ABSTRACT
East German graphic artist Anke Feuchtenberger is one of the most important teachers and practitioners working in German comics today. Trained during the German Democratic Republic’s most experimental decade of artistic production, Feuchtenberger brought elements of the East German avant-garde and the feminist politics of German unification to bear on art comics after 1989. She thereby pushed German graphic novels into a new realm, redefining the medium in cultural, political and aesthetic terms. This chapter examines her project to develop a feminist form of graphic expression in her 1995 collection of comics Mutterkuchen. By examining how Feuchtenberger’s art seeks to unite the female body with the process of writing and engages with feminist methodologies of artistic practice, I argue that Feuchtenberger’s art – and perhaps feminist comics in general – is already in dialog with feminist art from the 1960s onward and therefore warrant a position in the larger category of feminist art history.
