Feminism and Comics Studies

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2024) | Viewed by 5908

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of English, Queen's University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada
Interests: comics studies; feminism; graphic novels; feminist theory and politics; queer theory; comics and politics; literary criticism; reproductive justice; disability studies

Special Issue Information

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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Keywords

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

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

23 pages, 16792 KiB  
Article
Badass Mom Art: Motherhood Untold in My Kind of Crazy
by Lorinda Jean Peterson
Humanities 2025, 14(3), 46; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14030046 - 27 Feb 2025
Viewed by 456
Abstract
Graphic memoir and feminist mothering theory are at the heart of my research-creation paper “Badass Mom Art: Motherhood Untold in My Kind of Crazy”, which brings feminist mothering theory into conversation with traumatic mothering stories. The research-creation comprises a series of sequential [...] Read more.
Graphic memoir and feminist mothering theory are at the heart of my research-creation paper “Badass Mom Art: Motherhood Untold in My Kind of Crazy”, which brings feminist mothering theory into conversation with traumatic mothering stories. The research-creation comprises a series of sequential graphic stories from my 2023 memoir My Kind of Crazy and a drawing series, Mothering Myths: (Re)imaginings and (Re)visions. These narratives re-imagine trauma’s impact on my maternal generations and illustrate the feminist shift from the 20th century patriarchal institution of motherhood that creates mothers as powerless and oppressed to 21st century matricentric mothering that empowers mothers through agency, autonomy, authenticity, and authority. Through comic’s conventions of frames, gutters, and the ability to manipulate time, the stories—my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and mine—detail specific traumatic experiences that impact our abilities to mother; they also reveal my perspective on events according to my perceptions and beliefs as an adult creating our stories. These are real stories of mothers unfolding in images and words. The article foregrounds Western patriarchal mothering myths of the ideal mother and the generations of feminist activists and scholars, including Adrienne Rich and Andrea O’Reilly, who have worked to change how society perceives mothers. Feminist poet Adrienne Rich’s seminal text Of Woman Born (1986) differentiates between the idea of motherhood and the concept of mothering; she encourages mothers to be mother outlaws by mothering outside patriarchy’s institution of motherhood’s rules and prescriptions. O’Reilly first questioned why maternity was not understood as a subject position nor theorized as other subject positions regarding the meeting of gendered oppression and resistance in her 2016 text Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice. Rich’s and O’Reilly’s proposed mother-centered practice permeates and is key to my art and critical work. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feminism and Comics Studies)
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22 pages, 4499 KiB  
Article
Woman, Life, Freedom, and the Comics Classroom After Mahsa Amini
by Jane Tolmie
Humanities 2025, 14(2), 35; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020035 - 18 Feb 2025
Viewed by 1063
Abstract
Since the 2022 death of Mahsa Jina Amini in custody of the Guidance Patrol or morality police in Tehran, Iran, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi can also function in the classroom as a comics touching point for human rights discourses around the world and [...] Read more.
Since the 2022 death of Mahsa Jina Amini in custody of the Guidance Patrol or morality police in Tehran, Iran, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi can also function 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 2025, 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, which was inspired by tweets echoing protesters’ calls for change, became an anthem of the uprising and exists in comic art as well as song. 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, Julia Watson, Hillary Chute, Sally Munt, and bell hooks, 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. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feminism and Comics Studies)
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19 pages, 1996 KiB  
Article
Falling Back in Love with Trans-Inclusive Feminism: Canadian Creative Artists Re-Story Death and Choose Transformation
by Devon Harvey
Humanities 2025, 14(1), 4; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010004 - 8 Jan 2025
Viewed by 803
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, personal essays, [...] Read more.
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, personal essays, 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 article 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 and comics studies, 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. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feminism and Comics Studies)
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22 pages, 15197 KiB  
Article
Thrown to the (Were)Wolves: Sisterhood, Vengeance, and Liberal Feminism in Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle’s Squad
by Jessica Caravaggio
Humanities 2025, 14(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14010003 - 8 Jan 2025
Viewed by 1120
Abstract
In Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle’s graphic novel Squad, protagonist Becca and her new friends at Piedmont High are not human adolescents but a pack of werewolves who must kill to stay alive and select teenage boys—“the WORST ones” (70)—as their meal [...] Read more.
In Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle’s graphic novel Squad, protagonist Becca and her new friends at Piedmont High are not human adolescents but a pack of werewolves who must kill to stay alive and select teenage boys—“the WORST ones” (70)—as their meal of choice. The power of the pack’s “monstrous” bodies is a dangerous privilege and responsibility that Squad suggests is often misused to victimize innocents. The book critiques individualistic Western/liberal feminism—an ideology also critiqued by contemporary feminist writers—that encourages women and girls to gain power for themselves and then use it to perpetuate hierarchies of domination. Through an analysis of the figure of the werewolf and fantasies of revenge, this article suggests that both Squad’s narrative and its comic images guide readers toward an understanding of how liberal feminist ideology impedes collective empowerment. This article ultimately argues that Squad can be wielded as a potential feminist consciousness-raising tool for teaching about the ethics of different feminist ideologies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feminism and Comics Studies)
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