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- Title
"But I'm a Lady!" Undoing Gender Bending in Contemporary British Radio Comedy.
- Authors
Kennedy, Ellie
- Abstract
The two BBC radio comedies Little Britain and On the Town with the League of Gentlemen present a quirky view of turn-of-the-millennium Britain where gender and sexuality are perpetually in crisis. This paper explores the characters "rubbish transvestite Emily Howard" and Barbara, the pre-operative transsexual cab driver . A theoretical base is provided by Andreas Böhn's "imperative of flexibility", which he posits as a new paradigm for subversive post-modern comedy. This base is supplemented with Judith Butler' s concept of "undoing gender" and Marjorie Garber' s class-focused reading of cross-gendering. Through this combined theoretical lens, I read Barbara' s hyperbolic flexibility and Emily' s hyperbolic inflexibility as comic and subversive devices which expose the crises in gender, class and sexuality at the core of contemporary 'Britishness'.
- Subjects
GENDER bending (Gender expression); RADIO comedies; BRITISH Broadcasting Corp.; HOWARD, Emily; TELEVISION series
- Publication
Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik, 2009, Vol 69, Issue 1, p251
- ISSN
0304-6257
- Publication type
Article