Editor’s Introduction: Gender and the Graphic

Abstract

Popular culture has the power to deliver political messages. This truism is never more evidenced in the contemporary era than in the case of comic books and graphic novels. From Maus through Citizen 13660, Radioactive Forever, The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks, Bhimayana, Hush and March, the graphic novel, much more serious than 'comics', has been instrumental in raising the critical literacy level about events in history and present-day issues: the Holocaust, Japanese internment in the USA after Pearl Harbour, child abuse, the caste system, civil rights movements, the Holodomor. Personal memoirs and accounts of illnessgraphic medicine or autopathographics-have attained near-cult status as well. The centrality of the medium in representations of gender-in-crisis, gender-and-agency, gender-and-human-rights, gender-and-representation has attracted attention from commentators (Allison, 2014; Chute, 2010; Mandaville, 2009). Their writings point to the flexibility of language, both verbal and visual, in the form that enables the staging of the gender theme. A feminist aesthetics, in their point of view, is enabled by the medium. One hastens to add that 'gender' as a theme or frame of reference in studies of comic books and graphic novels is not committed solely to one or other gender. Studies of masculinity in superheroes are as common as studies of the erotic and sexualised representations of women superheroes. In the present instance, however, the essays focus on the representations of women in the graphic novel. Traumatic events find new forms of representation in the graphic novel, as do hitherto taboo subjects such as lesbian sexuality, say, for instance, in Amruta Patil's Kari. In texts that are autobiographical and personal, the narrator-author is made visible in the frames. To take one instance, Joe Sacco's work famously positions him as a witness, often uncertain, to the events-such as war-that he is reporting, and thus renders the text an instance of self-witnessing: the storyteller watches herself watching herself. Illness and recovery, the subject of graphic medicine, are viewed through the prism of femininity, patriarchy and

Appropriating Shakespearean graphic novels for Malaysian classrooms to create correct gender representations

“…Still, most importantly, it also tries to elevate the role of women and empower them through the use of graphic novels as a pedagogical tool in ESL classrooms. A number of studies are now looking into gender (mis) representations found in the narratives of graphic materials and have discovered both disturbing and hopeful observations when it comes to understanding gender or gender roles in society (e.g., Allison, 2014;Nayar, 2017), which findings and concerns are also shared by this study. By identifying and revealing what can be regarded as visual misrepresentations of or discrimination against women, it seeks to create awareness on these pertinent issues on both teachers and students in Malaysian contexts.…”