It’s that time of the year again and I am looking forward to attending and presenting at Comics Forum 2024! With the title “Between Bodies: Embodiment and Comics” Comics Forum will take place as usual at Leeds Central Library (UK) on the 14th and 15th of November 2024 as part of the annual Thought Bubble Festival.
I have organised a roundtable with the title Mexican Perspectives on the Female Body in Comics by Women: Reading New Canons Within a Globalised Context. It will take place on Thursday 14 November at 11:30 am in the library’s Sanderson Room (3rd Floor). You can find the full abstract and speaker bios below.
Speakers:
- Alfredo Guzmán Tinajero (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, México) -Presentation
- Ira Franco (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México) -Presentation
- Ernesto Priego (City, University of London, UK) -Presentation, Discussion and Chair
Self-Deprecation and Parody in Julie Doucet’s Autofictional Comics
Alfredo Guzmán Tinajero
Julie Doucet has created, through most of her comics, an ongoing work of autofiction where she grotesquely and ridiculously reconfigures her life. This paper will discuss how, through self-deprecation, Doucet exceeds the concepts of autofiction to explore her dark passions and abject desires without any reservation. The diverse and subversive use of her body as a fictional discourse material is carried out from her early works in Dirty Plotte (1988-1998) to her more abstract works like 365 Days: A Diary (2007), and even in her work as a visual artist beyond comics. Doucet resorts to self-fictionalisation to position herself as a character in surreal and decadent stories, depicting herself as a disturbed and depressive woman through an abject body exposure that impacts the reader and conditions reception. Doucet has created an image through which she plays with information from her life mixed with unusual fantasies; but most importantly, she allows herself to explore her absurd and shameful desires. This presentation will offer an analysis through the performativity of the genre of the visual elements that allow Doucet to (re)construct her persona and personality, and to investigate the narrative processes of mockery and self-flagellation that empower her and challenge normative standards.
Becoming Monstrua: The Female Body as Visual Metaphor of Horror in the Comics by Julie Doucet, Kyoko Okazaki, and Emil Ferris.
Ira Franco
This presentation will offer an advance of ongoing doctoral research on selected comics by Julie Doucet, Kyoko Okazaki, and Emil Ferris. The feminine monstrosity is expressed in Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters (2017) where the narrator’s subjectivity—a wolf-girl, artist, and queer— represented as a sketchbook filled with Bic pen scribbles, an extension of her dissident body. In Helter Skelter (1995-1996), Kyoko Okazaki reconfigures the concept of the body as a commodity, imbuing it with a sense of agency and memory. Meanwhile, Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte (1988-1998) fanzine introduces a game for the female body, a game of abject disobedience, disrupting systems, order, and boundaries, and in its absolute freedom, it confronts all limits, including the limit of death. These authors present monstrous and sexualized female bodies as a metaphorical form of representation of an unclassified horror that sits outside genre conventions, within and beyond comics. The montage in these comics imagine a singular type of horror; one that places the female monster in a sexualized, political dimension. The presentation will argue these comics destabilise to a certain extent the contemporary image of the female body as represented in comics and is presented as a response, a stance and a form of managing a rational ethos exercised by patriarchal capitalism over their bodies. Through a multidisciplinary approach and always focusing on the comics themselves, the analysis will place in perspective the contributions of these authors in relation to the production of political and aesthetic meanings of comics created by women.
Ernesto Priego
Self-deprecation, Monstrosity and The Body: A Discussion on Mexican Scholarly Approaches to Comics
There is no question that both the representation of women’s bodies and monstrosity in comics are a timely subject. Comics and the Body. Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability (Szep 2020), Monstrous Women in Comics (Lansdale and Coody, eds. 2020), Monstrous Imaginaries. The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics (Ahmed 2020), and Drawing (in) the Feminine. Bande Dessinée and Women (Flinn, ed. 2024) are volumes that document the contemporary interest in the examination of comics authored by women from multidisciplinary perspectives bridging cultural, gender and comics studies. A certain critical and wider geopolitical dimension is yet to be fully explored, and that is the emergence of new canons within a globalised context, and its popular and scholarly reception outside of the original contexts in which the comics, and most of the recent scholarship, is being produced. Building upon canonical 20th century Mexican cultural studies (Ramos 1934; Paz 1950; Caso 1953; Curiel 1978; Monsiváis 1997; Rubenstein 1998) Ernesto will respond critically to each paper and will also lead a Q&A with Alfredo and Ira interrogating the potential role that their shared Mexican cultural background -as punctuated by a body of literature on Mexican culture, Mexican comics and ongoing gender violence in Mexico and Latin America- may have played on their scholarly approach. Ernesto’s presentation will also feature a selection of images from Mexican comic books to stimulate comparisons and debate.
Bios
Ira Franco is currently writing her PhD dissertation on the use of horror metaphors by women comic artists at the Art History department at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She is also a translator and novelist. Her first novel was published in 2018. She worked as a travel writer and film critic for over a decade. She is involved in the ongoing Comic Studies Seminar (SECO) at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, México.
Alfredo Guzmán Tinajero studied English Literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He completed a Master’s in Comparative Literature at the Universiad Autónoma de Barcelona with a dissertation on the narrative space in the Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez. At the same university, he completed his PhD in literary theory with a thesis about autobiographical/autofictional comics. He has participated in various international congresses on comics and autobiography. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, México.
Ernesto Priego
Dr Ernesto Priego studied English Literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He holds a Master’s in Culture and Communication from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and a PhD from University College London. He is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, and the founder and editor-in-chief of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship.
You can find more details about the conference, including the draft programme, at the Comics Forum 2024 webpage (see also below as an image file).
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