The Origins, Migrations, and Queer Imaginations of Global Women’s Comics Cultures

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Gutiérrez Fuentes, Camila
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 05, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Scott Smith, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Matthew Marr, Outside Unit & Field Member
Jonathan Abel, Major Field Member
Charlotte Eubanks, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Charlotte Eubanks, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- comics
graphic novel
feminism
visual culture
Shōjo
aesthetics
women's studies
Japanese literature
manga
historieta
Boys Love
BL
comix
girls
phenomenology
illustration
lyrical image
少女
漫画
マンガ
queer
LGBT - Abstract:
- In The Origins, Migrations, and Queer Imaginations of Global Women’s Comics Cultures, I investigate the unique aesthetic devices developed in women’s comics and demonstrate that these devices conceal a tactical subversion of sexuality and gender roles. By women’s comics, I mean comics marketed to female readers, and mostly drawn by women authors. I show how these comics disguise their treatment of nonnormative desires and identities by using nonlinear and allusive aesthetics. Such aesthetic devices are crucial for their circulation in mainstream media, where critiques of normativity are otherwise unwelcomed. Thus, my dissertation challenges the formalist foundations of comics studies that overemphasize the linear and sequential; identifies new styles and techniques developed in women’s and girls’ print culture; and expands the criteria by which to gauge feminist and queer subversion. My methodology puts formal analysis at the backbone of a new history of women’s comics, broadening what counts as “comics” and increasing the number of women in the medium’s early history. In the first two chapters, I trace a lineage of women artists since the birth of modern comics, from the 1890s until the present. I study the works of Rose O’Neill as the first woman to publish a comic in the United States, and situate her as a founding mother of comic art broadly speaking. Visualizing her artistic legacy, I demystify the 1970s feminist underground comix as the origins of women’s comics. Beyond the United States, I study the French magazine Ah! Nana and the Chilean magazine Brígida as examples of comics anthologies that pursue feminist pedagogical missions. In subsequent chapters, I develop a phenomenology of Japanese girlhood to describe girls’ subtle tactics of resistance to Western compulsory heterosexuality, and illustrate how these tactics manifest in girls’ visual media, particularly in the genre known as Boys Love (BL). Studying the migration and adaptation of BL aesthetics from Japan to Latin America, I demonstrate the continuation and global conformation of women’s comics culture.