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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|93 pages
Interrogating restrictive frames
chapter 1|13 pages
Translating masculinity
chapter 2|14 pages
Black boys and black girls in comics
chapter 3|12 pages
Pocket-sized pornography
chapter 5|12 pages
Real men choose vasectomy
chapter 7|16 pages
“Is that a monster between your legs or are ya just happy to see me?”
part II|60 pages
Ethnoracial queer and feminist space clearing gestures
chapter 8|10 pages
Life out loud in the closet
chapter 9|15 pages
Graphic (narrative) presentations of violence against Indigenous women
chapter 10|15 pages
From “accidental” autobiography to comics activism
part III|87 pages
Back to the future
chapter 12|12 pages
Panels of innocence and experience
chapter 17|14 pages
Empirical looking
part IV|107 pages
Counterpublics
chapter 18|17 pages
From anodyne animals to filthy beasts
chapter 21|13 pages
Higher, further, faster baby!
chapter 22|19 pages
Female fans, female creators, and female superheroes
chapter 24|11 pages
“I’d like everything that’s bad for me!” 1
chapter 25|10 pages
Falling in or stepping out
part V|93 pages
Worldly interventions
chapter 26|10 pages
“A revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind”
chapter 28|13 pages
My grandmother collects memories
chapter 29|15 pages
Feminist riots and gay giants
chapter 31|12 pages
See him, see her, see Xir
chapter 32|15 pages
An age of sparkle and drama
part VI|89 pages
Queer and feminist intermedial textures