Intersectionality and Disability Studies in Contemporary Comics and Graphic Narrative
Description
Since the 1990s, comics and graphic narratives have emerged as an emphatic media form for exploring the embodied experiences of disability and identity (e.g., Alaniz, Chute, Czerwiec, Dolmage, and Refaie). To date, much scholarship has focused on Anglophone or Euro-American paradigms, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of how disability intersects with race, gender, class, and colonial histories in graphic narratives from diverse contexts. To bridge the gap, this seminar brings together international scholars from multiple disciplines (e.g., comics narratology and 4EA cognition, graphic medicine, posthumanist studies, history, and visual studies) to discuss both established and emerging works, especially those from the Global South. By identifying similarities and divergences in the works and analyses, the seminar advances the comparative methodologies for the study of disability studies and graphic narrative across geographies, languages, and traditions.
We invite papers that consider, among others, how contemporary comics and graphic narratives engage core concepts from disability studies (e.g., crip time; intimacy and care; interdependence and collective access; and disability networks or crip ecologies) to:
- Represent physical and/or cognitive impairments, embodied trauma, and historical memory in form, style, and narrative
- Depict disability/neurodiversity as an alternative embodied mode of knowing rather than deficit
- Uncover overlooked disability experiences of secondary, aging or non-superhero characters
- Critique social, political, and urban contexts
- Thematize (in)accessibility in both content and form
- Speculate on crip futurities
- Address structural violence, slow death, and debility in global and political contexts
- Resist diagnostic and pathological frames
Possible texts include transnational and multilingual comics and graphic narratives dealing with social and disability justice and intersectionality. These may range across South Korean manhwa; Brazilian graphic memoirs; graphic journalism; autobiographical comics by disabled artists; Latin American and Indigenous comics; Francophone bandes dessinées from West Africa and the Caribbean; and graphic narratives from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe. We also welcome discussions about webcomics, digital comics, and other emerging formats circulating across national and linguistic borders.
We look forward to proposals of analyses of texts from selected cultural, temporal, and spatial contexts. During the seminar, we will discuss the findings to derive new comparative frameworks about how disability and intersectionality shape global graphic narratives. The findings from the seminar promise to redefine and expand the critical horizons of comparative literature.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ana Matilde Sousa is an artist and researcher from Lisbon, Portugal. She presents and publishes work on contemporary art, popular culture, and artistic research in academic settings, journals, and international conferences. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes from Routledge and the University of Minnesota Press. She holds a PhD in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, where she teaches in the BA Painting program and is a FCT Junior Research Fellow at CIEBA.
Speaker Bio
I am a mythopoet, drawing breath from old gods and forging tales where ancient myths collide with futures unseen. For over fifteen years, I’ve wandered the barren plains of my mind, crafting graphic novels that defy convention. At CSULB, I teach ASL and Deaf Cultures, a task both solemn and unique. My debut, Pantheon: Heterotopia, carved out the genre of panfuturism, followed by Heterothanasia and HeteroGenia. You’ll find me in a cigar lounge, lost in smoke and thought.
Speaker Bio
Crystal Yin Lie is Assistant Professor of Comparative World Literature at California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches disability studies, health humanities, and comics & graphic narratives. Her research focuses on contemporary literature, life writing, and popular media about dementia and the memory of historical trauma as well as disability in comics. Her work can be found in The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Speaker Bio
Marissa Herzig (she/her) is a fourth-year English PhD candidate at the University of Toronto whose SSHRC-funded dissertation focuses on the female golem in contemporary retellings of Jewish folklore from the lens of disability studies. Marissa is currently a Junior Fellow at Massey College, part of the Jewish Studies collaborative program, and a consultant at the Writing Centre. In her spare time, Marissa enjoys listening to audiobooks and making three cups of tea a day.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Lauren (Ren) Chivington (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the Ohio State University specializing in Medical Humanities and Disability Studies with a focus on comics and graphic medicine. Their dissertation focuses on graphic medicine as a tool for advocacy for those with invisibilized chronic illnesses. You can read their work in the International Journal of Comic Art, ImageTexT, and the International Journal of Latest Research in Humanities and Social Science (IJLRHSS).
Speaker Bio
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Speaker Bio
Kai Qing Tan is an FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University, Belgium, where they conduct research on disability experiences and intersectionality in North American graphic narrative (since the 1990s) through 4EA approaches to cognition and comics. They are writing two monographs and are an active member of the Association of Literary Urban Studies, FRINGE Urban Narratives and the research group at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway, on visceral writing and affect transmission as feminist strategy.