1st Edition
Comic Art and Feminism in the Baltic Sea Region Transnational Perspectives
This edited collection explores how the relationship between comic art and feminism has been shaped by global, transnational, and local trends, curating analyses of multinational comic art that encompass themes of gender, sexuality, power, vulnerability, assault, abuse, taboo, and trauma.
The chapters illuminate in turn the defining features of the aesthetics, materiality, and thematic content of their source material – often expressed with humorous undertones of self-reflection or social criticism – as well as recurring strategies of visualising and narrating female experiences. Broadening the research perspective of feminist comics to include national comics cultures peripheral to the cultural centers of Anglo-American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese comics, the anthology explores how the dominant narrative or history of canonical works can be challenged or deconstructed by local histories of comics and feminism and their transnational connections, and how local histories complement or challenge the current understanding of the relationship between feminism and comic art.
This is an essential collection for scholars and students in comics studies, women and gender studies, media studies, and literature.
Chapter One
Feminist Comics: An Expanding Field
Kristy Beers Fägersten, Leena Romu, Anna Nordenstam and Margareta Wallin Wictorin
Part I: Swedish feminist comics artists
Chapter Two
Swedish Feminist Comics and Cartoons at the Turn of the Millennium: Åsa Grennvall (Schagerström) and Joanna Rubin Dranger
Anna Nordenstam and Margareta Wallin Wictorin
Chapter Three
A Woman’s Place (in the panel): Positioning and Framing in Comics by Nina Hemmingsson and Lotta Sjöberg
Kristy Beers Fägersten
Part II: Gender, sex, and sexuality in German-language comics
Chapter Four
A Brief History of Girlsplaining? Reading Klengel, Patu and Schrupp with Strömquist. Or: Reflecting Visualities of Gender and Feminism in German-Language Comics
Marina Rauchenbacher and Katharina Serles
Chapter Five
"What’s in a name?": Anke Feuchtenberger’s Roses and the Mythic Methodologies of her Feminist Comic Art
Elizabeth "Biz" Nijdam
Chapter Six
For Sex-Positivity? Potential and limits of representating Sex and Sexuality in Ulli Lust’s Comics Across Genres
Anna Vuorinne
Part III: Non-binary and queer expression in comics
Chapter Seven
Strategies of Ambiguity: Non-Binary Figurations in German-Language Comics
Anna Beckmann
Chapter Eight
Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Tove Jansson’s Moomin Comics
Mike Classon Frangos
Part IV: Addressing violence in Finnish comics
Chapter Nine
Feminist Education and Empowerment: The Individual and the Collective in Emmi Nieminen and Johanna Vehkoo’s Comic on Online Violence
Ralf Kauranen and Olli Löytty
Chapter Ten
The Narrative Complexity of Showing and Telling Sexual Harassment and Violence in Kati Kovács’s Comics
Leena Romu
Part V: Memoir and remembering in Polish and Russian comics
Chapter Eleven
"After all, we must be our own heroines": The Power of Feminism, Fun Home, and Form in Wanda Hagedorn’s Graphic Memoir Totalnie Nie Nostalgia: Memuar
Małgorzata □Olsza
Chapter Twelve
Staring Back at History: Varvara Pomidor and Russian Comics
José Alaniz
Biography
Kristy Beers Fägersten is Professor of English Linguistics at Södertörn University.
Anna Nordenstam is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg.
Leena Romu is a post-doctoral researcher at Tampere University.
Margareta Wallin Wictorin is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Karlstad University.
