Reclaiming Spaces from the Streets to the Gutter: Sketching Feminisms in Contemporary Arab Graphic Narratives
Chatta investigates how recent Arab graphic narratives challenge patriarchy and re-negotiate the marginalisation of minority voices.
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Welcome to MAI 10: Feminist Discourse in Comics & Graphic Novels
Dearest MAI Readers,
Welcome to our first issue of 2023. It is the tenth time we have presented you with a book-size collection of critical and creative articles!
Five years have passed since we started MAI, so let us take this opportunity to celebrate all our contributors, editors, peer reviewers and, most of all, You, Our Readers. This humble feminist initiative, which first gestated in 2018, would never be as globally successful as it is now without your continuous support. To say we are eternally grateful for your visits to our website and engagement with our authors’ work would be an understatement. You are at the heart of MAI, and we hope to serve you for many years to come. ‘Thank you’ from the bottom of our hearts.
This issue shines the spotlight on feminist discourse in comics and graphic novels. As a medium, comics exist in a liminal space between literature and visual art. They tell stories that tend to unfold within the tension between words—or even lack thereof—and pictures. Unlike film or television, they allow us to follow their narratives at our chosen speed. Some argue that comics are the most versatile media because they represent the broadest of churches, from charcoal sketches to watercolour paintings, from newspaper strips and satirical cartoons to prestige hardback volumes (and all points in between).
Importantly, comics and graphic novels by female practitioners that approach themes of identity and belonging from a feminist or LGBTQ+ standpoint are central to the current resurgence of the medium. Whether fiction or autobiography, and across a wide range of genres, critiques of dominant patriarchal cultures are key to their narrative content, context, and structure.
Our authors speak of comics and graphic novels in the context of burningly relevant, global topics such as women in Iran, contemporary Arab feminism, abortion, and queer struggles. Next to it, we feature work looking at the Suffragettes, the 1990s Zine culture and an examination of alcohol use in one of the most popular Scandinavian comic series, to name but a handful.
Alongside critical reflection, we present creative submissions and interviews with comics practitioners. For example, Sarah Lightman offers watercolour depictions of Biblical women escaping historical paintings only to find themselves trapped in the modern miasma of Covid lockdowns. Sydney Heifler’s graphic project explores post-rape PTSD, and Miki Shaw uses her creative practice to debate the realities of parenting. These pieces sit alongside illuminating conversations with such figures as Mariko Tamaki, Jiipu Uusitalo, Bishakh Som, and Ana Penyas.
Elsewhere in this issue, we feature an appraisal of Marie Kreutzer’s celebrated 2022 film Corsage, a timely and sobering conversation with director Irina Tsilyk on the subject of filming on the frontline of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and and a breath-taking and ambitious creative and critical hybrid interpretation of the sick lives and works of Bessie Bruce and Cookie Mueller, which activates loving epistolary exchanges across time to theorise letter writing as feminist care.
The presented collection of work was compiled and edited by a team led by Houman Sadri that included Ariel Kahn (Middlesex University), Laura Antola (University of Turku) and Anna Misiak. It was commissioned at the height of the pandemic, taking shape during a difficult and tumultuous time for everyone. Yet, our contributors and guest editors’ commitment and perseverance have been inspirational.
This issue also marks the first for Valeria Villegas Lindvall in her new role as MAI Reviews Editor. Val has been a stalwart of the journal for a long time, bringing her fire and verve to this position.
We hope you find this issue as enjoyable and illuminating as it has been for us to compile.
With solidarity,
Houman Sadri & Anna Misiak
(Gothenburg, Sweden & Falmouth, UK)
No ‘Bad’ Abortions: Graphic Narratives as Feminist Discourse
Reflecting on their own graphic abortion narratives, Freeman & Nandagiri talk about the power of the visual and the creative process.
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Daughters of Persia: Female Characters in Iranian Graphic Novels
Examining female characters in graphic novels, Hashemi discusses how Iranian diaspora writers engage with trauma and gender representation.
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Youth in Bloom: Girlhood Sexual Agency & Nondichotomous Sexual Consent in The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Tobin argues that The Diary of a Teenage Girl highlights the necessity of reframing our understanding of consent.
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Comics, Feminism, and the Future: Feminist Figuration in Parable of the Sower & Shuri
Scherr sketches the potential contribution of comics and graphic narratives towards disseminating future-oriented visions of justice.
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Spectral Legacies & Haunted Subjectivity: Feminist Temporality in Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland and Bezimena
In Fatherland and Bezimena, Nina Bunjevac exposes larger socio-historical structures of violence and oppression.
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A Game of Pank-A-Squith: Remembering Women’s Social and Political Union in Sally Heathcote: Suffragette
Belia shows how Sally Heathcote forges affective engagement to transport the reader to the centre of the suffragettes’ struggle.
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Heterotopias: Tillie Walden’s Queer Orientations
Tillie Walden’s work contests oppressive realities by showing the performativity of desire in the shaping of space and identities.
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Drawn from the Margins: Minicomics by Girls, Grrrls, and Wimmen on the 1990s’ Xerox Frontier
In the 1990s, minicomics were a defiant rebuttal to the comics industry’s indifference to the work of a new generation of girls and young women.
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Breaking Open New Worlds: An Interview with Bishakh Som
Mayer meets Bishakh Som to discuss her recent success in the world of graphic novels and the new trans literature.
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Comics Collectives as Feminist Practice
A historical insight into two female collectives, the Wimmen’s Comix Collective and Actus Tragicus, shows how their work can inspire today.
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How I Leave You
How I Leave You is an autobiographical graphic narrative that examines a woman’s healing after rape and the implications of PTSD diagnosis.
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Young Women and Alcohol in Lise Myhre’s Nemi
Dancus interrogates how Lise Myhre uses the cliché of the drunk woman to promote a feminist agenda.
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Unravelling
Struggling to nurture a creative career while parenting, Miki confronts self-doubt and perfectionism by drawing her children.
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Biblical Domestic
Lightman’s series of watercolours features Biblical women escaping historical paintings to be trapped during covid lockdowns (2020–2021).
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Palatable Political Passion Projects? Feminist Instatoons in South Korea
Focussing on two South Korean works by Soo Shin Ji, Molisso explores feminist instatoons as palatable political passion projects.
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Breaking Glass: Reclaiming Harley Quinn’s Past to Determine her Feminist Future
Harley Quinn’s rise to becoming one of DC’s most popular and recognisable characters was hardly a feminist success story.
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The Queer and Feminist Worlds of Witches & Magical Beings in Feminist YA Graphic Novels
Reading Lumberjanes and The Witch Boy Trilogy, MacDonald shows how their plot lines encourage a queer and feminist ethos.
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Spinning a Yarn: Mythic Storytelling in Isabel Greenberg’s One Hundred Nights of Hero & Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle
Drangsholt reveals that both her case studies concern themselves with how storytelling always stands in the danger of regurgitating misogyny.
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‘Misery is actually the only thing interesting’: Happiness Critique in Swedish Feminist Comics
Swedish feminist comics artists explore sad feelings to criticise the expectation of happiness associated with neoliberal ideals of the autonomous individual.
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‘Talking about me… doesn’t interest me at all’: An Interview with Ana Penyas
Segui meets Ana Penyas to discuss creative, social and political inspirations that shaped her successful career as a graphic novelist.
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‘It’s like magic’: A Conversation with Finnish Comic Artist Jiipu Uusitalo
An accomplished Finnish transwriter, Jiipu Uusitalo ponders on a range of their inspirations, from Nana the dog to feminist companionship.
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On Contradictory Emotions, Complexity & Time: A Conversation with Jillian Tamaki
‘The time and effort that it takes to capture that detail is very worthwhile and meaningful’, says Jillian Tamaki, chatting to Shoshana Magnet.
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Goddess Troubles: Gender & Femininity in Lore Olympus
Retelling the story of Persephone, Lore Olympus shows that misogyny is driven by fear and envy of the feminine ability to create.
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‘From the Inside Out’: Skin & Horror in Emily Carroll’s Comics
Kvistad & Duggan read Carroll’s work to ponder on her fascination with skin as it is depicted on the page, but also the reader’s skin.
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Gender-Bender Manga: Performance, Perception & Narratives of Subversion
Manga deconstructs the essentialism of gender binary through embodied performance, space, external perception and social positioning.
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Periperformative Speech & Performance of Sororidad in Jazmín Varela’s ‘Tengo unas flores con tu nombre’
Varela, a comic artist from Rosario, collected portraits of women and queer people to protest gendered violence in Argentina in 2018.
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Frontline: Iryna Tsilyk on Filmmaking during the Russo-Ukrainian War
Marshall meets director Iryna Tsylik whose films have captured events in Ukraine since the first Russian invasion in 2014.
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A Double in Different Clothes: Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (2022)
Tracing how Kreutzer mixes fiction with reality, Findlay situates the portrayal of Sisi in Corsage in the context of the New Austrian Cinema.
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Sick Women Correspondents: Practices of Care in Cross-historical Love Letter Writing
Blackshaw & Butler perform epistolary exchanges across time to theorise letter writing as feminist care, enveloping sickness into love.
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Gendered Defenders
While rather uneven, Gendered Defenders forms a strong contribution to the scholarly debate on the representation of women on the screen.
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‘Monstrous Youth’ by Sara Austin
Austin’s Monstrous Youth demonstrates how monsters have become potent symbols of adolescent deviance and rebellion.
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‘They Call it Love’
Cassigneul reads They Call it Love to praise Gotby for upholding the radical politics of care against heterosexual romantic traditions.
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WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey