Laughing at the Law: When Resistance is Misread as Politeness

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 143):

Other examples of stakes-lowering use of laughter token emoji include (53) – (55).

(53) @user I’m not going to lie... the thought crossed my mind. And then the crushing #momguilt caught up with me. 😂 [response to a post about a ‘kid-free’ flight]

(54) I had #momguilt, so here we are again with #2. Not that I minded eating more ice cream. 😂…

(55) What a good idea- #momguilt is real I know and everyone feeds their kids cornflakes off the floor sometimes 🤣 But keep this handy for when you have a moment of inspiration..[images of food with the overlaid caption ‘5 Homemade Alternatives To The Worst Processed Snacks For Kids’]

These posts lower the stakes of potentially community norm-violating activities – flying without your kids, eating too much ice-cream, and letting your children eat breakfast cereal off the floor.

ChatGPT Comments:

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna’s treatment of “stakes-lowering” humour in the #momguilt corpus exemplifies a pattern that runs throughout their chapter: they register interpersonal adjustments with extraordinary technical precision, yet remain blind to the ideological grammar within which those adjustments make sense.

Here, emoji such as 😂 and 🤣 are said to “lower the stakes” of “community norm-violating activities” — travelling without children, indulging in ice-cream, or letting kids eat from the floor. The laughter token, we’re told, “softens” transgression, “defers” evaluation, or “mitigates” guilt. On this view, humour functions as a pressure valve: the mother violates a norm, but laughter reabsorbs the disturbance into the moral order.

What the authors fail to see is that this moral order is not a neutral background — it is the object of critique within the discourse they are analysing. The acts they describe as “norm violations” are not genuine infractions of a shared ethic but gestures that expose the absurdity of that ethic. When a mother jokes about “eating ice cream again because #momguilt,” she isn’t apologising for her pleasure; she’s mocking the demand that she feel guilty for it. The laughter isn’t a softening — it’s a crack in the symbolic law.

By framing humour as an interpersonal resource rather than a semiotic act, the authors reduce it to an adjustment of affect (“lowering stakes”) rather than recognising its role in reconstruing value itself. This is an analytic reduction: meaning is collapsed into attitude, critique into emotion. The “shared values” invoked are treated as if they were descriptively real — a consensus to be navigated — rather than ideologically produced norms sustained by repetition and guilt.

The result is that what might be read as an act of symbolic resistance — a refusal to inhabit the confessional fantasy of perfect motherhood — is instead classified as a moment of compliance, a polite recalibration of tone. Laughter becomes a sign of fragility rather than a resource of freedom.

In the end, this is not a misreading of emoji. It’s a misreading of discourse itself. To laugh in the face of #momguilt is not to lower the stakes; it is to expose that the stakes were never real to begin with — that the so-called “law” of motherhood is already a joke.