Abstract: Bourdieu’s triad of doxa, orthodoxy, and heresy explains consensus and contestation yet leaves undertheorized the middle ground where practice unfolds. I theorize mediodoxy as a third logic of practice and knowledge that neither ratifies doxa nor negates it. Drawing on 23 interviews with Jews and Muslims, I reconstruct sequences in which actors invoke racialized tropes (“Timbuktu,” “pure-blooded”), normalize discriminatory jokes, or acquiesce in exclusion. These cases show symbolic violence operates not only by external imposition but also through the practical compromises of those navigating stigma. Extending Bourdieu’s claim that domination works with the complicity of the dominated, I specify mechanisms of complicity and argue that mediodoxy can crystallize as a mediodoxic habitus—durable, patterned, and formed through recurrent experience of antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism. Mediodoxy refines field theory and advances the sociology of racism and antisemitism by showing inequality is stabilized, legitimated, and rendered ordinary between orthodoxy and heresy.
Abstract: In recent decades, comedy studies have displayed a concern with understanding the power dynamics and cultural norms shaping the ‘marginal’ and ‘mainstream’ in comedy. Rarely, however, have intersecting norms concerning religion, gender and race been taken as a point of departure in this field. Through a qualitative analysis of Creeger’s 2022 set Pray It Forward! and of a semi-structured interview conducted with the comedian in August 2022, this chapter explores precisely these issues. Stand-up comedian Rachel Creeger, whose work is the central focus of this chapter, experiences particular intersecting forms of marginalization as an Orthodox Jewish woman on the normatively secular British comedy circuit. She experiences both covert misogyny and anti-Semitism, and more subtle forms of exclusion. At the same time, the frame of marginality is not always experienced by Creeger as a straightforwardly ‘negative’ thing. Instead, Creeger’s comedy complicates the frame of ‘marginality’ through an emphasis on the advantages of having a ‘unique voice’ and on the relatability of her material. Specifically, a repertoire of popular culture references in Creeger’s material blurs the imagined binary between the categories of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ and implicitly disrupts norms concerning religion and gender entangled with this binary frame.
