ABSTRACT
This chapter considers representations of law and justice in selected comics and graphic novels in relation to Judith Butler’s work on mourning and grievability. In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), she identifies the potential for grief to activate political agency, asking, ‘Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life?’ (20). Butler emphasises the impact that loss may engender in terms of its transformative possibilities within individual and collective domains. Globally, the widespread loss of life through conflict and state-sanctioned violence, among other processes, means that Butler’s questions remain urgent. Comics scholars have long emphasised the ways that the medium can operate as a politically engaged form of inquiry as comics artists generate unique ways of imagining subjectivity and challenging the status quo frequently ascribed to minority cultures (Adams 2008; Chute 2010; El Refaie 2012; Mickwitz 2015). This chapter contributes to such scholarship by examining the representation of minorities in selected comics by Henry Kiyama and Emmanuel Guibert, and online works related to graphic justice, and brings these texts to bear on Butler’s notion of ‘grievability.’ It is argued that comics offer a significant method through which ‘others’ can be apprehended via a politics of grief. This instantiates a mechanics of vulnerability (within the text, and also in its reception) because of the way that the comics form retains lacunae between words and images, as well as illuminating similarities between different subject positions. The chapter concludes that the recognition of loss in relation to the comic book page can usefully broaden debates on justice and the law.
