SOURCE: Çaliskan, Sevda. “The Coded Language of Female Quixotism.” Studies in American Humor 3, no. 2 (1995): 23-35.

In the following essay, Çaliskan considers the subversive humor of Female Quixotism.

In her witty article titled “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write” (1972), Joanna Russ, the author of the highly provocative The Female Man, makes a list of very familiar situations or story lines which seem very funny when “the sex of the protagonist (and correspondingly the sex of the other characters)” is changed. Here are a few examples of these odd transformations:

• a. Two strong women battle for supremacy in the early West.
• b. A young girl in Minnesota finds her womanhood by killing a bear.
• c. Alexandra the Great
• d. A young man who unwisely puts success in business before his personal fulfillment loses his masculinity and ends up as a neurotic, lonely eunuch.
• e. A beautiful...