Bodies and Boundaries in Graphic Fiction

Reading Female and Nonbinary Characters

Jessica Baldanzi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000612769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the fictional female bodies of four stylistically distinct comics artists in the United States—Chris Ware, Emil Ferris, Ebony Flowers, and Tillie Walden—whose work has attracted significant attention. These bodies showcase how comics and its unique visual language can both critique and re-envision some of the most challenging social issues of our time.

The characters analyzed in this book illustrate diverse techniques for projecting the complex humanity and "truth" of U.S. women's unruly bodies onto a two-dimensional page. All of the protagonists qualify as "outsider" in some way, whether by gender identity, sexuality, ability, religion, race, class, ethnicity, age, or a combination of these and other categories. These bodily expressions of outsider identity both resist traditional categorization and stereotypes, and sometimes harness and employ those stereotypes for the purposes of parody or social critique. The language of comics affords a unique opportunity for complex representation of these disparate women's bodies, especially when comics artists use the full range of tools at their disposal, such as style, materials, narrative direction, the space of the gutter, and the friction between word and image.

This is an a timely and important intervention suitable for researchers and students in comics studies, gender studies, literature and queer studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Our Bodies, Our Sequential Selves
• 1 Boxing Bodies and Building Stories: The Anatomy of an Everyday Life
• 2 The Horror of the Female Body: Monstrous Subversion in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
• 3 Privacy and Proliferation: “Embodied Thinking” in Hot Comb
• 4 On a Sunbeam: The Promise and Perils of Utopian Bodies, Spaces, and Outer Space
• Epilogue: Future Bodies
• Bibliography
• Index