ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies is a comprehensive, global, and interdisciplinary examination of the essential relationship between Gender, Sexuality, Comics, and Graphic Novels.

A diverse range of international and interdisciplinary scholars take a closer look at how gender and sexuality have been essential in the evolution of comics, and how gender and sexuality in comics demand that we re-frame and re-view comics history. Chapters cover a wide array of intersectional topics including Queer Underground and Alternative comics, Feminist Autobiography, re-drawing disability, Latina testimony, and re-evaluating the critical whiteness and masculinity of superheroes in this first truly global reference text to gender and sexuality in comics.

Comics have always been an important place for the radical exploration of feminist and non-binary sexualities and identities, and the growth of non-normative comic book traditions as a field of inquiry makes this an essential text for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers studying Comics Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Part I: Interrogating Restrictive Frames; Chapter 1: Translating Masculinity: The Significance of the Frontier in American Superheroes; Chapter 2: Black Boys and Black Girls in Comics: An Affective and Historical Mapping of Intertwined Stereotypes; Chapter 3: Pocket-Sized Pornography: Representations of Sexual Violence and Masculinity in Tijuana Bibles; Chapter 4: The Comic Strip in Advertising: Persuasion, Gender, Sexuality; Chapter 5: Real Men Choose Vasectomy: Questioning and Redefining Mexican National Masculinity in Los Supermachos, from Rius to Anonymous Authors; Chapter 6: Marriage, Domesticity and Superheroes (For Better or Worse); Chapter 7: "Is that a monster between your legs or are ya just happy to see me?": Sex, Subjectivity, and the Superbody in the Marvel Swimsuit Special; Part II: Ethnoracial Queer and Feminist Space Clearing Gestures; Chapter 8: Life Out Loud in the Closet: The Grotesque as Latinx Imagination in Cristy C. Road’s Spit and Passion; Chapter 9: Graphic (Narrative) Presentations of Violence Against Indigenous Women: Responses to the MMIW Crisis in North America; Chapter 10: From "Accidental" Autobiography to Comics Activism: Tracing the Development of an Andalusian-Chinese Feminism in the Work of Comics Artist Quan Zhou; Chapter 11: Plea Deal Compounds: Black Women’s Anger in "the System" of Bitch Planet; Part III: Back to the Future; Chapter 12: Panels of Innocence and Experience: Reading Sexual Subjectivity Through Horror Comics ; Chapter 13: Teenage Biology 101: Serializing a Queer Girlhood in Ariel Schrag's Potential; Chapter 14: Genre, Gender, Sexual, Textual and Visual, and Real Representations in Bande Dessinée; Chapter 15: A Comics Écriture Féminine: Anke Feuchtenberger’s Feminist Graphic Expression; Chapter 16: "I’m Trapped In Here!" Gender Performativity and Affect in Emma Ríos's I.D.; Chapter 17: Empirical Looking: Situating the Multiple Elements of Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout as Vehicles for Articulating a Place for Women in Science; Part IV: Counterpublics; Chapter 18: From Anodyne Animals to Filthy Beasts: Defying and Defiling Safety, Sanctity, and Sexual Suppression in Underground Animal Comics; Chapter 19: Wonder Woman’s Complicated Relationship with Feminism; Chapter 20: "Part of Something Bigger": Ms./Captain Marvel; Chapter 21: Higher, Further, Faster Baby! The Feminist Evolution of Carol Danvers from Comics to Film; Chapter 22: Female Fans, Female Creators, and Female Superheroes: The Semiotics of Changing Gender Dynamics; Chapter 23: Public-Facing Feminisms: Subverting the Lettercol in Bitch Planet; Chapter 24: "I’d Like Everything That’s Bad For Me!": Tank Girl’s Cracks in Patriarchal Pop Culture; Chapter 25: Falling In Stepping Out: Little Red Formation as Agentic Gender Construction in Lumberjanes; Part V: Worldly Interventions; Chapter 26: "A Revelation Not of the Flesh, but of the Mind": Performing Queer Textuality in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home; Chapter 27: BLOOD, or: Gender and Nation in the Contemporary Polish Comic; Chapter 28: My Grandmother Collects Memories: Gender and Remembrance in Hispanic Graphic Narratives; Chapter 29: Feminist Riots and Gay Giants: The Mayo Feminista and Cultural Context of Contemporary Queer Chilean Comics; Chapter 30: Questioning Obscenity: The Place of "Pussy" in Manga and the World; Chapter 31: See Him, See Her, See Xir: LGBTQ Visibility in Shōnen Manga at the Turn of the Century; Chapter 32: An Age of Sparkle and Drama: Exploring Gender Identities and Cultural Narratives in 1970s Shōjo Manga; Part VI: Queer and Feminist Intermedial Textures; Chapter 33: Representing the Extreme End-point of Sexual Violence: Ethical Strategies in Phoebe Gloeckner’s La Tristeza; Chapter 34: The People Upstairs: Space, Memory, and the Queered Family in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris; Chapter 35: Fat Bats, Postpunks, and Ice Witches: Afrogoth and the Undead Music of Militia Vox and the Comix of Calyn Pickens Rich; Chapter 36: Catherine Meurisse and the Gender of Art; Chapter 37: My Life With Toys: An Academic Esai into the Queer Multipurposing of Toys as Interrupted by the Author’s Life; Chapter 38: "Bobby…You’re Gay": Marvel’s Iceman, Performativity, Continuity, and Queer Visibility