Feminism and Comics Studies

Dear Colleagues,

Feminist studies, always already a (inter)disciplinary challenge, has so much to say around creative forms of resistance, around comics as crisis witnessing, around memoir and self-revelation, around superherodom studies and posthumanism.  In 2023, comics studies is established enough to offer (a few) tenure-track jobs and graduate programs, but is still finding itself in many ways, ways that continue to challenge traditional disciplinarity.  Back in 2010, in “Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics Studies,” Charles Hatfield characterized comics studies as “a nascent academic field of great productivity and promise” (Transatlantica, 1, 2010).  This Special Issue asks us, at this particular time, to bring these interdisciplinary challenges together productively:  What can these fields say and do for one another, to start new critical dialogues about the relevance of comics studies to feminist scholarship, and the relevance of critical feminism(s), to comics studies? Feminism is not a unified body, and just saying so is step 1 towards an acknowledgement of shared “indisciplinarity” with comics studies.  What can or should feminist scholarship be doing with reproductive justice in comic art? With disability studies in comic art? What interventions from Black feminism, Indigenous feminism, transfeminism can be brought into the indiscipline of comics studies?   I turn to bell hooks to bring us together with love and mutual respect: “Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination—imperialism, sexism, racism, classism” (from “Love as the Practice of Freedom”). Feminism can and does fail as a critical tool set, can be imposed where it is not wanted and is not part of the artistic creator’s self-identification.  Where that happens, it needs to be talked about and through, and become part of feminist scholarship’s work towards better criticism and self-awareness.  So this Special Issue is about both doing and undoing, and about love within both feminist scholarship and comics studies.

Dr. Jane Tolmie
Guest Editor

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• comics studies
• comics
• feminist studies
• feminism
• reproductive justice
• (dis)ability
• bodymind
• comics and human rights