The conference topic Spaces Between – Gender, Diversity and Identity in Comics will draw our attention to the nexus between the medium of comics and categories of difference and identity such as gender, dis/ability, age, and ethnicity, in order to open and deepen an interdisciplinary conversation between comics studies and intersectional identity studies within the international comics studies community. In this respect, the 13th annual conference of the German Society for Comics Studies will not only contribute to the disclosure of exclusions, power structures and (hetero)normative allocations in comics, but will also critically analyse their socio‐political and communicative forms of (re)production.

Potential topics for contributions may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• constructions of gender in comics

• the interplay of gender and genre in comics
• conceptions of identity and their (de)construction in comics
• intersectionality and comics
• the (re)production and constitution of difference and power structures in comics
• manifestations of heteronormative structures and allocations in comics
• mechanisms of hegemonic exclusion(s) in comics
• queerness and comics
• historic dimensions of identities in comics
• diversity and normalisation processes in comics
• race, class and ethnic stereotypes in comics
• comics and postcolonial studies
• body images in comics
• representations of dis/ability in comics
• the interrelation of comics, health and corporeality in the realm of graphic medicine
• economies of difference: gender, identity and diversity on the (international) comics market

• spaces between, centres and peripheries: transnationality and diversity in comics culture

See the PDF here for more information.