Despite Alison Bechdel, despite Marjane Satrapi, despite manga, women are still in many ways marginalized in American comics. And if you are a marginalized group, there are generally two ways to go about advancing your lot. You can work towards integration. Or you can work towards establishing your own institutions. Martin or Malcolm, Betty Friedan or Shulamith Firestone, the questions remain the same. Do you want to be given access to the institutions? Or do you want to change them? These two positions aren’t always or necessarily opposed, of course — some people may have voted for Barack Obama both because it marked an important moment in integration, some may have voted for him because they hoped he would change the country, and a lot of people probably voted for him for both reasons. Still the goals don’t always dovetail so nicely; often you have to pick which to prioritize, and how.
These issues were the subtext of much of the discussion at a panel on “Gender and Cartooning in Chicago,” which I attended in April. The panel was organized by Anne Elizabeth Moore (former editor of The Comics Journal and Punk Planet) and featured cartoonists Nicole Hollander (Sylvia) and Dewayne Slightweight (The Kinship Structure of Ferns, I Want to Know the Habits of Other Girls.) Each of them had thought about the problems of being a women in a male dominated field, and each had come to somewhat different conclusions about how to best advance their careers and their art.
Dewayne Slightweight (who is an acquaintance of mine) is not widely known, but he’s a remarkable young artist. Though he’s female, he identifies as genderqueer, and prefers to be referred to by the male pronoun. As this suggests, Slightweight’s thought a good bit about identity; his work is very consciously focused on exploring and building, as he put it, “feminist or queer or anti-capitalist community.” His comic The Kinship Structure of Ferns attempts “to make an art that communicates a new form of kinship” built around “love, hope, desire, and friendship.” Slightweight argued that “hierarchical capitalist culture privileges sight,” by, for example, saying, “I know what a woman looks like,” or “I know what a terrorist looks like.” So in his work, Slightweight tries to complicate looking by turning his comics into performances; he will project them on a screen and dance and sing in front of them, contrasting his body with drawn bodies and with music. He includes a CD of musical accompaniment with each comic as well, the effect of which is pleasantly disorienting. As you read and listen along, words and phrases pop out and repeat in odd, out of sync ways, breaking linear progress up into effervescent bubbles of sound and meaning.
Slightweight’s focus on separate communities and non-hierarchical experience is mirrored in his career. All of his work is self-published; most of it is not sold, but traded with friends in the underground rock and queer arts communities of which he is a part. When asked about his take on current cartooning or mass culture, Slightweight said that he had not bought a book or comic or record in something like three years. Partially this is because he makes virtually no money; he said he walks during the winter rather than taking the bus in order to save up the funds to put out his comics, and he mentioned that one of his main sources of support is food stamps. In addition, though Slightweight noted that he isn’t part of the comics scene, mainstream or alternative, because he doesn’t want to be. “I don’t need to pay attention to what dude is the up and rising star,” he pointed out. Nor does he need to worry about sexism or discrimination, since the underground community of which he is a part has lots of women, and lots of queers, and lots of feminist men. “A grouping of women and queers is not a ghetto — it’s a wonderful thing,” he said.
Slightweight, then, is committed to a separatist rather than an integrationist model of feminist culture; when asked if he would be more interested in the mainstream if it included more interesting, feminist-friendly work, his answer was essentially, “no.” For Slightweight, the very existence of the mainstream is the problem; he argued that the point of feminism was to decentralize power. “You have as much right to talk back to culture as culture has to talk to you,” he said. The point, then, for Slightweight, is not for marginalized groups to step into positions of power, but for them to speak from where they are, and so break down a hierarchy which insists on privileging certain creators or certain voices.
Nicole Hollander, the creator of the strip Sylvia, began her career as a comics professional when women were even more underrepresented in the industry than they are now. She is also a newspaper political and strip cartoonist, segments of comicdom that are perhaps the least gender-integrated. (Anne Elizabeth Moore pointed out that there had been only one female editorial cartoonist in the United States — before she was fired in the recent economic bloodletting.) It is no surprise, then, that Hollander spent a good part of her discussion talking about the barriers she had faced as a woman to mainstream success.
Hollander began her career illustrating articles for The Spokeswoman, a feminist, political magazine. After receiving some interest from book publishers, and inspired in part by Doonesbury, she tried to syndicate Sylvia — at which point she ran up against something that looked rather like sexism. One syndicate executive told her that her strip was “deep, but narrow” — narrow, presumably, because it didn’t have any men in it.
Faced with mainstream disinterest, Hollander turned to DIY. She worked to syndicate herself, phoning up newspapers on her own behalf. Though she made some sales, being a woman was a disadvantage here too — newspaper editors would often tell her, as she put it, “We have Cathy already. One woman is quite enough, thank you.” Nonetheless, she managed to land the strip at one paper and another, and to cobble together book deals, performance opportunities, and a certain amount of fame, if not exactly a fortune.
Hollander discussed not only the lack of opportunities for, but also the lack of representation of, women on the comics page. “Men want to write about men,” she noted, and pointed out that there would only be more strips for women when there were more women creators with access to the comics page. As it stands now, Hollander said, girls don’t generally think of becoming cartoonists. She herself, she said, had not been interested in comics as a girl; as a child she had liked the Phantom and Broom Hilda, but as an adolescent, comics had offered her nothing.
All of this might suggest that Hollander sounded bitter…but that wasn’t the case at all. On the contrary, she pointed out that in her experience it was her male colleagues who often complained about low pay or that they could not make a living at cartooning. As for herself, she noted, “I wish I had more money…but I feel very happy in my career. I’ve been able to say everything I wanted to say. I was able to say “vibrator” in one strip. I was able to say “orgasm”” At another point she added, “I could be Sylvia. I could be tough.” Thus, though Hollander would have liked more mainstream success, she also has appreciated the freedom which came with being on the margins.
In contrast to both Slightweight and Hollander, Anne Elizabeth Moore is somebody who follows the comics industry closely. She is in the process of conducting a series of interviews with female comics professionals, and she seems to know just about everybody there is to know. She said that for her it was very important to try to accrue mainstream power in order to promote people like Slightweight and Hollander, “whose work should be everywhere!” as she said. At the same time, she noted, when you participate in the mainstream, you end up “subverting rather than changing.”
Though Moore seemed to be at least provisionally interested in working with the mainstream, she also argued for a need for more female institutions. In response to a question from the audience about the lack of female representation in Kramer’s Ergot, and Sammy Harkham’s reportedly snotty defense of same, Moore suggested that there was a need for more (or even one) female comics anthology.
The final statement of the evening came from a Korean-born woman in the audience. She noted that growing up in Korea, she had constantly read comics by women, for women. She very rarely read any comics by men, because they were overly violent, because they focused on male characters, and because, with so many comics written by women, she didn’t have to, so why would she? In Korea, in other words, comics for women are their own separate genre and have their own audience — but that separate institutional framework is so large and so strong that it is, in fact, effectively of the mainstream. The women added that when she got to America, it was a shock to realize that women here weren’t drawing, writing, or reading comics in large numbers. “It made me really sad,” she said.
________
This essay first appeared in The Comics Journal. Since it appeared, Sylvia has been cancelled in the Chicago Tribune, it’s home paper. The Chicago Reader has the story, as well as info about what you can do if you would like to try to get the decision changed.
Update Jan 2014: Dewayne Slightweight now goes by the name Lee Relvas.
Hi Noah: Great piece; that sounds like an awesome panel.
Hollander’s comment about comics not offering her anything in adolescence resonates with me but for possibly different reasons; do you remember if she talked any more about this beyond what you captured here?
I pretty much went straight from Broom Hilda and illustrated books to adult novels, skipping “young adult fiction” altogether, sometime around the 5th grade. That’s too young for “adult” comics (even if they’d been widely available in the 80s) because they are often more graphically — and visibly — sexual.
I read Ian Fleming for the first time at 12. Bond novels are hardly “gendered female” so it wasn’t that comics didn’t offer appealing subject matter: there’re plenty of comics similar to a Bond novel. But a picture book with that subject matter would not have made it past the library and parental censors as easily as the prose books could. And comics didn’t offer all the other aspects that appealed: the prose novels were accessories that said “I am grown up enough to understand this” (even if I didn’t).
More importantly, to a 12 year old, even books as stereotype-laden as the Fleming novels took place in adult scenarios, revealed adult secrets, represented adult identity and the subtleties of adult relationships. Bond is adult fantasy, not moral tale.
Darwyn Cooke spoke at the Smithsonian a couple of weeks ago and this was a point he made in his talk: ‘The Hunter’ is “adult” in the same way that the original novels (and to some extent, the Bond novels) were. In contrast, superhero comics were originally moral tales for young boys. As they’ve increasingly targeted adult men, they’ve squeezed out other kinds of adult stories – not literature, but entertaining stories palpably for grown ups – without actually being adult in the same way. And those entertaining adult stories that have been squeezed out are often appealing to adolescents of both genders.
A lot of female writers I know also read adult books at a young age, and anybody who followed this trajectory was pretty well shut out of graphic literature until very recently. “Grown up” comics are still very often preoccupied with adolescent identity, which was the very thing I was trying to escape.
I think as graphic novels mature and there’s more variety period, more books that are neither “male” nor “female”, it’ll be easier to break out of these rigid gender distinctions and you’ll see more women reading comics as adolescents and wanting to write them. That’s not to suggest that the more self-conscious efforts to create opportunities for and enthusiasm among women shouldn’t happen too, just to say that I think things will probably improve organically. This motif keeps coming up: in 10 years, nobody who cares about books will be able to avoid graphic novels, and that will likely include 12-year-old girls.
Hey Caro. Those are really interesting points. I guess I’d disagree with you, or maybe question you on three things:
First, I can see that literature for young boys might be even less appealing to some young girls than would be literature for adult men (or at least somewhat older men.) On the other hand, I think that ultimately if comics are going to have a large female audience, it’ll probably have to be with comics that are aimed at girls more or less consciously. There is crossover reading by boys and girls, of course, and probably more by girls, but still, genre and gender are pretty intertwined, and if you’re going to have a mass culture phenomena (like Twilight, like shojo, like girl-oriented R&B) you usually do have to know who you’re talking to.
Second, I think, as I sort of said, that this has kind of already happened with manga, where there is a significant female audience — possibly on a par or larger than the male audience for super-hero comics, though it’s difficult to gauge these things.
Third…I don’t think the triumph of American comics over time is necessarily anything like assured. I think the Internet could really prevent the kind of development you’re talking about. It seems reasonable to think that comics will become more and more central to book culture, perhaps — but book culture itself may become more and more marginal to the Internet. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which smart young girls spend much of their time reading prose of various sorts on the Internet, in which case comics might again become fairly secondary….
It’s a numbers game: there are far fewer females who pursue comics as an avocation than men. Thus, there are fewer still with actual talent ( I’d wager it’s proportionately similar to the number of talents among males) .
The ethic of concerted complaint ( what’s left of lefty activism, I suppose) that has infected so many social movements, along with the concomitant belief that if all things are not “equal” those on the margins are there due to the direct oppression of those who are not, seems to have led to a world where we can utter really stupid things in public; a not hugely talented cartoonist, already working in a medium not many people give a shit about, can actually suggest that they haven’t achieved the station they really want to because they’re female.
And let’s be honest, talks like these start with that premise. It’s the real reason why no one listens, promise.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know your grievances, and they’re so much more unusual and more articulate than anyone else’s, it’s a wonder you haven’t attained fame and fortune.
I missed you being away.
All right; my apologies. That was overly irritable.
Hollander isn’t necessarily my favorite cartoonist. But lots of people who aren’t my favorite cartoonists are very successful. She had lots of instances of folks telling her they didn’t want her strip because it was focused on women. That’s how sexism works. And it doesn’t just stop very talented people (as I judge talent) from being successful; its stops mediocre and downright bad people from being successful. Whether you make it big has way more to do with luck than with talent, and a big part of “luck” is who you happen to be and who you happen to know. And a big part of that is often what your gender happens to be.
The idea that everybody gets their due according to their talent is simply silly.
And yes, up to now there have been fewer women than men in comics. There are reasons for that which have to do with things other than God randomly reaching down and saying, “hey, let’s distribute more men here being artists and more women here being secretaries.”
And you can see the truth of this because in other cultures there are as many women as men who do comics.
I also find your complaints about the ethic of concerted complaint pretty funny. What do you do other than go on blogs and message boards and piss and moan about how the world is going to hell because this person doesn’t think exactly the way you do about Chris Ware or Abstract Comics or health care reform? You know and I know that if you had to stop complaining you’d puff up like a bullfrog with all the unreleased bile.
Re: “integration vs creating our own institutions” — The ideal situation would be integration into institutions that are re-worked so as not to be disproportionately advantageous to only one group of people. That is, if the institutions in place are already set up in favour of men (often white, straight men) then women and other marginalized groups aren’t going to get the best deal by simply joining those institutions.
That said, they’re not necessarily going to be able to change those institutions from the outside. While his idea of feminism essentially working towards a decentralization of power is definitely something to think on, I don’t quite follow Slightweight’s logic when it comes to his strategy of breaking down hierarchies. That is, I don’t understand how those hierarchies can be broken down without some presence in the mainstream, or creating a new mainstream, as mainstream is arguably the most influential/most read.
Wading into the comments here, I kind of get uncomfortable with the idea that the alternative to a male-dominated comics industry, as seen in America, is automatically comics by women and for women as exemplified in Korea and Japan’s comics industries. I admittedly have read very little manga (and I haven’t read any manhwa), but I frequently get the impression that they tend to get sorted into “for girls/women” and “for boys/men” categories.
Maybe it’s just my loathing for things like Twilight and gender-stereotyping in general, but the idea of developing similarly rigid genres for specific audiences doesn’t appeal to me. I think it’s partly just the nature of how targeting to a specific demographic tends to narrow down the content.
I.e., girls like romance, boys don’t, boys like explosions and violence, girls don’t, so let’s make the girls books all about romance and the boys books about adventure. Those can sometimes end up being self-fulfilling prophecies. Just look at the colour pink: it wasn’t until the 20th century it was believed to be an inherently feminine colour, and now the idea that “pink is for girls” is very much embedded into our culture.
That’s not to say there’s no value in media that is intended for a specific gender, but surely there must be a great deal of middle ground.
Hey Maddy. The problem you point out is the classic difficulty with integration; if you don’t try to integrate, how do you change the mainstream? On the other hand, if you’re in the mainstream, you’re in the mainstream, which has its own logic and makes change difficult.
I think the solution is not so much “a mix of both” as it is that there can be victories and defeats from both approaches, and I think different people are going to do the calculus differently depending on what’s most important to them.
Having said that…I think creating your own institutions can ultimately affect mainstream culture in various ways. It can be an inspiration or a model or it can offer people alternatives. Malcolm X was by no means irrelevant to civil rights, even if he wasn’t the mainstream figure that King was.
As for your second point…as I said to Caro, I think gender and genre are just really closely intertwined, and I don’t see that as being especially likely to change. That doesn’t mean that individual women and men don’t read lots of different things…but when categories get set up for widespread consumption, they do tend to get set up along gender lines.
I suppose it would be possible to look towards a more movie-like model for comics, where the gender lines are present but not necessarily as clearly drawn as in manga. But then you’ve got the problem that Hollywood doesn’t have a major tradition of women creators and directors….
The thing about manga is that the stuff for girls is so popular and so prevalent that it’s had a fair bit of success in crossing gender lines from the other side. Ranma 1/2 – by a women coming out of a shojo background in part — was a huge success among boys and girls. The women’s collective Clamp, who came out of a fangirl doujinshi background, has been very successful in creating comics that appeal (I think) first to girls, but also to large numbers of boys. It’s a case where a subculture for women (which initially had many of the kinds of gender interests that Dewayne talks about) got so big that it essentially went mainstream — not entirely on its own terms, but not entirely not on its own terms either.
Of course, though I’m a guy, I do like Twilight — and a lot more than I like a comic that tries to appeal cross-gender like Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman. Though, on the other hand, I like Marston’s WW more than either of those, and that was way more successful in appealing to boys and girls than Simone is…so it all just depends, I guess.
Let’s presume what we’re after here is a world where lots of women dig comics. You want some of these women to be talented artists, but mostly you’re interested in eager consumers who will support the women who want to be cartoonists and inspire more women to want to be cartoonists.
I agree to achieve that you really need women to have a commitment to cartooning itself. There are a lot of “women’s causes” vying for our attention, so there has to be something more than equality at stake to make women spend money and time on this one. I disagree, though, that the most important thing to do in order to get women interested in cartooning is to market gender-stereotyped material to them. Making them more welcome in the currently existing, male-stereotyped comics culture is also tremendously important.
It’s important to remember that the female gender-stereotype is significantly less homosocial than the male. While gender-normative male things are often about gender identity, gender-normative female things are usually about gender interaction. To invoke the most extreme genre stereotypes as an illustration: you can write an exciting (gendered male) superhero comic without a compelling female character, but you cannot write a sexy (gendered straight female) romance without a compelling male character.
But comics by men – art and genre – often are just men representing themselves to themselves. They’re men thinking about men’s identity, men’s pleasure, men’s angst. Engaging women readers has never been a goal. (Art comics probably has more people like Dash Shaw who on principle refuse to think about readers at all. What a tool.) The answer to women feeling excluded by that is not to say, “Oh, let’s have more women write comics for women. Women will like that better!” That’s like a man saying “oh, my dinner date felt excluded because I couldn’t talk about anything except myself and the football score. She clearly should only have dinner with other women.” No, she should just go out with more interesting men – men who actually want to talk to women. Women need to have the option of reading men cartoonists who actually want women to read their books, not just their own little ghetto of women’s comics.
(Disclaimer: the previous sentences could be gender reversed if I were posting this about a woman-dominated subculture. To no small extent “women’s fiction” is the same way, and the bifurcation plagues pop culture in general.)
I just have a “look to your own weakness, Horatio” reaction when men – even the ones who legitimately want women to participate – blame women’s disinterest on there not being enough comics “especially for girls.” To no small extent, women don’t read comics because comics-writ-large doesn’t care enough whether women read comics to reach out to women readers. Why exactly do you want women to appreciate comics, if you don’t really want to talk to us? If we’re to be pushed over to the girls-only drinking fountain? How come the men can’t write for us too (and vice versa)? Can the idiom really only handle stories that are gender-exclusive? If there’s no part of comics that’s really truly co-ed, you’re not going to get a critical mass of women interested. Straight women, at least. (I’m not going to try and speak for the ways comics culture does or does not exclude queer women or men like Dewayne who take principled oppositional stances as a matter of personal choice.)
I am optimistic about this getting better organically because I think there are increasingly more men cartoonists out there who are not onanistic little boys and I think women will want to read their books, and because I think that the traditional preference of women for text over pictures (a truism of porn studies) is getting weaker as our culture gets more visual overall. I don’t have any objection to simultaneously encouraging the creation of more “books for girls;” it just can’t be enough to have a “separate but equal girls comics.”
For the record, HU already does a lot of what I’m saying needs to happen: probably as much as it’s possible for a blog to do to make women feel more welcome in this particular corner of more-mainstream-than-it-used-to-be comics culture, so props to you for that, Noah.
” I don’t have any objection to simultaneously encouraging the creation of more “books for girls;” it just can’t be enough to have a “separate but equal girls comics.””
I guess my point is that, in places where there are a huge number of women creating comics that women and men read, it seems to have started with comics marketed especially for girls (which were at the start created by men like Tezuka, actually.)
The idiom can handle all sorts of stories. But genre is what genre is, and what genre is is very much tied up with gender. And genre is where you go for mass appeal.
“I just have a “look to your own weakness, Horatio” reaction when men – even the ones who legitimately want women to participate – blame women’s disinterest on there not being enough comics “especially for girls.””
I think American mainstream comics suck, largely because of their insularity, which is in turn about their narrow focus on a very narrow demographic, in terms of both gender and age.
But…there are comics especially for girls. And girls really like them, as far as I can tell. In addition, their quality is overall much higher than American comics for boys, in my estimation (I know Suat is writhing, but Clamp is better than Geoff Jones. That’s just how it is.)
The point again is that in Japan, the “separate” in “separate but equal” got so big that it wasn’t really separate anymore; it was kind of everything. Shojo appeals to guys too, as I can attest.
” If there’s no part of comics that’s really truly co-ed, you’re not going to get a critical mass of women interested.”
I just don’t think this is especially true. I don’t see women in any pop culture arena rushing to buy things because those things are so gender balanced. I mean…women’s magazines, Twilight, shojo, romance — this stuff doesn’t sell well because it’s carefully calibrated to reassure women that men are interested in it too.
“To no small extent, women don’t read comics because comics-writ-large doesn’t care enough whether women read comics to reach out to women readers. Why exactly do you want women to appreciate comics, if you don’t really want to talk to us? If we’re to be pushed over to the girls-only drinking fountain?”
I agree with bits of this…but genre is about pandering, not about talking. Reaching out to women readers is about giving them what they want, not engaging them in thoughtful discourse (and yes, the same applies to reaching out to male readers.) The way you show you’re interested in female readers is by providing the kinds of stories that female readers have historically shown that they’re interested in. I don’t think this is brain surgery.
“For the record, HU already does a lot of what I’m saying needs to happen: probably as much as it’s possible for a blog to do to make women feel more welcome in this particular corner of more-mainstream-than-it-used-to-be comics culture, so props to you for that, Noah.”
Aw, thanks. Though coffeeandink would disagree with you, alas….
“Art comics probably has more people like Dash Shaw who on principle refuse to think about readers at all. What a tool.”
Maybe. But Dash Shaw can create compelling characters both female and male, as Bottomless Belly Button, for example, well demonstrates.
There is a disconnect between what Shaw says about his motivations and the actual effect his (very readable IMO) comics have. As an artist, he’s no tool.
“The thing about manga is that the stuff for girls is so popular and so prevalent that it’s had a fair bit of success in crossing gender lines from the other side. Ranma 1/2 – by a women coming out of a shojo background in part — was a huge success among boys and girls.”
I realize you are probably talking about your perception of American comics culture, but its worth pointing out that Takahasi’s background in Japan is in books and titles aimed at men. Her first hit comic features a bikini clad woman who loses her top in the first chapter, and ran in Weekly Sh?nen Sunday.
In a sense, its more surprising that women like her comics than men, since, at least in America, back in the day, I can imagine that an editor at Marvel or DC would be instructing any female creators to take out the boring relationship bits, and add more fight scenes. Write it like Stan Lee!
We’re probably just dancing around matters of emphasis and scale here; I don’t hear anything in what you’re saying that precludes a both/and approach.
My personal experience is that I am far more likely to read a superhero comic handed to me by a man I like who really likes the comic than I am to click on that link down there at the bottom of this page with the pastel-shaded picture of some sort of manga elf. If someone I respect likes me enough to want to share it and is grown up enough to stay engaged with me even if I don’t like it as much as he does, that grown-up interaction will do more to make me read comics than all the girls comics in the world. Individual men have a lot of influence here, and they often let defensiveness get in the way of wielding it to the greater good. (The women at coffeeandink are the same phenomenon in reverse.)
More philosophically, I do think that the link between genre and gender is more fluid than you do. Even if you don’t accept that the genre ever really loses its gender marking, I think it is worth paying attention to the not-insignificant ways in which female gender performance very comfortably allows for drag.
There’s a lot of co-ed genre out there in fiction and movies. We’ve talked before about how gender blurring has been a theme in SF for at least a generation now. I think you could make the argument that the psychological thriller is actually gendered female. Women watch a lot of mystery and spy films, and I’m thinking about the success of The Avengers in the 1960s: it was campier than the “serious male spy shows” but it was very co-ed, and I think it changed the genre significantly.
I just think we’re better served seeing genre overall as playing with gender than as rigidly instantiating it…
Charles — Yeah, I’m just venting being pissed off about that TCJ 300 interview. I reviewed Mother’s Mouth back in 2006 when it first came out and liked it. But that interview made me want to have a ritual book burning on my front lawn.
I’ll try to forgive him. In a few months. Maybe.
Pallas, I guess I’d be interested as to who Takahashi’s influences were as well. Ranma just seems so clearly to be trying for both a male and female audience, but also coming out of a gender-bending tradition that starts with Tezuka’s shojo titles…but, as you say, my grasp of the gender/genre implications of Japanese work is not always what it should be.
Mystery is definitely as much (or more) of a female genre than a male one. The Avengers is a great example too — though James Bond films are still quite male oriented (though with male cheesecake that is intended to appeal to women too, I think.)
True enough. Mystery probably followed the trajectory you’re advocating for comics: there were cozies, and there were hard-boiled detective novels, and lots of people read both, and now it’s just a less gendered genre all around…
Oh, Noah..
I complain all the time, yeah, but I don’t present it as “truth in action”, working towards some kind of greater “social justice”. I don’t have that kind of non-profit funding, or University backing, I guess. People don’t organize “talks” around my complaints..
Anyhow, yeah, it’s clear that there is a disparity between the number of men vs. the number of women involved in cartooning. There’s a huge disparity that cuts the other way when it comes to sewing, scrap-booking and dance. So what?
To suggest that these disparities exist because of some concerted effort to marginalize, or any kind of systemic pressure that can be met with some kind strategy ( that seems to amount to the comfortable and “educated” telling the less-so what they ought to be thinking..) is just foolish. It’s more faith-based initiatives for lefty secularists.
There clearly is not some kind of hump that female cartoonists need to get over in order to get published, or be involved. I know for a fact that publishers on the literary end seek out female talent.
Go to SPX, MOCCA, or APE. There are plenty of women involved in all aspects.
And, let’s get real about this Slightweight character; It’s total incoherence, posturing as radical-chic. You need to ask these anti-hierarchical types why they all seem to worship Fort Thunder, and ape all the same stuff even beyond that.
“There clearly is not some kind of hump that female cartoonists need to get over in order to get published”
So Kramer’s does have more women than men in its pages? Odd.
“You need to ask these anti-hierarchical types why they all seem to worship Fort Thunder, and ape all the same stuff even beyond that.”
Dewayne knows and has worked with Fort Thunder people. He apes it in the sense that it’s the idiom he works in, not in the sense that he’s stealing from it, as you imply. You might as well ask manga artists why they “ape” manga conventions. Dewayne says nothing about being radically new; that’s your avant-garde baggage, not his. Though, when it comes to that, his artwork, which combines music, visual art, comics, dance, and performance, is as original as that of any comics artist I can think of.
In any case, you can be anti-hierarchical, or anti-mainstream, and be part of a tradition. There’s simply nothing incoherent about that.
Dewayne’s not especially interested in being radically new or in selling his crap to you. He’s interested in community and collaborative work. Your real objection is that you dislike the idea of community, you dislike the idea of female communities, and you really, really dislike the idea of queer female communities.
“People don’t organize “talks” around my complaints..”
So the tea-party convention didn’t happen, then?
Dewayne’s a “he”, Uland. You can repost with the correct pronoun usage if you’d like.
My crack about Fort Thunder really had more to do with pointing out how absurd it is to suggest that any one could do without “hierarchies”, which are nothing more than systems of value. This woman clearly values the work of a group of young, straight white males who met an institution of higher learning, over other notions of style.
I think the hypocrisy charge, which is what a lot of this boils down to, is just kind of silly. Dewayne works frequently with Edie Fake, who was at ground zero for Fort Thunder pretty much. And I think they both come out of a fine art tradition, and a performance art tradition, which is exceedingly queer and woman friendly. Claiming it’s all and only about Fort Thunder just demonstrates your provincialism, not theirs.
The problem with hierarchies, and with trying to separate from the mainstream in general, is a real one. James Baldwin talks about this in “The Fire Next Time”, when he points out that the Black Muslims couldn’t exist without the society they’re attempting to turn their backs on. But, as Baldwin also notes, that doesn’t mean the Muslims were wrong to turn their backs, or that that gesture was futile, or meaningless.
Hierarchy refers, as the term is usually used, to human pecking orders, and I don’t think it’s ridiculous to try to find ways to live that minimize those or try to work around some of them.
Something that is sort of lost in this conversation is the recognition that there are, actually, a fair amount of women in the comics industry at all levels, and in all genres.
It would have been interesting to have Independent Comic Artist gone Spiderman cover artist Abby Denson on the panel, or DC Editor Joan Hilty.
The question of gender fairness is not really a Comics Industry question, but one of society in general. Men represent men’s stories, and set that as societal norm, so any women looking to rise in the field will have to write/draw those stories too or be relegated to an inferior “girl’s” position.
It’s not just a wn/lose situation, because it is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Comics are for guys, so guys read comics, so comics are for guys,so guys read comics.
But what I, Abby and Joan have in common is that we work within the system AND outside it simultaneously. we create “stuff fo people who want to read it” which is potentially the most out-of-the box one can get in comics or manga.
I wish this were something that had an actual answer, but it really doesn’t. Comics here in the US will evolve to a different space than manga precisely because it’s not an answerable issue.
I look forward to this evolution, and wonder if it will make comics more inclusive, or even more of a niche than ever before.
Cheers,
Erica Friedman
Hungry for Yuri? Have some Okazu!
http://okazu.blogspot.com
Hey Erica. Thanks for stopping by. Sorry you got caught in the spam filter for a moment; not sure why that happened.
I think it’s certainly worthwhile to point out that there are women working in comics in various capacities, and to note that sexism isn’t only a comics problem. On the other hand…bad as they are in certain ways, I think books, magazines, television, movies, and music all do better in trying to reach out to women as audience members and in including women as some sort of creative presence. Obviously there are still major problems (women directors should be a lot more prevalent by all rights) but the fact that comics do worse than other comparable industries is telling — as is the fact that the way in which we did finally get viable comics for women in this country was by importing them from halfway around the world.
Noah – Thanks for finding my poor lost post. lol
It’s kind of obvious that once the playhouse is built, the first thing that goes up, the “no gurls allowed” or “no boyz allowed” signs go up. :-) Even if mom says you have to let your sister in, it’s not like she’s going to be “in.”
This playhouse was built by guys, it’s going to take a lot of us women to make the guys inside cool with playing with women and sometimes it’s just easier to build our own playhouses, ’cause boys are smelly anyway. :-)
The people at the tops of companies aren’t the one’s that are going to make the change – because few can really see their prejudices for what they are, so it means that all we can do is comment, and push, and comment, and do our own work and comment. And comment. And comment. Every time we note the sexism that’s inherent in comics as an industry, we take a step forward against it. Every time we make our own comics (and by we I mean anyone who has something to say that generi-comics don’t say) we take a step forward against it.
Each step is a step forward for comics. Period.
Cheers,
Erica
Hungry for Yuri? Have some Okazu!
http://okazu.blogspot.com
I’m so glad I got to read about Dewayne. I met him in 2004 at something called Pilot. I’m glad to hear that he’s still around making art.
He is! Except he’s changed his pronoun to she, and her name to Lee Relvas.
“Claiming it’s all and only about Fort Thunder just demonstrates your provincialism, not theirs.”
Bravo.
“hierarchical capitalist culture privileges sight” – Slightweight
A fine way of putting an important and interesting point.
I find validity in all three perspectives, four including Noah’s. I am glad he ended with the Korean women’s perspective. Many of us are aware of this reality in other markets. I am one that have always found it frustrating (given American’s role in Comics history) that the medium is so limited here.
I am reminded here though, that there are Comics markets in the US that I have no knowledge of. My wish is for family and friends to enjoy Comics as they do, motion pictures, words on a page, static images and sounds. This wish has helped me explore beyond my own interests. In hope that I find the comic suitable for others tastes. The result has been a broadening of my own interests more then finding the right comics for others.
I am interested in these other communities. Partly because I share values with them, not always found in the comics that speak to own aesthetics or narrative. So a modest dilemma appears. I fear my own curiosity and support of spirit may lead to voicing an opinion that contributes to audience input that corrupts a market not intent to accommodate my personal interests. However, it is intended to improve my most desired interest, diversity in Comics.
Realizing, my opinion on form and function in Comics is tightly controlled by my personal perspective has helped better support others work and others communities in Comics. Without trying to insist it all work well for me and work well for others. As if we all have the same tastes. I have always know this about everything else, but with Comics I have fooled myself into sometimes thinking, I am a consumer of diversity and Comics, there for I can assess the two in combination at all times. Clearly this was never the case and I am happy to be at point where I can appreciate more what I like as an individual and don’t need to do more, then gain enough knowledge of others works to see the potential for others in my life. Then they can follow that rabbit hole.
That said, the insiders game is just as important, because there is where much of my interest is and if I identify with Slightweight, but find this shared perspective void in the comics I otherwise love…well I will continue to feel as if I am not reading what I identify with. Not that that is entirely a bad thing.