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Chapter one Making Connections Building Cultural Citizenship through Charged Humor One of my main contentions is that any analytical consideration of how ideologies of belonging are forged and sustained through cultural forms needs to give comedy a prominent place, since laughing together is one of the most swift, charged and effective routes to a feeling of belonging together. Comedy is a short cut to community. Andy Medhurst, A National Joke: Pop­ u­ lar Comedy and En­ glish Cultural Identities It feels good to belong in our families, workplaces, social scenes, and even our nation, but not everyone does. Legal citizenship reflects a struggle to determine membership in a national community and what that membership means; put another way, citizenship is the answer to the question: “who belongs and what does belonging mean in practice?”1 Citizenship is understood, articulated, and experienced in a variety of ways at different periods in time by different people. A property-­ owning White man in the early nineteenth century had a different experience of citizenship than did an enslaved African American woman. Today, a US naturalized Trinidadian transgender man will have different difficulties to negotiate in our society than a Black Muslim teenage girl. They are both United States citizens, though the way they understand and exercise rights as a citizen will be quite different. When we do not belong, we find other means of creating community. As Andy Medhurst suggests in the quote above, comedy is one way of facilitating community, of reminding us that we matter somehow, somewhere. Fostering community based on shared ethnicity, religious beliefs, and sexual orientation is one means of mitigating experiences of social and po­ liti­ cal exclusion. Cultural practices used in an effort to build cultural unity and as- Making Connections  17 sert rights are part of a larger effort to create cultural citizenship. Draft concept papers about cultural citizenship, written by early members of the Latino Cultural Studies Working Group (LCSWG) in the late 1980s, offer primary sources that lay the groundwork for thorough consideration of how cultural forms can enact cultural citizenship. Cultural citizenship recognizes that while some inhabitants of the US and US territories are not legal citizens, they are, in fact, cultural citizens existing in the daily workings and maintenance of the United States as an economy, society, and culture. Additionally, there are legal citizens who, historically and currently, have not been granted full rights as­ citizens based on age, sexuality, race, religion, and ability. The theory of cultural citizenship—­ more widely disseminated in the book Latino Cultural Citizenship : Claiming Identity, Space and Rights (1998), edited by William Flores and Rena Benmayor—­ has been borrowed and applied by scholars researching smallto large-­ scale mobilizations, such as grassroots initiatives and social movements focused on changing public policy and securing resources and ­ social ser­ vices. Seldom, if at all, have these studies of cultural citizenship ­ addressed pop­ u­ lar cultural forms, though some scholars do cite community cultural development as vital to the project of cultural citizenship. Applying this theoretical construct to an analysis of comedy helps to broaden what constitutes cultural citizenship, incorporating cultural forms like stand-­ up comedy that have been formerly­ dismissed as innocuous, irrelevant, or merely entertaining. People practiced cultural citizenship long before scholars began theorizing and naming it as such. Labor ­ unions or­ ga­ nized strikes in canneries, mills, slaughter­ houses, and mines to secure a living wage, safe working conditions, and respect for their professions; during the Reconstruction Era and after, African Americans lobbied for access to housing, jobs, and education; and first and second wave feminists defied social expectations by demanding suffrage, education, child custody, and property rights for women. With a specific focus on the social and cultural exclusion of Latino/as in the United States, scholars in the 1980s began giving a name to these strategies for seeking economic, social, and po­ liti­ cal equality. Members of the Latino Cultural Studies Working Group found themselves frustrated with the limitations posed by existing theoretical concepts in citizenship studies—­ none of them quite articulated the importance of linking cultural struggle to empowerment and enfranchisement.2 Seeking remedy for these lacunae, they define cultural citizenship as: a pro­ cess manifested in par­ tic­ u­ lar types of cultural practices that embody symbols, discourses, practices, values and identities by which a subordinate community establishes a social and cultural space within which to affirm its collective sense of identity, solidarity, common historical experience and struggle to reclaim their rights. The term cultural...

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