Full Description
Queer Narratives in Contemporary American Comics: Gutter Smut provides timely cultural criticism of both fiction and nonfiction graphic narratives in order to reveal how social mores related to gender and sexuality have—and haven't—shifted since the turn of the twenty-first century.
Beginning by tracing recurring moral panic over comics from the 1940s to the present day, the book contributes to current controversies about the form, content and audiences of American comics and graphic memoirs. Interpretations of a varied body of cartoonists' work—including Alison Bechdel, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Trung Le Nguyen and Laura Gao—are posited using various lenses drawn from intersectional feminist theory to queered approaches to popular cultural studies. Readers will be prompted to consider how visual rhetoric and textual dialogue and narration operate in tandem to produce, reflect and challenge gender norms, question stereotypes about sexual identity, and resist heteropatriarchal systems.
Queer Narratives in Contemporary American Comics: Gutter Smut serves as an invaluable resource for scholars and students of the visual and literate arts, gender studies, cultural studies, media studies, and other many other disciplines.
Contents
List of figures; Preface; Chapter 1: The Dream of a Common Visual Language: Reading Sex, Gender and Sexuality through Comics Formalism in the Early 21st Century; Chapter 2: "I Just Don't Know How to Explain Myself:" Liminality, Narrative Foreclosure and Censorship in Comics Memoirs by Alison Bechdel and Maia Kobabe; Chapter 3: Illustrated User Manuals for Adolescent Bodies: The Sex Positive Rhetoric of Recent Young Adult Comics for Sexual Health Education; Chapter 4: "Language is a Map:" Transtextuality, Transculturality and Belonging in Coming-Out Narratives by Laura Gao and Trung Le Nguyen; Chapter 5: Caging Father Earth's Unruly Daughters: Critiques of the Carceral State and Abolitionist Feminist Aesthetics in Bitch Planet; Index.
