New Strategies of Public Engagement in Social Movements: Feminist Disability Activists Performing Stand-Up Comedy

In recent years, much scholarly work on the ways to read progressiveness in the performance of Indian stand-up comedy has emerged (Gogoi & Sarma, Politics of performance and performance of politics: Analysing stand-up comedy in the Indian context. In S. Perera & D. N. Pathak (Eds.), Humour and the performance of power in South Asia: Anxiety, laughter and politics in unstable times (pp. 156–177) Routledge India, 2022; James, Feminist Media Studies, 22, 831–847, 2020; Paul, Contemporary South Asia, 25, 121–135, 2017; Shivaprasad, Asserting cultural citizenship through situated comedy: Female comedians in India. In R. Bhargava & R. Chilana (Eds.), Punching up in stand-up comedy: Speaking truth to power (pp. 149–169) Routledge India, 2022). This scholarship highlights the largely performative nature of political engagement as significant gaps exist in the way they address intersectionalities. Apart from personal preferences, the lack of such socially aware comedy has been attributed to sociocultural and economic disparities preventing comedians from actively taking up the role of a social commentator. In this chapter, I look at ways in which comedy has in fact been used by activists themselves to speak for a social cause. I look at feminist activists and their public engagement on issues related to disability through stand-up comedy. I try to understand the registers of intersection between activism and comedy. I examine the ecosystems of feminist activism as well as stand-up comedy that allow for the space to experiment with an amalgamation of the two by the performers. In this sense, this chapter looks to broaden understandings of how disability activism and stand-up could mutually benefit from each other for more effective public engagement. For this purpose, I explore the work of feminist disability activists as they actively attempt to dispel myths and misconceptions around disability in India using comedy. Is it possible to look at stand-up comedy as a liminal space between entertainment and activism? What are the conditions that need to prevail in order to make stand-up comedy more conducive to activist material or to encourage more activists to use stand-up comedy as well? I analyse their personal interviews as well as publicly available digital comedy content to understand their brand of activism that merges stand-up comedy and human rights activism.