ABSTRACT
Finnish artist Kati Kovács has depicted sexual violence in her comics since the beginning of her 30-year long career. The chapter asks: How do her comics use narrative strategies of combining words and images to represent sexual harassment and violence in a feminist way? Through a narratological analysis, the chapter shows how gaps, ruptures, and conflicts between visual and verbal information create ambiguity in the narratives, thus, provoking the reader to actively process and think sexual violence, firstly, on the story level, and secondly, thematically in relation to their knowledge about gender-based violence in the real life. The chapter suggests that a feminist strategy of representing sexual harassment and violence in comics cannot be reduced to one particular narrative technique or word–image combination, but it should be, rather, viewed as a broad selection of different means that together aim to serve certain ethical purposes of the narrative.
