizing voices in a political entity and ignoring how humour can be strategically appropriated by authorities (PetroviÄ, 2018, p. 207). Whatâs more, such a nationally bounded approach presumes that humour and individuals who employ humour always stay in the same political entity. But we all know this is not true; human beings travel across borders even in times and countries where human mobility is mostly constrained. In light of this gap within existing anthropological studies, this chapter brings 13 migration and displacement into the discussion of humour. It engages with the questions of: what happens to the politics of humour once individuals leave authoritarian conditions, and move to relatively more liberal places, and how transnationalism and the peculiar in-between positions among different political entities generate new possibilities for political engagement? 2.1 Humour as resistance against silencing Not only do humans travel across borders, but so do their languages, their forms of humour, and their narratives of political oppression. This section dives into the transnational aspects of humour and political violence and shows how participants use stand-up comedy to de-normalize and navigate violent experiences, to destabilize the binary between authoritarianism and liberal democracies, as well as between homeland political involvement and host-land integration. Here, the term âtransnationalâ is used to highlight the extension of networks of political repression or engagement, in contrast to âdiasporicâ in the next section, which centres more around individualsâ lived senses of belonging. Under the influence of Weberâs (1978) model of territorially bounded state violence, theorists tend to neglect immigrantsâ relations with their home states and how the effects of state oppression remain after emigration. Despite the important correlation between geography and the possibilities for political engagement (Waldinger & Shams, 2023), authoritarian states often permeate across borders to assert control over their citizens abroad (Délano & Gamlen, 2014). In her study of Libyan and Syrian dissidents in the United States and the United Kingdom during the Arab Spring, Moss (2014) investigates how the regimes force dissidents to remain silent through surveillance via overseas informant networks, harassment toward, and the taking hostage of their family members at home, and, in extreme cases, harming them directly (Dukalskis, 2021; Henry et al., 2024). Given that most individuals cannot fully cut 14 off their domestic connections after emigration, immigrants seeking to connect with their domestic networks inevitably fall under the sophisticated surveillance regimes deployed by their home state and are often captured by transnational schemes of repression. In addition, the nationally bounded approach fails to consider how immigrants come to âcarry the state within themselvesâ (Nyíri & Zhang, 2010, p. 53), which, in an authoritarian context, is useful in thinking about how propaganda and nationalism are internalized by citizens. In her study of young Chinese women international students in Australian universities, Martin (2022, p. 219) observes that the patriotic education curricula introduced by the party-state since the 1990s â in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen democratization movement (Wang, 2008; Zhao, 2005) â have contributed to the embodiment of âlong-distance nationalismâ by Chinese international students (Dong, 2017). Although some students gradually become critical of the party-state, others reinforce their national allegiance to China, partly due to anti-Asian racism and social exclusion they encountered when living in Australia (Martin, 2022, p. 220). This counters the prevalent assumption that individuals will automatically be âfreedâ from authoritarian propaganda once they move to a so-called liberal democracy. Moreover, the patriotism and nationalism extended abroad can lead to censorship of and backlash against scholars and other students and dissidents who are vocal on politically sensitive issues in China (Hail, 2015). Likewise, Martin (2022, pp. 216-217) documents the fierce cyber backlash faced by a graduating student at the University of Maryland after her commencement speech mentioning the absence of freedom of speech in China was posted on Chinese social media. This challenges the Weberian model of state violence, which considers political suppression to be geographically limited and the state as the sole wielder of political violence (Weber, 1978). On the contrary, apart from official agents, immigrants can become the victims of state control, which extends beyond borders and reproduces the authoritarian 15 violence of silencing. The transnational extension of authoritarian violence is tangibly felt by most Chinese dissidents who are concerned about potential backlash from their compatriots and who internalize the prolonged censorship that characterized their lives back home, highlighting how previous experiences of repression can circumscribe political expression and engagement in a new country (Almasalkhi, 2024). As mentioned in the introduction, UniCome emerged during the White Paper Protests in late 2022. The protest erupted domestically and soon spread internationally in response to a building fire in Urumqi that killed ten people who could have escaped if the emergency entrance had not been blocked as part of lockdown policies. âFor many people, the âWhite Paper protestsâ were the first time that they demonstrated on the street and chanted in Chinese and in English. The power at that moment was just immaculate,â recalled Fang, a performer and volunteer, âAfter the protests, people suddenly felt the urge to express and discuss politics. The feeling was so overwhelming, as if we wanted to spill out what had been suppressed for decades.â The organizer, Chilli, contends that this is one of the main reasons why she and other founding members initiated UniCome: âFor us who lived in China for the most part of our lives, because of censorship and fear, it is hard to talk about our political opinions candidly, especially in our own language. Like doing public speech, political expressions need practice. But we rarely use Mandarin to talk about politics. Itâs like a muscle that has atrophied for a long time, which needs lots of time and effort to rehabilitate. I hope UniCome can become a safe space for people to learn about and practice political expression, in our own language and in stand-up comedy.â (Interview with Chilli, June 10, 2025) 16 The emergence of UniCome echoes Kanaanaâs (1995) observation after collecting jokes told by Palestinians for years, that jokes almost become a necessity and compulsive when a political problem becomes prevalent and strongly felt. As such, stand-up comedy becomes a site of resistance for performers to express and detox the internalized censorship by simply writing about politics in jokes. This is not as easy as it seems, for censorship leads to not only the closeting of oneâs political opinions due to mistrust (Yurchak, 2013), but also the lack of vocabulary for political expressions, even in oneâs mother tongue. The feeling of political aphasia, as this thesis will continue highlighting, is widely shared among participants and a common topic in scholarship on the aftermath of political violence (Das, 2007; Kleinman, 2000). In UniCome, there are a few regular performers who are known for writing fierce political jokes and satires â Felicity, Sea, and Caomei. Sea is a queer woman in her mid-twenties who grew up in China and went abroad for university. âGrowing up in China, my grandparents have always told me, âDonât talk about politics. Donât ask why.â I guess thatâs their survival strategy, after living through the Mao era. So, I never had the chance to talk about politics in my family, nor in other public places,â Sea told me, âIt didnât change until I went to a university abroad, where I was often the only Chinese student in tutorials, so, naturally, people looked at me when it came to discussions about Chinese politics. That was my first experience of talking about politics with others, of some sort of semi-public political expression.â For Sea, although she found it difficult to articulate nuanced political issues in English, English as a foreign language also provides a safe distance, protecting her (albeit not fully) from the overwhelming emotions and fears when it comes to Chinese politics and history, so that she could at least try talking about them. âAlthough Mandarin is my mother tongue, I considered English to be my first political language. When thinking about it, I always feel a little sad,â Sea concludes with a bitter smile. 17 Starting from English, Sea began sharing thoughts on politics and news in both Mandarin and English in the form of writing mini blogs or posting on social media. But the fear lingered: âStill, Iâm always self-conscious about posting. When I post on Chinese social media, I will filter out words that will be censored, and never directly write about things that wonât see the light. In contrast, on non-Chinese platforms, I can write about whatever I want. But I never share anything about my identity, given that the content might be reposted to the other side of the wall,5 and given that Chinese cyber police may be patrolling.â (Interview with Sea, March 28, 2025) For Sea and many other performers in UniCome, their personal life and political one must be separated even when they are writing on non-Chinese platforms, for there is always a risk of police harassment or unwarranted random phone checks at the Chinese border. Seaâs narrative further complicates our understanding of the transnational extension of authoritarian control and the embodiment of censorship and fear by adding a cyber dimension. In this sense, performing in UniCome incorporates the personal and the political, both in the feminist theoretical sense and in the most literal sense â performers are standing there in person, talking about politics. The significance of real-life presence is so obvious that it is often taken for granted in studies of stand-up comedy conducted in the English-speaking world, where real-life public discussions seem so natural. For participants, writing and performing comedy help them reconnect with and practice Mandarin as a political language in a space where they feel safe. Felicity is a performer, volunteer, and 5 Refers to Chinaâs Great Firewall blocking domestic access to many social media platforms and websites run by foreign companies. 18 trans non-binary sapphic refugee in her thirties who moved to Canada around three years ago. As she jokingly noted: âIt was like coming out again, but out of a political closet. Once youâre out, thereâs no coming back. Although I had experiences of political engagement in China and in Canada, the performance was the very first time I showed my face whilst coming out and expressing political dissent. To be honest, at first, I was very nervous and worried â what if someone recorded it? But later, my tourist visa expired, and I decided to apply for asylum. At that point, I knew I would have to stay here and would never go back to China again. These circumstances pushed me to make up my mind to do the first show, and the second, and the third â thereâs just something addictive and empowering about it.â (Interview with Felicity, April 2, 2025) As ironic as it sounds, political violence like censorship provides fertile ground for the creation of humour. The humour of censorship was illustrated beautifully by Felicityâs skit: As a Psychology student, I have always been interested in the subject since I was a child. One day in secondary school, I learned the concept of conditioned reflexes, so I brought a little bell back home and rang it before feeding my dog each time, to see how it would react. But instead of drooling, the dog barked at me. Maybe the Chinese dog thought I was a foreign hostile force6 named Pavlov. 6 An ideological and rhetorical umbrella term used by the Chinese government to describe external actors, domestic activists, feminists, queer people and so forth, whom the government perceived as threatening to state security, political stability, or ideological control. 19 Later, I realized you donât have to study conditioned reflexes from dogs â you can learn about them in history class, too. For example, whenever the teacher mentions 1949, I had a conditioned reflex, âThe founding of the Peopleâs Republic of China!â When it comes to 1979, I reflexed, âThe beginning of Reform and Opening-Up Policies!â When it comes to 1989,7 I reflexed, âUghhâ¦ this wonât come up on the exam!â (Excerpts from Felicityâs skits) Here, Felicity joked about herself being a âforeign hostile forceâ, a term used by the Chinese government that she fits perfectly as a transgender, activist, and emigrant. Rather than being imposed on her by the government and nationalists who habitually used the term, she playfully used the term to describe her adolescent self, generating a twist of power (Bakhtin, 1984; Scott, 1987), challenging the legitimacy of the concept (Douglas, 1968), and reappropriating the derogatory implications of the term through mockery (Turner, 1969; Navaro-Yashin, 2002). In addition, the last line of the excerpt satirizes the erasure of the Tiananmen Massacre in Chinese history books and the fact that any direct reference to this event is heavily censored in China, rendering most in the younger generation unaware of its occurrence. By mentioning and laughing at the unmentionable, Felicityâs skit resists dominant narratives of history by the government, and the very existence of censorship is exposed and ridiculed. In comparison, Seaâs skits play with censorship in a more explicit way: I cannot help but think about how good a Chinese empress I would make. The reason is very obvious â I am just, hot! When doing a press conference with our besties â the 7 The Tiananmen Square Movements. 20 emperors, oops, sorry, the beloved leaders of Russia and the Deâmoâcraâticâ People's Republic of Korea, both bald, and one over-botoxed â my beauty will greatly enhance our international image. All the press will only care about me, instead of our dictatorship. The other reason is even more straightforward. I am too smart not to be the Chinese empress. I have a masterâs degree, making me way more competent than some primary school students like Xi.8 (Excerpts from Seaâs skits) Compared with Felicity, Seaâs skit involves more direct offence and exemplifies the âpunching-up strategiesâ in stand-up comedy (Bhargava & Chilana, 2022), as well as the notion of âcharged humourâ targeting hegemonic orders and powerful figures (Krefting, 2014). Both Felicityâs and Seaâs skits play with political taboos by speaking the unspeakable. âThe more I perform and write, the less fear and self-censorship I feel. Now I can joke about things that I found challenging to even talk about before,â suggested Sea. When the unspeakable was spoken, a sensation and connection were felt among the performers and the audience. You can tell from the audienceâs reaction â whenever Felicity and Sea performed, they always received massive rounds of applause. âIt was just thrilling to hear the daring jokes on stage, like when the performer spilled out the full name of Xi on stage. You know, people rarely address him using his full name â it is always President Xi, or Xi Dada,9 or youâll be censored. So gradually, when texting 8 Although Wikipedia says Xi Jinping holds an honorary doctoral degree, rumour has it that he only completed primary school, after which he had to quit in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. 9 An informal and somewhat affectionate nickname for Xi Jinping. âDadaâ (大大) is a northern Chinese term for elder male relatives conveying warmth, respect, or familiarity. 21 my friends, I got used to referring him as just âhimâ,â said Kim, a regular audience member. Seaâs reflection on her skit echoes Kimâs sentiment: âAt first, I felt nervous because of lingering self-censorship when writing and performing skits that directly âpunch upâ against powerful political figures, but later I figured that the nerve and the fun are two sides of the same coin. For example, thereâs nothing dramatic when you name and offend, letâs say, Donald Trump â because people do it all the time! It is exactly because Xi Jinpingâs name, as well as the unholy anecdotes of him, are one of the most censored and tabooed subjects on Chinese social media, that makes them hilarious. Without censorship, my skits wonât be so thrilling and funny.â (Interview with Sea, March 28, 2025) As such, through writing and listening to stand-up comedy, the existence and lingering influence of censorship are exposed, ridiculed, and resisted. The show also becomes a venue where uncensored political speech is practiced and shared among the performers and the audience and where the silencing effects of censorship are exposed and healed. 2.2 Humour as transnational political engagement This section investigates how humour functions as a channel for transnational political engagement and generates new connections and political subjectivities. Unlike domestic political participation, scholarship in migration studies suggests diasporic mobilizations are transnationally oriented and preconditioned by immigrantsâ unique positionalities (Fouron & Schiller, 2001). Immigrants often navigate the cultural and political landscapes of their host societies while remaining emotionally and politically invested in homeland affairs. As such, diasporic movements can leverage external political 22 opportunities such as lobbying or mobilizing diaspora voting blocs in liberal democracies, to influence the politics of their countries of origin in ways that domestic political actors cannot (Amarasingam, 2015; Quinsaat, 2024). However, diasporic mobilizations and integration into the host land are often considered to be irreconcilable. As noted by Rotella (2021), Chinese dissidents living in the United States often find themselves in the crossfire between home-state surveillance and host-state suspicions. In her ethnography of Bangladeshi Muslims in Los Angeles, Shams (2016) illustrates how individualsâ ongoing cultural practices and engagement in homeland politics result in a âmirrored minority effectâ, in which their Muslim identities are reiterated, and their practices are perceived as a lack of commitment to integration. Likewise, for second-generation Palestinian Americans, their devotion to homeland politics often leads to experiences of exclusion and stigmatization in the host land (Brocket, 2018). On the other hand, an increasing degree of integration into the host society can be perceived by kin and community members as eroding their pre-existing connections to the homeland (Sheffer, 2013), which can also be reflected by the âgenerational dilutionâ of ethnic identities, attachment, and engagement in transnational politics (Portes & Rumbaut, 2005). Emerging scholarship on diasporic mobilization â collective political and social mobilizations led by migrant communities â has disrupted the presumed tension between host-land integration and diasporic mobilization. For instance, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Chinese diaspora activists mobilized against prevalent anti-Asian racism and joined anti-lockdown movements in China and internationally. As Jin and Ni (2021) illustrate, participation in these movements gave Chinese diaspora activists an opportunity to articulate past experiences of racism, a voice often marginalized in the UK. During the process, their immigrant identity was politicized and transformed from an outsider of the host society to âresidents 23 deeply engaged with the local societyâ. Whatâs more, the experiences of authoritarianism and racial marginalization give diasporic activists the rhetoric to understand the experiences of and build solidarity with other marginalized communities in the host land (Zhao, 2020). The interactions between homeland and host-land politics are not unidirectional, as diasporic groups mobilize not only around political issues in the host land but also back home. For instance, when overseas Chinese activists heard about the news of mistreatment and displacement experienced by African immigrants in Guangzhou, China, during Covid-19, the activists mobilized their networks in Guangzhou to advocate and help translate official documents and provide necessities (March et al., 2020). Rather than hindering integration into the host society, diasporic activists see involvement in local movements as opportunities for acquiring knowledge of and practicing civic participation under different political systems (Quinsaat, 2024), which accumulates political capital for their future incorporation (Chow & Ren, 2023). Furthermore, as diaspora activists inevitably encounter internal hierarchy, embedded sexism, racism, nativism, and conflicting ideologies in real-life organizing, they reflect on the experiences and develop their own political subjectivity in and critiques of liberal democracies (Zhao, 2021). The intervention of the binary between integration and diasporic mobilization is reflected in participantsâ skits. For Caomei, a non-binary Chinese international student in their early twenties, stand-up comedy helps them to connect Chinese politics with local and international political issues they learned in class: âMy skits often compare and contrast ongoing political issues of both sides from my insider-outsider position.â Caomei sees stand-up comedy as a channel to shed light on political issues that are less discussed among local Chinese communities and vice versa, as they also perform in English stand-up comedy shows in which they address politics in China to English-speaking crowds. Caomei explains, âLocal Chinese communities, even those relatively âliberalâ and âprogressiveâ ones, tend to neglect other 24 marginalized communities and ongoing international political issues. Or they still subscribe to certain myths of Western liberal democracy and colonialism. I wish my skits could highlight these problems and bridge my studies in English and my Chinese language.â This is exemplified by Caomeiâs skit below: Last year, when I went back to China, I tried explaining to my dad, a Chinese dude in his fifties, about what my major is. I said, âMy major is called GRSJ, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice.â And my dad just looked confused. âSo, what exactly can you do with this degree?â he asked. âI want to be a community organizer,â I answered, and he looked even more confused. âWell, have you heard of Barack Obama?â âOf course,â he answered immediately. âBefore becoming the president of the United States, he was a community organizer.â âOhâ¦ so your career path is to be the president of the United States?â âWell, dad, thatâs not how it works,â I patiently explained, âFirst, I wasnât born on American soil; Iâm not a man; and most importantly, I donât want to be a war criminal.â Then my mom stepped in. âItâs okay, itâs okay, baby. We donât have to be the president of the United States. We can be a teacher â itâs much more stable!â I did agree with my mom and seriously considered becoming a teacher at that point. For class, I just read Edward Said â¦ (a crash course of Saidâs theories) â¦ and I wanted to be a scholar like him. As the old saying goes, those who can do, teach. But soon I learned that during Saïdâs career at Columbia, he actually taught Obama! What kind of karma is this? I want to be a teacher because I donât feel comfortable bombing the Middle East. But youâre telling me my student does? Well, maybe becoming a teacher is not that ideal for me after all. (Excerpts from Caomeiâs skits) 25 In this scenario, humour becomes not only a tool of resistance against censorship, as demonstrated in the previous section, but also a channel for political engagement and exposure for both performers and audience members. It is worth noting that not all audience members consider themselves to be political; many come to watch the show simply because it seems fun. In this situation, the performance becomes a venue where people are exposed to not only issues surrounding Chinese politics but also local and international ones. With performersâ thoughts and experiences of engaging in different political activities being shared in their skits, audience members gain potential resources and connect with performers and among themselves, expanding the scale of impact beyond the venue. Echoing the previous section, this phenomenon demonstrates how humour travels across borders with individuals and generates new possibilities for connections and political engagement, disrupting the nationally bounded conceptualization of humour and the dichotomy between the engagement in homeland politics and the integration into the host land. Caomeiâs reflection is shared by Sea, whose skits address political issues in different contexts and seek to blur the dichotomy between liberal democracies and authoritarianism: I know people always said Western democratic countries like Canada are different from China, but there have been moments when I felt right at home. For example, when someone told me about colonialism in Canada, specifically the history of residential schools, they were so considerate and said (with a very heavy tone), âYeah, it is a lot to take in. Many people are unfamiliar with this side of Canadian history.â And I was like, 26 yes, and no? Because, if I remember it correctly, we still have very similar stuff back home, like, right now.10 And, in a class about nationalism, a classmate pulled out an Israeli news channel, and the broadcaster went like (mimicking a male voice), âOur nation is eternal. Our people are eternal. Conspiracies and hostilities against us will not stand.â At that moment my heart was filled with nostalgia. Maybe the scriptwriter was one of our comrades (from the CCP)! (Excerpts from Seaâs skits) âI always found analogies and paradoxes among different political contexts illuminating, especially witnessing whatâs happening in the world today,â Sea comments, âPeople seem to take it for granted that democracy is opposite to authoritarianism, or the United States is the opposite of China. But politics is a spectrum; itâs very easy to slip to the other side. I think paradox and jokes are very effective in pointing this out.â As such, through stand-up comedy, Caomei and Sea connect their experiences of living in China and Canada and channel their thoughts to the audience. In doing so, they challenge dominant polarized narratives of Chinese, Canadian, and international politics, and establish their âimmigrant civic identityâ (Chow & Ren, 2023) which is shaped by, and evolving with, ongoing political circumstances in China, Canada, and internationally. 2.3 Humour as resistance and refusal Building on previous sections, this section highlights how individuals navigate through not only resistance but also the refusal to normalize violence and existing political orders. While the previous 10 Implying internment camps and âvocational schoolsâ for Uyghurs. 27 section demonstrates that stand-up comedy constitutes a form of resistance, humour should be perceived in the framework of not only resistance but also refusal. Among âresistance studiesâ across disciplines, the concept of resistance often presumes oppositional acts (Vinthagen & Johansson, 2013). The emphasis on active opposition, alongside the top-down structure of domination versus resistance, risks romanticizing the oppositional effects of resistance (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Graeber, 2007) and neglecting the agency of the repressed and the ways in which agentive acts can reproduce power relations rather than subvert them (Mahmood, 2005). For individuals living under authoritarian regimes, active opposition is rarely a viable option, and when it is, it often comes at an unbearable cost (Bayat, 2013; Fassin, 2013; Weeden, 1999). In addition, as evidenced by participantsâ experiences with enduring (self-)censorship, authoritarian control and political violence often extend beyond borders, leaving deep psychological imprints which can further limit individualsâ political capacity even after they emigrate (Almasalkhi 2024). The concept of refusal goes beyond outright opposition, allowing performers to navigate the power of authoritarian regimesâ transnational reach; it is rather a kind of non-compliance and non-recognition (A. Simpson, 2007). Although refusal and resistance sometimes overlap, the former is not reducible to the latter (McGranahan, 2016) for it focuses on affirmative pursuit of alternative possibilities out of reality (Weiss, 2016). In Mohawk Interruptus (2014), Simpson documents how Mohawks of Kahnawà :ke claim their sovereignty by refusing to travel on the âgiftâ of settler-colonial governments â American or Canadian passports. Despite tensions and ambiguities, by doing so, they disrupt the settler-colonial orders and challenge the proclaimed fixity of settler-colonial governance. Similarly, in Red Skin, White Masks (2017), Coulthard criticizes the politics of recognition in liberal politics, questioning whether the language of acknowledgment and reconciliation is adequate in addressing the history and ongoing realities of 28 Indigenous dispossession. Instead of seeking liberation through the settlerâs frames which will benefit the settler-colonial order, Coulthard argues that endeavours of decolonization should turn to cultivate âgrounded normativityâ, that is, to turn away from settler-colonial language and seek alternative forms of Indigenous knowledge and practices and to re-cultivate the relationship with land and constituencies (Coulthard, 2017; L. Simpson, 2017). Refusal, as these scholars contend, is to question and disrupt norms of dominance which are proclaimed to be unshakable and take it as the starting point of reimagining alternative futures that transcend orders of domination. Humour can also function as a type of refusal. In fact, this has already been pointed out by Arendt (1970, p. 45), who famously wrote that â[t]he greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.â In her study on Palestiniansâ humour and laughter when encountering colonial authorities â at checkpoints, when arrested, and in front of soldiers â Bhungalia (2013, p. 400) investigates how humour acts as an affective gesture of refusal in that it insists âyour power has no authority over meâ. Humour, under these circumstances, defies the intention of violence, which is to deter and to subjugate; it denies the recognition of power and authority, a necessary condition for the Hegelian master/slave dialectic (Fanon, 1963; 1967). Whatâs more, Bhungalia (2013, p. 388) argues that humour exposes the absurdities under occupation, disrupts the normalized conditions of subjugation, and helps Palestinians to navigate everyday lives. Here, humour cannot be fully captured by resistance, for no outright actions of resistance are employed, nor is it always intentionally oppositional. It is, rather, to borrow Fanonâs (1963) phrasing, to put the authority âout of the picture.â Humour does not necessarily imply subversion but a form of reconfiguration of power, no matter how ephemeral it is. Ridiculing violence and laughter help individuals navigate collective trauma (Lionis, 2016); as Palestinian-American comedian Amer Zahr captures, âIf you can make it funny, it kind of makes it not as damaging to your 29 psyche. That doesnât mean you live with it and accept it, but you find ways to compute it that become effective to youâ (cited in Bhungalia, 2013, p. 394). The politics of refusal is embedded in participantsâ skits and allows performers to compute repression in new ways, as exemplified by Felicity's: One day, a policeman called and asked me to go to their station for a chat about the house I rent. I was nervous, since thereâs a real problem with my place â we often experience water shortage. Maybe the police want to check our water meter11 to see if itâs broken? In fact, I knew exactly why they came to me because I had prepared to organize a community gathering, in memory of a trans friend who took their life recently. Maybe this topic touched their red line. You know, police are so sensitive [in an erotic? tone] that the moment I touched the redline, they just couldnât stand it, insisting that I need to get in... their station for a âchatâ. Not long after we greeted, they asked to see my place. I was like, wow, this is happening so fast â we havenât got the chance to know about one another, and you are asking me to take you home? Of course, I could say no. But the result would be me having a wild and unforgettable night with three super masculine men in the police station. So, I took them home. 11 Check the water meter (cha shui biao æ¥æ°´è¡¨): a Chinese internet slang used as a euphemism for the police unexpectedly showing up at someone's door to investigate or detain them. 30 When we got home, the moment I opened the door, they were shocked â my place was only 10m2, and it was packed. With three men coming in, I almost had to sit on the ceiling. It amused me that they thought the gathering venue was my place â what can I do with twenty people here? A cheek-to-cheek dance party? One of the policemen didnât give up. He rushed in and checked every corner, especially the closet. Maybe he heard of the term âcoming out of the closetâ and thought, the moment he opened the closet, twenty trans people would immediately storm out! (Excerpts from Felicityâs skits) Through bringing up this story in such a mundane way, Felicity underscores the normalization and everydayness of authoritarian violence and at the same time, de-normalizes it. In addition, Felicityâs skits serve as an example of Bakhtinâs (1984) concept of carnivalesque; by using irreverence and sexual innuendo to present the police, which are the representation of authority, the normalized image of the police being serious and powerful is undermined and ridiculed. For Felicity, performing the skits and telling the story in public helps her to process the violent encounter. Although she acknowledges that stand-up comedy will not give complete closure, she finds healing and empowerment in writing about it in skits, and in the collective bursts of laughter during her performance. âThe police wanted to scare me, but I wrote a stand-up comedy instead,â Felicity proudly announced. Through her skits, humour serves to de-normalize political violence and twist the intended deterring effects, constituting an act of refusal. In addition, writing about the encounters and moving to Canada helped Felicity to reconsider what it means to be ânormalâ. As Felicity suggested: âWhen I was in China, I thought it was normal that the police could search my home without notice or warrant; that they could call you and invite you to their station for a âchatâ 31 and you could not say no. But when I told people here about my encounters with the police, they were all shocked. And I realized what Iâve always taken as normal was in fact not normal at all. I hope, through my writing, I can tell myself and fellow emigrants about that. And since Iâm writing skits in English, I wish to tell people here what they have taken for granted was not accessible to people in other parts of the world.â (Interview with Felicity, April 2, 2025) In doing so, Felicity reflects on and de-normalizes not only authoritarian violence in China but also taken-for-granted conditions in Canada. This is also highlighted by Seaâs and Caomeiâs skits, showing that performers do not equate rejecting authoritarianism with subscribing to myths of liberal democracies and settler colonialism. The experiences of living under authoritarian orders give them the vocabulary to grasp the oppression experienced by other marginalized groups in the host society and encourage them to channel their thoughts to different groups of audience and envision how normality should look like beyond different regimesâ repertoires and institutions of justice (Danewid, 2023; Weeden, 2013). 32 Chapter 3: Humour as queer, feminist, and Chinese? This section explores how humour serves as a queer, feminist, and Chinese diasporic interventions to existing scholarship, authoritarianism, and patriarchy. Whereas stand-up comedy used to be straight menâs domain, in recent decades, there has been a boom of queer feminist stand-up comedy and scholarship. The growing body of literature has foregrounded stand-up comedy as a potent site for interrogating power and identity. Building on Butlerâs (1990) theory of gender performativity, which argues that individualsâ modes of behaviour are not pre-determined by biological sex but shaped by social expectations and normative pressure, scholars examine how queer and feminist comedians use humour to articulate personal experiences of discrimination and marginalization as political interventions (Krefting, 2019a; Muñoz, 1999; Wolflink, 2022; Wood, 2016) and subversion against cis-heteronormativity (Bing, 2004; Hennefeld, 2018; Henry et al., 2023; Krefting, 2014). Further expanding this framework, Cheurfa (2019) studies how Palestinian and Egyptian women writers use humorous articulations when they are expected to grieve, constituting what she calls âcomedic resilienceâ which disrupts power dynamics and the simplistic assumptions of Arab womenâs subjugation. Notably, recent studies on queer feminist comedy engage in more nuanced analyses and challenge the romanticized generalization of resistance. Through announcing âquitting stand-up comedyâ in the middle of their performance, Hannah Gadsbyâs Nanette (2018) articulates their personal narratives and struggles of making fun of past traumatic experiences, complicating the discussions of how trauma can be triggered and reproduced in the process of skit-writing and performances. This prompts Lintott (2020) and Krefting (2019b) to theorize the stage as a contested site involving vulnerability and discomfort. In this sense, bourgeoning scholarship addresses how âugly feelingsâ like shame, awkwardness, and exhaustion carry political significance (Moore, 2024) without reducing them to catharsis or subversion (Ortner, 1995). 33 Taken together, these works position queer feminist stand-up comedy as critical political expressions that interrupt realities and sometimes refuse to make audiences comfortable. However, among existing queer and/or feminist scholarship on humour, there is a lack of diasporic perspectives and voices of individuals who have lived under authoritarian regimes. Localizing queer feminist ideas in specific geographical and socio-cultural contexts creates dangerous conceptual gaps which reiterate Western-centrism in existing queer feminist scholarship, reproducing the orientalist assumption that âprogressiveâ queer feminist ideas only exist in âWestern liberal democraciesâ and the settler-colonial white-saviour narrative (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Mahmood, 2004; Puar, 2007). A geographically bounded approach also ignores the very realities of how discourses of queerness and feminism are constituted by transnational flows of ideas, capitals, and people (Allen, 2021; Manalansan, 2003; Rofel, 2007; Williams, 2018) and marginalizes significant contributions from subaltern terrains (Spivak, 1988) and people of colour (Dyrness, 2020; Florvil, 2020; hooks, 1990). Insights from studies on authoritarianism complicates existing Western-centric understandings of the lived realities of women and queer people and sheds light on how political violence and displacement exert an uneven impact on women and queer people, limiting their political and social engagement in homeland and the host land (Diaz et al., 2018; Espiritu & Duong, 2018; Luibhéid & Chávez, 2017; Parreñas, 2001). 3.1 Conceptualizing queer and feminism In this paper, the term queer is used in a double sense. Firstly, it is used as an identity category that stands by itself or acts as a synonym of LGBTQIA+, an umbrella term incorporating people who identify themselves as outside of heterosexual and/or cisgender norms. Secondly, it is an analytical rubric that emphasizes fluidity and ambiguity and âcalls into question the stability of any â¦ categories of 34 identityâ (Somerville, 2014, p. 203). Unlike other essentializing categories, queer denotes nothing universal or unchangeable. In that, queer is not merely a tool of potential liberation but also an identity category that disciplines subjectivity (Foucault, 1978). Queer as an analytical framework underscores agency without disregarding broader contexts; it prompts us to consider how individualsâ experiences are influenced by diverse socio-political conditions, to historicize how the concept itself was developed, and to divert scholarly inquiries to questions of power, intersectionality, colonialism, imperialism, and transformation (Luibhéid & Chávez, 2017). In a similar vein, this thesis articulates feminism through ambiguities, ambivalence, and transformation. Queer feminist scholars and feminist scholars of colour have challenged the idea of a single, unified category of âwomen,â arguing that it often reflects cis-heteronormative and white liberal assumptions about whom feminism is for and what it should look like (hooks, 1981; Lorde, 1984; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981). This subject matter is further complicated by the fact that the implications of the word âfeminismâ are formulated not only by and for women, but also by those who seek to demoralize feminism or endorse certain âgoodâ forms of feminism as acceptable (Ahmed, 2017). In response to the conceptual challenges, Ahmed et al. (2000, pp. 12-13) argue that feminism should not be programmatic, as if there is an object of feminism which can âalways be successfully translated into a final end and outcomeâ; instead, the power of feminist discourse lies in its ability to acknowledge and articulate personal, affective experiences that are grounded in the body, place, and individual narrative. This is not to argue that there is completely no agenda for feminism at all, but that feminist movements are open to questions and reflections on ambivalence occurring alongside the way, rather than assuming that lack of unity and certainty is always detrimental. Emphasizing questions and uncertainties is not to propose division, but to, firstly, acknowledge that experiences of women (in an inclusive sense) 35 and queerness are never reducible to the identities themselves but intersectional with race, gender, and class (Crenshaw, 1991); and secondly, recognize the contribution and voices of marginalized communities in mainstream, Western-centric social movements (Cohen, 1997). Finally, as the following sections will continue to highlight, such a conceptualization enables us to be more open-minded and realistic about the lives of queer people and/or women who are entangled with multi-faceted structures of domination and marginalization. No one is born to be a âgoodâ queer or feminist, and I doubt if one can or should ever be. As previously mentioned, the shameful, imperfect but authentic parts of queer feminist lives carry political significance, and their recognition opens new possibilities for imagination and solidarity. 3.2 Humour as feminist disruption The popularization of stand-up comedy and the intersection of stand-up comedy and feminism in China are recent phenomena. Whereas Chinese forms of comedy like short-plays (xiaopin) or crosstalk (xiangsheng) traditionally exclude women, the growing popularity of stand-up comedy as a new, more casual, and imported genre â which was fuelled by Tencentâs stand-up comedy competition series streamed from 2017 â gives women performers a space to challenge dominant gender-based norms and discrimination in China (Meng & Literat, 2023). In addition, amid an intensifying authoritarian turn and declining birth rates, the Chinese state has reoriented its biopolitical strategy from birth control policies to the promotion of conservative gender divisions. This shift is marked by the simultaneous public celebration of traditional family values and the suppression of feminist movements. With vocal feminists who engaged in public demonstrations being harassed, persecuted and/or exiled since the late 2010s, discussions about feminism have been largely limited to online platforms or very limited offline activities, and many of them have taken a neoliberal, consumerist, or socialist/Maoist form (Wu & Dong, 2019). In 36 this context, the rise of stand-up comedy offers a much-anticipated space not only for women comedians to perform, but also for the circulation of gender-non-conforming and feminist ideas in a comparatively less âthreateningâ public form. Therefore, unlike mainstream Western studies of feminism and feminist humour, analyses of the Chinese context must account for the role of authoritarian politics in shaping both the discourse of feminism and its relationship with humour. Even so, feminism and feminist humour are hugely polarized and contentious topics in China. Yang Li was one of the most well-known women comedian stars who gained fame on a popular show in 2017. She was known for her tender but piercing use of gender satire and irony, having coined the term âaverage yet confident men,â which she used in a skit mocking menâs oversized egos and sense of entitlement and which went extremely viral online (Li & Guo, 2024). Chinese netizens quickly adapted this term and both Yang herself and feminists who love the term faced fierce backlash from many male netizens (Liao, 2024). The example of Yang illustrates how stand-up comedy serves as a tool for gender transgression, elicits popular discussions of gender-based issues, and highlights the contentious nature of feminist topics in China. Here, I argue that the polarization and contention surrounding feminist issues in China â or even the expression of womenâs discontent with misogyny and traditional gender norms â cannot be reduced to patriarchal structures but should be understood within the broader political context of censorship and authoritarianism. Given the constraints of the current political and social environment, feminist discourse in China finds itself adopting less overtly political forms which it disseminates on social media. Moreover, with nearly all public gender-related discussions being confined to online platforms, pre-existing tensions and potential divisions â both within feminist communities and between feminists and their critics â are frequently amplified rather than resolved. 37 In light of exacerbating socio-political conditions, many Chinese feminists move or stay abroad. For them, UniCome provides a space for exposing embedded misogyny, exploitation, and oppression in the Chinese patriarchal society without worrying about being censored or encountering backlash: I was born into a five-generation lineage, with one and only one male heir per generation. Sadly, me, my mom, and my grandma â weâre all women. Total genetic disappointment. My great-great-grandfather had three daughters before finally scoring a son. My great-grandfather did worse; it was after having a total of four daughters â my eldest grandaunt my maternal grandmother my third grandaunt and my fourth grandaunt â that he finally had a son, which is my granduncle. My granduncle was extraordinary. His first shot â boom, a son! I think maybe itâs because he married a Shandongese woman, which breaks our Sichuanese matriarchal curse.12 According to the official definition from the Census Bureau, our family doesnât count as five generations of single heirs. But for my great-grandpa, women are not humans! So the population of our family should be halved and halved and halved and halved and halved and halved. What do we call this? One-child policy in real life! (Excerpts from Jadeâs skits) The selected skits written by Jade, a queer woman and asexual feminist in her late twenties, use humour to expose the deep-rooted patriarchy and gendered biases in Chinese familial and cultural 12 In Chinese popular discourse, stereotypically, men from Shandong are often portrayed as more conservative and patriarchal â the archetypal hyper-masculine men, whereas Sichuanese women are often stereotyped as fierce and outspoken, especially in relationships, owing to some matrilineal customs in nearby ethnic minority regions. 38 contexts. By framing her family as a âfive-generation lineageâ while simultaneously revealing it is largely composed of daughters, she employs sarcasm, ironic contrast, and hyperbolic repetition to highlight the systemic erasure of women, rendering them de facto ânon-humansâ within the logic of patriarchal lineage. Additionally, by attributing her granduncleâs ability to have a son âon the first shotâ to his marriage to a woman from a stereotypically âmasculineâ and âpatriarchalâ region, Jade satirizes the gendered tendency to blame women for failing to produce male heirs, exposing broader ideologies that tie womenâs worth to their reproductive capacity. Through the punchline âone-child policy in real life,â Jade not only critiques how cultural sexism mirrors the operations of state power, but also links individual experience to broader political contexts, revealing how biopolitical governance institutionalizes pre-existing patriarchal orders, exacerbates gendered preferences for sons over daughters, and leads to further marginalization of women. âWhen I write about womenâs lived experiences, I like using dramatic irony and contrast,â Jade says. âBecause honestly, being a Chinese woman sometimes feels like a cruel joke. When you try to explain this stuff to outsiders, it sounds so absurd â like, under the one-child policy, many people will literally abort a baby simply because itâs a girl. But these are, in fact, very real.â 3.3 Humour as queer AND feminist If feminist politics is shaped by limitation, contention and hostility, queer politics faces reminiscent but different circumstances that involve erasure and invisibility. Like their feminist counterparts, queer mobilizations must navigate laws and regulations that target public activism (Bernot & Davis, 2023), surveillance targeting queer organizations, censorship, crackdowns on civic organizations, and repercussions against protesters (Wang et al., 2020). In their literature review of queer organizing in China, Bernot et al. (2024, p. 991) use the term âqueer necropoliticsâ as an extension of the Foucauldian 39 biopolitics to capture the networks of authoritarian controls that dictate which bodies and populations are legitimate and worthy. Moreover, they use the term to capture the paradoxical gray ground designated for queer populations in China, in which queer folks are legally invisible yet sometimes visible on social media platforms, 13 and in which queer existence and organizations are oppressed yet increasingly demoralized and politicized. Under these circumstances, the relationship between feminist and queer mobilizations in China has been a love-hate one (Bao, 2018). Although there have been mutual influences and sometimes alliances among feminist and queer mobilizations, there are often conflicts and divergences. For instance, the issues of surrogacy and tongqi14 often created heated tensions between feminist and gay communities. In addition, while the term TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism) is not always explicitly used in the Chinese context, online radical feminist communities tend to emphasize a biologically essentialized 13 Rather than outright criminalization, homosexuality and gender non-conforming identities are rendered invisible, silenced, and sanctioned in socio-legal terms. Even though on Chinese social media platforms, we can often see queer-coded hashtags, posts, and influencers, only certain forms of queer-coded contents (e.g., fashion, entertainment, personal anecdotes, etc.) are allowed to be circulated, whereas more outright political symbols and content (e.g., the rainbow flag or participation in pride overseas) are often censored. This ambiguous and depoliticized representation of queerness on social media justifies arguments like âChina is not queer-phobicâ, conceals the political and legal silencing of queer populations, and circumscribes their pursuits of rights (see Engebretsen, 2014, p. 14 for more detailed discussions about the socio-legal situation of queers in China). 14 Refers to a heterosexual woman, who usually without knowing, marries a gay man who enters a heterosexual marriage due to persistent heteronormative and familial expectations. 40 definition of womanhood.15 Tensions also exist within queer communities; for instance, gay communities often mobilize around public health issues, while lesbian activism tends to be less visible and more marginalized in both public discourse and advocacy efforts (Bao, 2018; Engebretsen, 2014). When talking about feminist and queer discourses in China, it is important to recognize that authoritarian control does not always rely on overt repression; instead, it can operate by fostering a hostile and divisive environment which limits the possibilities for dialogue and collective engagement. In such conditions, individuals become so preoccupied with personal struggles and survival that they lack the capacity to address broader conflicts or build intersectional solidarity. Therefore, although for consistency, the term queer is used as a synonym for LGBTQIA+ throughout the work, it is necessary to acknowledge the ambiguity and contention of terms like queer and feminism and how other factors like gender, class, and visibility contribute to internal conflicts and hierarchies. UniCome emerged as a queer AND feminist stand-up comedy community in response to the nuanced tensions among queer and/or feminist organizing, and challenges faced by these communities under authoritarianism in China. The choice of stand-up comedy was not coincidental; it was inspired by the sweeping popularity of stand-up shows in China, a short-lived feminist stand-up comedy group in Chengdu, China, and a rising Mandarin-speaking feminist stand-up community in New York (The Economist, 2023). The producer Chilli views humour as a powerful yet less intense tool to counter the 15 TERF discourse in China is a transnationally influenced yet locally embedded phenomenon shaped by the socio-legal erasure and silencing of trans people â conditions that foreclose meaningful dialogue. It is further informed by the lived realities of reproductive exploitation and gender-based discrimination experienced by cis women, alongside state-sanctioned conservatism, anti-Western nationalism, and selective exposure to Western feminist ideologies. 41 state-sanctioned demoralization of feminists and queers in China. As noted above, many audience members do not necessarily identify as queer, feminist, or political; they attend simply to enjoy a stand-up comedy show. As Chilli jokingly puts it, âThe only expectation I have of our audience is that, after watching our show, theyâll realize that feminists and queers are actually not that scary.â More importantly, as an experienced community organizer in both China and abroad, Chilli finds the emphasis on the personal in stand-up comedy particularly meaningful: Stand-up comedy is a form of public expression that requires you to dig into your personal experiences. Thereâs something extraordinary about that, especially in the Chinese context, where deep divisions and conflicts exist among feminist and queer communities. The core of feminism should be about centring the lived experiences of the marginalized. But when public space for discussion is so limited, thereâs no room for real conversations, and you stop seeing real people. It becomes dangerous when feminist discourse is reduced to theories and abstract concepts. (Interview with Chilli, June 10, 2025) Although other diasporic feminist stand-up groups exist and are generally queer-friendly, UniCome is the first to explicitly identify itself as a queer feminist collective. âItâs a public statement,â Chilli explains, âthat not all feminist communities endorse so-called âwomen-onlyâ spaces, especially given the rise of TERF ideologies among Chinese feminists.â For Chilli, adding âqueerâ is not about piling up another fixed label or identity. Rather, it is to talk about the existing conflicts and divisions so as to resolve them, to acknowledge the shared ground between the lived experiences of women and queer peoples under patriarchy and to expand the scope of feminist discourse through a queer lens. In this process, humour functions as a more accessible and less confrontational medium for facilitating dialogue, 42 and it opens space for mockery, discomfort, and self-exposure. âTo have real dialogue, we need to allow certain space for offence and discomfort,â as Chilli eloquently puts it. Moreover, echoing the aforementioned queer feminist critiques, humour offers a powerful critique of identity politics by addressing complex ambiguities of individual experience, which are often ignored or discredited by essentializing identity categories (Fraser, 1997; Moore, 2024). This embrace of imperfection â of seeing one another as human beings who make mistakes, sometimes want to conform, and have their own drawbacks, especially under multi-layered structures of domination â opens space for more nuanced connections, imaginative possibilities, and deeper forms of solidarity. Fangâs skit illustrates how humour serves as a powerful tool to expose and challenge the everyday biases and demoralization experienced by gay people in China. As a gay man in his thirties, Fang draws on his own experience of receiving an HPV (Human Papillomavirus) diagnosis at a Chinese hospital, using comedy to highlight the stigma and misunderstandings that surround queer health issues: After the medical examination, the doctor immediately asked my dad to leave the room, then turned to me and said, dead serious: âThis is HPV. Youâre homosexual, right?â I was shocked and ashamed. My mind flashed to those sketchy street ads: terrifying ulcers and bold black text: âHPV, syphilis, gonorrhoea â imported meds, one shot and cured!â Then I remembered the once-trendy saying, âMen who donât love themselves are like rotten broccoli.â The thought of my certain body part becoming a rotten broccoli almost made me cry. Then came the more âthoroughâ part of the exam. While poking a cotton swab up my ass, the doctor asked, âWhat do you study?â âSociology,â I said, âI study abroad.â He scoffed, âSo this is what you learned from society?â I choked and asked sincerely, 43 âWhat can I do to avoid getting this again?â He replied, âThereâs no cureâ¦ You just need to change this.â I thought, Whatâs âthisâ? Should I drink traditional Chinese medicine?16 Study traditional ethics? Thatâs when I realized: in his eyes, I didnât just catch HPV â I caught homosexuality. From the West. (Excerpts from Fangâs skits) In his skits, Fang blends personal narrative with humour to expose the everyday violence and absurdity of queer life under medical and societal scrutiny in China. The scene begins with an encounter at a hospital, a space often presumed to be neutral but quickly revealed as deeply moralized and heteronormative. The doctorâs question juxtaposed with the removal of the father from the room, highlights how queerness is framed as shameful and unspeakable, something to be diagnosed, hidden, and pathologized. Through humour, Fang shares a moment of vulnerability without positioning himself as a victim. His internal monologue, which is filled with exaggerated references like ârotten broccoliâ and grotesque public health advertisements, transforms stigma into comedy and critiques the stateâs approach to public health, where queer, especially gay bodies, are often rendered as hyper-sexualized, diseased and in need of moral correction (Bao, 2018). Notably, his skits also work to demystify sexually transmitted infections, which are frequently used to stigmatize gay men. The Chinese translation of HPV, for example, takes a starkly literal form â âsharp-pointed moist wartsâ â a term that reinforces fear and revulsion rather than using neutral medical language, which exacerbates broader social stigma surrounding (queer) sexual health. Fangâs final sarcastic inner response deconstructs the authoritarian national and moral logic that 16 A satirical phrase commonly used in Chinese-speaking queer and online communities to mock the idea that queerness is a Western disease that can be âcuredâ by traditional Chinese values and remedies. 44 equates queerness with foreign infiltration, revealing how medical encounters in China can become microcosms of larger ideological battles over nationalism, gender, and sexuality. Ultimately, Fangâs skits exemplify the generative potential of âugly feelingsâ like shame not just in sparking laughter, but also in reclaiming agency, exposing structural violence and biases, and challenging stigmatization faced by queer people in everyday life. Building on producer Chilliâs comments above, skits like Fangâs acts of self-exposure offer audience members, particularly those from other queer communities or non-queer individuals, a glimpse into the often shameful yet deeply authentic experiences of gay life. This flow of meaning is not one-directional. Although these moments and reflections may not be readily accessible or relatable across all groups, they create space for knowing, emotional resonance, and connection. As Fang reflects: Writing stand-up comedy and interacting with the audience helps me reflect on my position as a gay man in feminist and queer mobilizations. When I participated in feminist movements, I always saw my role as supplementary. Sometimes I didnât relate much; I was just there to help. But through stand-up comedy, I began to think about how my sexuality and gender presentation as an âeffeminateâ Shandongese male intersects with my experience and understanding of queerness and feminism. (Interview with Fang, March 16, 2025) In this regard, Fang recalls a time when he collaborated with another performer, in which he impersonates as a privileged middle-class gay man who cannot understand why so many feminists follow a biologically essentializing notion of womanhood and denounces alliance with men of any sorts, including gay men. For Fang, the process of writing the skits is exceptionally difficult, because it touches upon taboos and contentious topics in queer and feminist communities such as how gay men can benefit 45 from gendered inequalities and can, consciously or unconsciously, be indifferent to and reproduce gendered hierarchies. At many points he almost gave up because he was worried about how the audience would react, but under other performersâ encouragement, he put it on stage. Compared to Fangâs other skits which were more lighthearted, this performance received less laughter or applause, but more lingering contemplation. I know by heart that this skit will make many people uncomfortable, for fellow gay men, cis men in queer and feminist mobilizations, and feminists who endorse biological determinist notion of gender alike. When I almost gave up, I recalled Chilli telling me that, the whole point of this skit is to make people feel uncomfortable. Because these problem and divisions do exist within our communities, and we need to talk about them, despite the uneasiness. (Interview with Fang, March 16, 2025) In a related but distinct way, Lisheng, a queer woman in her late twenties, uses humour to dive into the discomfort of âshameâ, highlighting how both queerness and feminism can internalize and reproduce patriarchal gender binaries and normative ideals: I always feel ashamed. Why? Because Iâm a feminist, and people have a lot of expectations for feminists. But if youâre a man? The bar is on the floor. This is what Iâve learned from our fellow male netizens. According to them, if you spend even one cent on a woman, youâre a feminist. I remember there was this influencer whose whole gimmick was pampering women to be his lovers. And immediately, he got roasted by other men online: 46 âYou absolute disgrace to men! You spend money on women? My wife cooks, cleans, takes out the trash, sews, irons, massages me, feeds the dog, and I donât pay her a single cent! And youâ¦ Youâre paying? Youâre ruining the game for the rest of us! You damn feminist!â But these men arenât dumb. Theyâve got strategies. They say, âJust date a feminist. Feminists split the bill.â So back when I was still straight, I was constantly torn. Should I spend menâs money? I wanted to! But thatâll make me a âbad feminist.â Now, Iâve thought it through. If youâre straight â I mean, if you insist on being straight â then be a terrible feminist. Spend menâs money unapologetically. Let them talk! He owes it to women. But then I started dating women. And guess what? A whole new set of shame unlocked. See, the traps of heterosexuality donât go away in sapphic relationships. People start assuming the one whoâs more âmasculineâ should pay the bills. So here I say: if youâre going to be a lesbian, be a bad one. Donât pay off menâs debts. Donât follow their rules. Let them sort out their own damn patriarchy. (Excerpts from Lishengâs skits) Through humorous exaggeration and ironic reversals, Lisheng finds in stand-up comedy a rare space to explore the internalization of cis-heteronormative and patriarchal dynamics within both feminism and queer relationships. âOn mainstream Chinese social media, where queerness is censored and often erased,â she explains, âit feels inappropriate to call out toxicity in queer relationships, as it risks reinforcing harmful stereotypes like âmasc lesbians just want to be men.â But these gendered binaries and hierarchies do exist and are complicated in lesbian relationships, and it's important to address them.â Her comment underscores how comedy enables difficult and often taboo conversations that are overshadowed 47 by both state censorship, public stigmatization, and internal community ambivalence. Whatâs more, Lisheng challenges the contradictory expectations placed on feminists and queer women to maintain a sense of political purity. She critiques how feminist discourse is often arbitrarily appropriated, both by those seeking to delegitimize it and by those attempting to impose narrow ideas of âindependenceâ and âliberationâ (Ahmed et al., 2000). Her inability to conform to either patriarchal conventions or idealized feminist behaviour becomes a source of comic energy, disrupting binary frameworks of oppression and resistance (Mahmood, 2004; Ortner, 1995). Echoing Sedgwickâs (2003) work on how shame contributes to the formation of subjectivity, relationality, and creativity, Lishengâs comedy shows how shame and humour work not by prescribing moral certainties, but by unsettling them and embracing contradiction, ambivalence, and self-irony as tools of queer feminist critique. As Chilli observes, âTalking about shame is powerful because itâs so widespread. None of us is perfect, especially because weâre all entangled in systems of domination. When people feel safe to share shameful pasts like âI used to be a nationalistâ or âI used to date, and still date men,â others are more likely to feel safe about sharing their own stories. In this way, humour opens space for reflection and bonding.â Likewise, performers frequently mentioned scenarios where audience members and other performers reached out to them and shared their thoughts after listening to their skits. For participants, the friendships and connections they have built through UniCome are naturally more intimate and trusted, for they have already shared moments of vulnerability and listening. Comedy, in this sense, becomes a site where political âimpurityâ and personal contradiction are not failings but channels for understanding and openings for recognition, connection, and critical engagement. 48 Chapter 4: Conclusion This thesis has explored how stand-up comedy and humour can exemplify diasporic and queer feminist modes of disrupting existing frameworks around authoritarianism, patriarchy, belonging, and feminist queer politics. In doing so, it has aimed to add another perspective to existing scholarship in migration studies, anthropological studies of humour, and queer feminist performance studies that examine diasporic and displaced communities. My interlocutorsâ skits and reflections reveal that the power of humour should not be perceived as simply rooted in its ability to make others laugh; rather, humour allows people to dive into their uneasy and messy past experiences of living as queer and/or women subjects under authoritarian orders and across borders. The wittiness, candidness, authenticity, and vulnerability embedded in the featured skits carry political significance, for they help individuals to reframe past experiences, cultivate deep connections and a sense of belonging, and to explore alternative possibilities that transcend existing orders of domination. Scale-wise, this study is limited in that it only focuses on a Mandarin-speaking diasporic stand-up comedy community. However, similar initiatives can be found among other diasporic groups, such as regular stand-up shows organized by Ukrainians in Toronto (Clibbon, 2023) and stand-up tours by Palestinian comedians across the UK (Beale, 2023). Human beings have never stopped moving since time immemorial and have never stopped laughing in the face of oppression, displacement, and turmoil. Alongside burgeoning scholarship in migration studies in recent decades, future studies can further explore humour as a transnational phenomenon. Not limited to a specific geographical and socio-cultural context, humour and in this case, its attendant discourses of queerness and feminism travel and transform across borders, producing resilience, empowerment, and new possibilities of solidarity in the process. 49 Due to the scope of this study, it does not fully examine how UniComeâs presence in Canada, a settler-colonial nation-state, shapes membersâ use of humour or their understandings of migration and settler-colonialism. As this study demonstrates, however, UniCome serves as a platform through which not only Chinese political topics but also local and international issues are voiced and circulated, many of which remain marginalized within Chinese communities in Vancouver, as reflected in Caomeiâs and Seaâs remarks and skits. Through humour, members (most of whom are first-generation immigrants) find a channel to engage with the histories of settler-colonialism and to build connections with the struggles of other marginalized groups, including Indigenous peoples and earlier generations of Chinese immigrants, particularly in relation to the gentrification of Vancouverâs Chinatown and advocacy around Downtown Eastside. As this study has repeatedly emphasized, migration is always imbued with uncertainty, and the question of how to build belonging within a contested settler-colonial territory remains an open-ended one for future generations to work on. As the study has shown, the most remarkable potential of humour and stand-up comedy lies in its ambivalence and its more light-hearted form, which allows for the articulation and exchange of ideas that can otherwise be traumatic and contentious. It is in this regard that the participants find stand-up comedy as an effective and creative tool for dialogue, public expression, and the cultivation of deeper forms of connection and solidarity. It is, however, also important to note that humour, as well as discourses of immigration, queerness, feminism, should not be assumed to be always progressive and liberating. Highlighting the ambivalence of humour and identities is not to discredit them, but to recognize the sometimes-messy realities lived by individuals under different orders of domination, and to think about what kinds of transformation and connections are possible out of these realities. As this study, and many other studies of authoritarianism and queer feminism have pointed out, orders of domination are 50 maintained and reproduced through silence, fear and hindering individuals from seeing and having real dialogue with one another. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Anthropology
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Zeweri, Helena
Humour and the making of queer, feminist and diasporic belonging : a study of a Mandarin-speaking stand-up comedy community in Vancouver
Text