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Author Archives: Annick Pellegrin

CfP: Spaces Between – Gender, Diversity and Identity in Comics (ComFor 2018, Cologne)

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.

 
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Posted by on 2018/03/15 in Gender, General

 

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The Bi-Monthly ComFor Update for February 2018

By Lukas R. A. Wilde

It might be a little late to open the 2018 installments of our column with a “happy new year”… but nevertheless: happy new year! As usual, ComFor‘s 2018 started off with our edited lists of international comic book reading recommendations from some of our members. This time around, the participation was exceptionally high, with more than a dozen seasoned scholars, junior researchers and prolific journalists involved.

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Posted by on 2018/02/27 in ComFor Updates

 

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[SIC!] 2018 – Call for Participation

[SIC!] invites graduate and postgraduate students from Art History, Classics, Comics Studies, Communication, Cultural Studies, Dance, English, Film, German, Japanese Literature, History, Literary Studies, Media, Music, Performance, Sound, Theatre, and related fields to apply for this international interdisciplinary program. (All sessions will be conducted in English.) Participants and faculty of [sic!] 2018 will explore perspectives on the topic Construction Sites through three themed seminars:

  • Comics & Visual Narration
  • Sound
  • Theatre Historiography

 

See the PDF for more information.

 
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Posted by on 2018/02/23 in General

 

The Bi-Monthly ComFor Update for December 2017

by Stephan Packard

 

For comics studies in the German speaking parts of the world, the last two months of this year were dominated by two major conferences.

On the one hand, the annual ComFor conference took place in early December. Hosted for the first time at Bonn University, the conference focused on Comics and their Popularity. With this topic, organisers Joachim Trinkwitz and Rolf Lohse brought the continuously expanding discussion in the German Society for Comics Studies back to some aspects that had almost been neglected in several years of research, as the discipline had moved towards perspectives on advanced, avant-garde and aesthetically unique comics. This year returned our attention to the art form as a decisively popular genre and thus revisited questions of seriality, popularity, ideology and culture industry. Beginning with the by now traditional open workshop for planned and ongoing research, the conference then moved on to discussing practices of identity, political and ideological aspects, discourses of cultural legitimacy, facets of authorship and finally the concept of the popular itself. In their keynote lectures, Julia Round (Bournemouth) and Martin Lund (Växjo/New York) discussed canonicity and aestheticism in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and the popular propaganda of Jack T. Chick’s ‘chick tracts’ respectively.

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Posted by on 2017/12/25 in ComFor Updates

 

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Bangladeshi Women Creating Comics

by Sarah McNicol

Comics are, of course, found in many cultures, from Japanese manga and Chinese manhua to South and Central American historietas, and Filipino komiks that draw on traditional folklore as well as elements of mainstream US comics. Moreover, it has been argued that comic books “have always been attuned to the experiences of immigrant Others” (Davis-McElligatt, 2010: 137). Graphic narratives have long played a crucial role in representing and constructing immigrant subjects and the immigrant experience. Today, several of the most widely known graphic novels address issues of migration including Chris Ware’s (2001) Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Shaun Tan’s wordless graphic novel (2007) The Arrival. The latter is often said to depict a universal story of migration, telling “not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story” (Yang, 2007). Nevertheless, it is explicitly the story of a man’s migration as he leaves his wife and daughter behind to make a better life in a new land. At the end of his struggles, the man reunites with his family who, it would appear, settle seamlessly into their new life without experiencing any of the hardships he has endured. Discussing literature more broadly, Pavlenko (2001: 220) argues, “immigrant women’s stories were continuously ignored by the literary establishment” despite the fact that female migrant life writing often explores different themes from those of traditional male autobiographies.

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