Woman, it was a joke. Undoing things with words

Abstract

The stereotype of the “feminist killjoy” (AHMED, 2018), of a woman without sense of humour, is embodied in a hackneyed retort which, often, attempts to reinforce this image: “Woman, it was a joke”. With John L. Austin (1962) we would say that with this phrase we are faced with a possible case of undoing things with words. The idea of this text is precisely to analyse this ability to disrupt the effectiveness of the words spoken, resorting to the non-seriousness of what is said. Examining the effects and strategies of undoing what has been done will lead us to dwell in detail on the communicative situation that such a phrase summons up. This will shed light, not only on the role of the sender, but also on two key figures that contribute to understanding this phrase: the aforementioned killjoy, in the role of the receiver, and, what I will call, the illocutionary accomplice or, in other words, the role of the thirdness in the doing and undoing of things with words.