Feminism and Comics Studies

Dear Colleagues,

Feminist studies, always already a (inter)disciplinary challenge, has so much to say around creative forms of resistance, around comics as crisis witnessing, around memoir and self-revelation, around superherodom studies and posthumanism.  In 2023, comics studies is established enough to offer (a few) tenure-track jobs and graduate programs, but is still finding itself in many ways, ways that continue to challenge traditional disciplinarity.  Back in 2010, in “Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics Studies,” Charles Hatfield characterized comics studies as “a nascent academic field of great productivity and promise” (Transatlantica, 1, 2010).  This Special Issue asks us, at this particular time, to bring these interdisciplinary challenges together productively:  What can these fields say and do for one another, to start new critical dialogues about the relevance of comics studies to feminist scholarship, and the relevance of critical feminism(s), to comics studies? Feminism is not a unified body, and just saying so is step 1 towards an acknowledgement of shared “indisciplinarity” with comics studies.  What can or should feminist scholarship be doing with reproductive justice in comic art? With disability studies in comic art? What interventions from Black feminism, Indigenous feminism, transfeminism can be brought into the indiscipline of comics studies?   I turn to bell hooks to bring us together with love and mutual respect: “Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination—imperialism, sexism, racism, classism” (from “Love as the Practice of Freedom”). Feminism can and does fail as a critical tool set, can be imposed where it is not wanted and is not part of the artistic creator’s self-identification.  Where that happens, it needs to be talked about and through, and become part of feminist scholarship’s work towards better criticism and self-awareness.  So this Special Issue is about both doing and undoing, and about love within both feminist scholarship and comics studies.

Dr. Jane Tolmie
Guest Editor

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• comics studies
• comics
• feminist studies
• feminism
• reproductive justice
• (dis)ability
• bodymind
• comics and human rights

Title: Woman, Life, Freedom: resistance through the pedagogy of comics and human rights

Abstract: This started with a lecture called “Say Her Name: Teaching Persepolis after Mahsa Amini.” With better attention to the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, the lecture title now would be “Say Her Name: Teaching Persepolis after Jina Mahsa Amini,” using her Kurdish name as well as her Persian one. Since the 2022 death of Jina Mahsa Amini in custody of the Guidance Patrol or morality police in Tehran, Iran, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi now functions in the classroom as a comics touching point for human rights discourses around the world, and in particular – though not exclusively – those that impact women. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who brought intersectionality to the forefront of cultural and political discourses in 1989, has used the phrase ‘say her name’ to draw attention to the deaths of women and children, especially black women and children, at the hands of law enforcement officers. Chants of “Say her name, Mahsa Amini,” rang among protesters outside Khalifa International Stadium in Qatar ahead of Iran’s first match of the World Cup 2022 against England. Now in 2024, cultural conversations around feminism and creativity as resistance can turn to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran. Shervin Hajipour’s song “Baraye,” meaning “for” in Persian, inspired by tweets echoing protesters’ calls for change, has become an anthem of the uprising. The comics classroom can address the concerns and issues surrounding Amini’s death and the ongoing relevance of Persepolis as a coming-of-age text about living as a woman in Iran. In dialogue with the works of Sidonie Smith, Hillary Chute, Sally Munt, bell hooks, and Lola Olufemi, this piece addresses the pedagogy of human rights through comic art as crisis witnessing. With attention to comics material from two members of the Iranian diaspora, Shabnam Adiban and Farid Vahid, from the 2024 collection Woman, Life, Freedom, put together by Satrapi, this piece navigates potential orientalism and Islamophobia in the Western classroom through engagement with intersectional feminism. Feminist work is justice work, and the classroom must address Olufemi’s reminder that “Feminism is a political project about what could be."

Title: Falling Back in Love with Trans-Inclusive Feminism: Canadian Creative Artists Reject Death and Choose Transformation Through Re-Storying

Abstract: Prevailing political and popular narratives often treat the issue of trans death as an inevitability and reduce complex stories of trans life to their endings. This paper investigates the transformative potential of creative forms of resistance—specifically a selection of Canadian poetry and comics—and how their artistic affordances engage with transfeminism as an approach to narratives of trans existence. Rooted in Canadian author Kai Cheng Thom’s reckoning with the shortcomings of trans-exclusionary feminist thought, and informed by Chinua Achebe’s conceptualization of re-storying, this essay explores how I Hope We Choose Love and Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom, Death Threat by Canadian creatives Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee, and comics from Assigned Male by trans activist and Canadian comic artist Sophie Labelle re-story “necessary” trans death to orient queer death spaces around a trans-for-trans (t4t) praxis of narrativization. Addressing the (inter)disciplinary possibilities of trans-inclusive feminism through Kimberlé Crenshaw, Kata Kyrölä, and Cameron Awkward-Rich, and of comics studies with KC Councilor and Hillary Chute, this article celebrates how these texts disavow and re-story the “Good” Trans Character, who dies to satisfy transmisogynistic ideologies, and theorizes the T4T Dead Trans Character, who dies to reclaim instances of trans death and recodify trans personhood as a site of hope, agency, and self-determination. In their re-storying, these texts recognize the transformative potential of trans existence and echo Thom in their urging of trans-inclusive feminism to renounce narratives of disposability and invest in the dignity of all human life.

Title: Star Portals and Interdimensional Space Travel: America Chavez as Feminist Icon

Abstract: Lesbian and Latinx, America Chavez is the first LGBTQ+ character to star in her own comics series, written by Gabby Rivera and released in 2017 by Marvel Comics. Raised by two lesbian moms, America has superhuman strength, an ability to move at super speeds and punch into different time dimensions. With her gold hoop earrings, wavy brown hair, brown skin, and wearing the red, white, and blue colors of the American flag, America Chavez embodies the intersectionality that typifies American culture, an intersectionality that is assumed and naturalized within the series itself, one that affirms gender and sexual diversity, racial and class multiplicity, and the importance of chosen family. The first comics issue addresses America’s lesbianism directly—her swagger and tomboyishness are key elements of her superheroic strength and sexiness—devoting seven separate panels to the physical flirtatiousness between America and her girlfriend Lisa, panels that are notably absent of any explanation or justification of the relationship. As the series goes on to prove, and as this article will discuss, America Chavez’s queerness is her superheroism; her strength and gender authenticity endear her to fans both in and out of the series. America’s promise to give her enemies “a little of this brown fist” (2018: n.p.) reminds readers of this queer Latinx superhero’s determination to protect American national identity. America Chavez represents an important milestone in queer comics publishing, and in the superhero genre in particular. From the semi-secret closet, LGBTQ+ identities are no longer implied by a set of coded clues that knowing comics readers interpret, but are now central narrative themes and formal foci across all graphic formats, solicited and published with increasing regularity by mainstream comics publishers.

Title: Thrown to the (Were)Wolves: Sisterhood, Vengeance, and Neoliberal Feminism in Maggie Tokuda-Hall's Squad (2021)

Abstract: Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s graphic novel Squad (2021), illustrated by Lisa Sterle, reinterprets the school story of Mean Girls (2004) as paranormal YA fiction, imagining protagonist Becca and her new friends at Piedmont High not as human adolescents, but as a pack of werewolves who must kill to stay alive, and select teenage boys— “the WORST ones” (70)—as their meal of choice. The fractured subjectivity of these young girls—a common theme of werewolf fiction (Pulliam, 2012; Purdue, 2016) and posthuman YA fiction (Flanagan, 2011)—is reflected not only in Tokuda-Hall’s writing but also in Sterle’s artistic style. Becca and her friends are drawn outside of and in-between comic panels as Sterle strategically makes use of “the limbo of the gutter” (McCloud 66) to represent their uncontained bodies without sacrificing the “firm, head-on perspective” that Will Eisner, in Comics and Sequential Art (1985), claims is necessary of speculative comic fiction. The revenge fantasy that Becca and her friends enact quickly becomes confused when innocent boys begin being targeted and alpha Arianna’s vicious dominance causes the “sisterhood” (187) of the pack to fall apart. Revenge narratives like Squad, that are always failed narratives because of their satisfaction/dissatisfaction contradictions (Haen and Weber, 2009), become more complex when they investigate vengeance as a gendered experience (Yoshimura and Boon, 2023). The power of the pack’s “monstrous” bodies is a dangerous privilege and responsibility that Squad suggests is misused to victimize and prey upon those who would or might victimize and prey upon others; the book critiques individualistic, Western feminism that encourages women and girls to gain power for themselves and then use it to perpetuate the “ideology of domination” (hooks, 1984) that patriarchal societies are built upon. The actions of the wealthy Arianna, whose father “practically owns all of Emeryville” (28), and her willing peers are reminiscent of Lola Olufemi’s claim in Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020) that “solidarity is impeded by…a refusal to recognize that women can be perpetrators of structural violence too” (142). The novel provides its readers with the satisfaction of revenge but reveals the undesirable nature of this role-reversal fantasy when Becca ultimately abandons her restrictive "pack" to find joy and freedom in queer love. Squad therefore models ways in which women and girls in positions of power can reject heteropatriarchal ideologies of hierarchy and domination in order to move towards new ideologies of peace, justice, and equality.

Title: Matri-centric Feminism, Comics and Story: Mothers Tell It Like It Is

Abstract: Feminist activist-scholar Andrea O'Reilly first questioned why maternity was not understood as a subject position nor theorized as other subject positions regarding the intersectionality of gendered oppression and resistance (O'Reilly, 2016). Over the past 20 years, O'Reilly has championed the maternal as worthy of academic study, focusing on matri-centric or mother-centered feminism, and on the development of motherhood studies as a field. Within comics studies, women's graphic memoir provides accessible spaces for addressing and pushing back against maternal oppression and male-centred norms in comic art. Hilary Chute argues that "[e]mbodiment in comics may be read as a kind of compensation for lost bodies, for lost histories. Comics resurrects, materializes" (Chute, 2011, p.112). This embodied compensation underscores the transformative power of comics. By embodying mothers' experiences, comics render them visible and redefine mothering experiences from mothers' perspectives, thereby replacing traditional male-defined motherhood. This article explores the transformative potential of maternal embodiment; it applies O'Reilly's matri-centric feminist theories to a comparison of mothers' stories in Alison Bechdel's comic drama Are You My Mother? and in my own graphic memoir My Kind of Crazy, to discover how the theories apply to mothers in popular culture. Using comics theory and criticism, this piece considers comic texts as works of art and of cultural criticism, accounting for each author's subject position and use of comic tools. While Bechdel writes about her mother from a self-proclaimed not-having-kids perspective, I write about three generations of mothers from a mother's perspective. This piece examines how these different experiential positions and choices impact the construction of motherhood stories in the texts, and how they enrich and complicate comparative work. According to Alana Jelinek, art's power is in recognizing the operation of power within us, which is expressed in our agency, outwardly as stories told (Jelinek, 2013, pp. 11-12). In its complex mixture of life, theory, and art, the comic story authenticates mothers' experiences and makes space for maternal histories. Matri-centric feminism lives in mothers' stories. These stories are often disjointed and messy, searching for voices and places. I examine this messiness in the pages of comics and graphic memoirs, including both text and images in my own critical work as an activist-scholar.

Title: Theorizing Graphic Embodiments: A Feminist Perspective

Abstract: This article extends the work of an edited volume entitled Graphic Embodiments (Leuven), which collected essays from scholars in various national settings examining comics that in some way depicted embodiment as a theoretical, experiential, or aesthetic construct. The notion of graphic embodiment arose from questions about what it means to have or inhabit a body and the ways those meanings can be depicted in what theorist Thierry Groensteen called ‘the comic art.’ Theories of graphic embodiment are invested in challenging several overlapping binaries: author/text; reader/creator; materialist/social constructivist; visual/textual; subjectivity/corporeality; theory/application; representation/icon; formalism/politics; self/text. And these binaries can play out in many different disciplinary contexts. For reference, Susan Squier linked Graphic Medicine with several scholarly strains and themes, including women’s studies, disability studies, and medical humanities. Each of these disciplines embraces feminist methodologies. More recently, Judith Butler saw feminism, particularly since the mid-twentieth century, as "a highly contested field, with many paradigms that are always clashing or blending in some interesting and creative ways" (2024, 59). Modern and postmodern feminist theorizations of embodiment exemplify Butler's clashing-and-blending contestations, variously and simultaneously attending to the body as material and experiential, as object of heteropatriarchal hierarchies and resistant subject, as politicized and co-constructed. These themes play out variously in graphic narratives, which, as theorists like Hillary Chute and Hannah Miodrag point out, allow for depictions that transcend language. This essay's approach to graphic feminist embodiment is indebted to and extends the dual-lens approach in Graphic Embodiments, which was located at the intersection of health humanities and comics studies and touched on, but did not center, considerations of feminism. We will lay out some of the theoretical considerations that inform studies of embodiment more generally, then examine several graphic texts by artists like Tillie Walden and Élodie Durand that exemplify feminist theories of embodiment, with particular attention to the creative relationships of authors/artists, characters, and readers, as they co-construct embodied narratives. The combination of fantastic and more verisimilitudinous texts will allow us to consider the vast scope of graphic embodiment as well as the power of feminist theory within this intellectual and aesthetic space.