University of North Texas (Web)
Time: May 2017
Venue: University of North Texas, Denton, TX
Proposals by September 01, 2016
- Keynote: Carol Tilley, Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The relationship between women and the comics industry is contested perhaps now more than ever before. Fresh conflicts in mainstream presses reveal lingering aversions to women creators, and fan-reactions to reboots demonstrate similar dis-ease with „non-canonical“ re-imaginings of female characters. Far from being novel, these tensions are rooted in the very history of western comics. From the Golden Age, women were erased or marginalized in comics through, for instance, the use of „gender-neutral“ monikers. Female characters were aesthetically constructed to meet and satisfy the male gaze and overwhelmingly, their narratives were penned by male authors.
Women readers of comics were historically „pandered to“ with romance comics but were otherwise ignored as a target audience. Even within the medium of graphic novels, where women’s work has arguably been more visible, women creators are being erased by industry-standard events like the Angoulême Festival. Here, as in other areas of popular culture, women are treated in very Aristotelian ways—at best, they are deemed to be monstrous derivatives of men, and at worst, they are Continue reading