Women's Studies Colloquium Series (Spring 2009)
January 30 (Friday) 12:30pm-1:30pm, Saunders 541
Riding Astride: Self-Representation in Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West
By Kristin M. McAndrews (Department of English, UHM)
Abstract
In “Riding Astride: Self Representation in Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West,” I will discuss the way in which female identity emerges in a collection of stories I gathered from women who work with horses in Winthrop, Washington, a legally mandated Western theme town. To understand the complex cultural dynamics of these women and the humor they employ in storytelling, I found it necessary to commit myself to this geographic location in order to begin comprehend humor and gender in the American West. I also discovered the need to include my own experience, analyzing my off-centered relationship with the women I interviewed and the community I researched. What resulted from my work was another way in which to consider scholarship of women’s narratives.
Speaker bio: Kristin M. McAndrews is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. She works with folklore, oral narratives, auto/biography, humor, tourist and gender studies and culture and cuisine. Most recently, she has researched on the 1850 visits to Paris by Lot Kamehameha and Alexander Liholiho. Working at Bishop Museum and the National Library of France in Paris, she is looking at the ways in which these future rulers of Hawai`i enter and exit the discourse of the Grand Tour, a traditional narrative of upper class European young men.
One of the distinctive aspects of Kristin's analysis is that she watches for humor as expressed by ordinary women going about their normal lives. She isn't analyzing women who would call themselves comics or humorists, but women in a particular (non-traditional) job category who use humor to navigate their relations with male co-workers and male and female customers. Interesting!
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