Bryant’s History, Literature, and the Arts Department Chair and Professor Amber Day Ph.D.’s new book, Caught in the Crosshairs: Feminist Comedians and the Culture Wars, will be published July 1 by Indiana University Press. Bryant News chatted with Day to learn more about her latest project and what readers can expect. 

Your work often revolves around popular culture and what it tells us about ourselves. Can you give us an insight into your new book and what’s in store? 

Caught in the Crosshairs is about feminist comedy but, more specifically, the conversation around the work of certain performers: the big public discussions and dustups. The book starts with the observation that there were a number of high-profile cultural controversies where suddenly everybody's weighing in on one joke that a comedian made. I was interested in the fact that there are more of these moments of intense scrutiny around feminist performers in particular. Most of the comedians I focus on do identify as feminist, but, more importantly, are often being identified that way by others, and that's fueling some of the negative and positive interest in their work. So, I examine the conversation around those controversies and use it to look at what we are actually talking about. Sometimes we're talking about jokes, but it's often a proxy for other culture war issues around gender, race, and conceptions of what kind of voice should be heard in a specific context. 

How did you structure your book, and who are some of the comedians highlighted? 

The chapter titles are organized around a particular emotion: ambivalence, ridicule, loathing, revulsion, and hope, and the book begins at the moment when the all-female cast of Ghostbusters is announced and immediately gets piled on. As the movie was coming out, all the online vitriol turned on Leslie Jones, who was the one African-American cast member. I frame it as the first publicly noticeable example of the manosphere coalescing to deliberately trash a particular cultural text or performer. 

From there, I take a look at Samantha Bee on her program, “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.” She got in a lot of trouble for calling Ivanka Trump a bad word, and that happened in quick succession with Michelle Wolf getting roundly critiqued for her routine at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner where she joked about Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Donald Trump, in his first presidency, did not go to that event and sent Sanders instead. It’s a longstanding practice that, at that event, the president and other members of the administration get ribbed a little bit, so that was not out of the ordinary, but people piled on Wolf for going too far. Both controversies interestingly ended up focusing on motherhood and what it means to be a good mother.  

I also write about Hannah Gadsby's special, “Nanette,” which is one of the most talked about standup comedy specials of all time. A lot of the book, I am looking at the way in which the alt-right or manosphere trolls are driving the conversation. In Gadsby’s case, that starts to happen a little bit, but then there's an outpouring of support for what she’s doing, which shuts down that other frame. 

From everything you’ve mentioned so far, I imagine Caught in the Crosshairs called for a variety of research methods to help inform the narrative. Could you give us a peek into what that research process looked like for you? 

So, part of it included a lot of reading in my field and in some of the theory, but it was also watching and re-watching these particular specials, movies, and television shows and deconstructing them. Probably the most time was spent examining news media, magazines, blogs, and website chatter; I also looked at Twitter and the conversation happening there around these particular comedians and events. 

For instance, there's a chapter about Amy Schumer and how a lot of people like her, but how she's also intensely hated by the right wing as well as a number of people on the left who came after her for racial insensitivity. In that chapter, I talked about how, in some ways, despite not nominating herself for this position, she became the stand-in for white feminism; so, everybody who had critiques about that went after her. For that particular chapter, I examined the trash comments underneath her specials on YouTube and other platforms. 

What do you hope readers take away from your book?  

I hope people gain a better understanding of the cultural flashpoints of our time and think about the way in which those often get refracted off women and minorities. The most interesting comedy and the most potent, especially politically, is the stuff that transgresses boundaries. Comedy often does transgress boundaries, but it can also be super volatile and controversial. Comedy as an industry was historically male dominated but there are a lot of women now who are flourishing and breaking into the industry and introducing new frames, new topics, but also generating this enormous backlash; that’s partially because women in comedy are already transgressing boundaries just by being there, and so there's a lot of gatekeeping going on. 

Want to check out Day’s book? Caught in the Crosshairs can be purchased through Indiana University Press, major booksellers, and Amazon.