All the Rebel Women: The rise of the fourth wave of feminism (Guardian Shorts) by Kira Cochrane

Author:Kira Cochrane [Cochrane, Kira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Guardian Books
Published: 2013-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Humour

Nadia Kamil stood in a shop, in front of a display of sandwiches, crying. It was summer 2012, the Olympics had just ended, the Paralympics was yet to start, and in the midst of a collective national comedown, she was feeling terrible about the state of women’s rights.

In the space of a few days, the news had served up one awful story after another. A pregnant teenager in the Dominican Republic had died after her cancer treatment was delayed, apparently due to the country’s ban on abortion. In the US, Republican senate candidate Todd Akin had explained that he was against abortion in all circumstances, including rape, arguing, ‘if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down’. George Galloway had aired his views on the rape and sexual assault allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, introducing the repulsive notion into the national conversation that, ‘not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.’

Kamil was momentarily overwhelmed. ‘It felt like it was on-trend to be misogynist,’ she says. ‘I felt really vulnerable, and horrible, and I broke down in a shop and started crying. I was at work, on my lunch break, and it had all just been building up. I thought, “Oh god, life is terrible as a woman!”’

Although she has worked as a comic for years, Kamil, 29, had never performed her own full-length show – she had always balked slightly at the prospect before. With so few women in comedy, she felt the pressure of representation. While a man can go on stage, perform badly, and be judged on his own terms, if a woman goes on stage and performs badly, she’s often seen as proof that women in general are useless, unfunny, pathetic. ‘I put this pressure on myself,’ she says, ‘of, “I need to be amazing, otherwise I might fuck it up for other women.” That was a real monkey on my back for a long time, because it stopped me writing, it stopped me being creative.’ In January 2013, she decided to write the show anyway.

By the summer, she was performing to acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe, with a set full of feminist ideas and images. She explored whether there could ever be a truly feminist burlesque, for instance, by peeling off eight layers of clothing, to reveal slogans such as ‘pubes are normal’ and ‘equal pay,’ picked out in sequins. The show included a Mary Wollstonecraft puppet, an explanation of the feminist theory of intersectionality – delivered through a vocoder – and badges, handed out at the end, stamped with the words ‘smash the kyriarchy’.

The term kyriarchy was coined in the early 1990s, and describes a hierarchical system broader and more complex than that of patriarchy, including class, race, sexuality, and ability as well as sex. Kamil’s hope was that, after the show, the audience would look up this and any other unfamiliar feminist terms she’d used. Cis was another example, a shortening

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