by Morgan Podraza
French Comics Poster
During the weekend of 28–29 February 2020, scholars from France, Belgium, the United States and the United Kingdom came together for “Drawing Gender: Women and French-language Comics,” a symposium presented and sponsored by the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in partnership with the Department of French and Italian at the Ohio State University. Framed by the events surrounding the 2016 Angoulême International Comics Festival in which the nominations for the Grand Prix included all men and happening in coordination with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum’s exhibit “Ladies First: A Century of Women’s Innovations in Comics and Cartoon Art,” the symposium was dedicated to the representation of and contributions by women in comics within the Francophone world. Thus, central discussions during the symposium were concerned with not only bringing the work of women to the foreground but also calling attention to the ways that women’s experiences and identities are conveyed through such work. Importantly, these conversations also highlighted and engaged with artists and works that expanded beyond the boundaries of any one identity—including a range of languages; nationalities; sexual and gender identities; and social and cultural backgrounds—in order to further emphasize the incredible contributions of creators who have not been historically canonized.
Read the rest of this entry »
Like this:
Like Loading...
Tags: Abir Gasmi, abortion, Ah! Nana, Alain Frappier, Alexis Horellou, Angouleme, Anjela, Aude Mermilliod, Aya de Yopougon, Aya of Yop City, Émilie Plateau, bande dessinée, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Brigande! Marion du Faouët: Vie amours et mort, Canada, Catherine Muller, Cham, Christelle Le Guen, Colored: The Unsung Life of Claudette Colvin, colourists, Désirée Frappier, Delphine Le Lay, Des salopes et des anges, Elyon’s, feminism, FIBD, Florence Cestac, France, Francophone comics, Gender, gendered violence, Gustave Doré, Hshouma, Il fallait que je vous le dise, Jean-Louis Bocquet, Josephine Baker, Julie Delporte, Kiki de Montparnasse, La Vie d’Ébène Duta, Laëtitia Rouxel, Le Choix, Lebanon, Leila Slimani, Lena Merhej, Marguerite Abouet, Martin Winckler, Moi aussi je voulais l’emporter, Moomins, Morocco, Nicole Claveloux, Noire: La Vie méconnue de Claudette Colvin, Nora Habaieb, Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury, Ohio State University, Okapi, Olympe de Gouges, parenthood, Paroles d’honneur, Plogoff, Rodolphe Töpffer, Roland Michon, Samandal Collective, sex, Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women's Intimate Lives in the Arab World, Sexe et mensonges: La Vie sexuelle au Maroc, sexuality, Studios Hergé, The Diary of Ebene Duta, This Woman’s Work, Tonino Benacquista, Tove Jansson, Women, Zainab Fasiki
By Whitney Hunt
New Racism Ideology In the USA
Whiteness is an enduring construct of privilege and power that systematically shapes and maintains racial inequality, resulting in a hierarchal system of oppression toward people of color (Feagin & Elias 2013). Systematic racism requires generations of people reproducing racist institutions and the white racial framings that support them (Feagin 2013). According to Feagin (2013), the white racial frame is a broad concept encompassing racist practices, imagery and discourse throughout US society shaped by and for the primary benefit of individuals considered white by society. In all eras of American history, manifestations of racism contain the ideological underpinning that justifies racial inequality. Moreover, the societal grip of white racial framing underscores the gross reality that America’s racist foundations are regularly unacknowledged (Feagin 2014; Bonilla-Silva 2017).
Read the rest of this entry »
Like this:
Like Loading...
Tags: adaptation, Black Panther, blackness, Captain Marvel, Colorblindness, DC, fandom, film, Jim Crow laws, Marvel, New racism, origin story, Race/ethnicity, racism, superheroes, USA, White racial frame, whiteness, Women
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Like this:
Like Loading...
Tags: autobiography, Bangladesh, charity projects, digital comics, Gender, graphic lives, migration, UK, Women
By Charlotte Johanne Fabricius
How can one queer a comics genre – especially one rooted in patriarchal tradition, rife with male gaze and stereotypical gender roles? I consider ‘queering’ to be not only an inclusion of nonnormative gender and/or sexual identities, but a broader strategy of ‘making strange’[i]. Furthermore, I consider the comics medium to be an especially interesting site in which to investigate such ‘strangeness.’ This idea has previously been offered by, amongst other, Ramzi Fawaz, who, in The New Mutants (2016), draws upon queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s idea of queerness as “gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances”, which manifest themselves as “formal gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances of comic book visuality.”[ii] I speak of queering as not only a ‘making unfamiliar’, but also of ‘making possible’ different futures and logics than presented in traditional version of a genre. In the following, I investigate one such attempt, the comic Et Knald Til (Another Bang), which has been characterised by publishers as an ‘erotic Western’.
Et Knald Til[iii] is written and drawn by Rikke Villadsen, published in 2014 by the Danish Publishing House Aben Maler, and nominated for a Ping Prize for Best Danish Comic Book in 2014. It tells the story of a quintessential Western town, inhabited by cowboys and loose women. An outlaw with a price on his head comes to town, kills the men who try to stand in his way, solicits a prostitute – who explodes after their intercourse – and has a drink at the saloon before retiring to a room in the same establishment. Parallel to these goings-on is the story of a young woman in the town who dreams of being a man, so she can leave the town to go adventuring. When the outlaw arrives, she steals his horse and the clothes of one of his victims and sets out. When she starts menstruating, however, the horse recognises her sex and throws her off, leaving her to an uncertain fate. The story concludes with the outlaw waking up in his room only to discover that he has been transformed into a woman identical to the one whose story the reader has been following.
Read the rest of this entry »
Like this:
Like Loading...
Tags: Danish Comics, Denmark, Gender, Queer Comics, Sexual Violence, violence, Western Comics
In the folded concertina pages of their book Correspondences (2013), artist Bernice Eisenstein and writer Anne Michaels have collaborated to adapt and put to use a multifaceted temporal dimension inherent in the medium of comics. Michaels and Eisenstein explore the potential that comics have to interrupt processes of consumption through phenomenal engagements with image, text, narrative and temporality. (Smith 2013) Correspondences changes through reading, offering new connections and configurations, made possible by the choice of directions in which the book can be read, and the page arrangements chosen by the reader upon any particular visit. The book opens as an accordion, the edge of each page attached to another. Read it this way, it is a poem. Read it a different way to look at Eisenstein’s portraits. When arranged conventionally, they are accompanied by a text on the facing page. As voices in a gallery of conversations, situated in the shadow of the Holocaust, Eisenstein’s portraits show us the faces of connected figures, from Paul Celan to Nelly Sachs, while the fragmented text of the poem sets up associations and relationships across time. There are echoes of the image/text combinations of Eisenstein’s previous graphic novel I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006), which prodded the boundaries of the medium, resisting a more conventional approach to graphic memoir. Miriam Harris describes how Eisenstein illuminated “a vanished world of family members, shtetl culture, and Jewish intellectual inquiry and art, to identify what had been lost.” (2008: 132) Harris points out that “the union of words and images” (2008: 141) enables a reanimating of the dead through yoking together past and present in the corporeal form of the graphic novel. Correspondences performs similarly, but with an even greater sense of corporeal engagement, and moves even further away from standard image/text relations as found in comics.
Read the rest of this entry »
Like this:
Like Loading...
Tags: anti-Semitism, Auschwitz, Bernice Eisenstein, Canada, Correspondences, Griselda Pollock, Holocaust, I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, image-text, kinship, linearity, mental health, Russian revolution, Shoah, Stalinism, trauma, Virtual Feminist Museum
Comics Forum 