Comic Art and Feminism in the Baltic Sea Region
This edited collection explores how the relationship between comic art and feminism has been shaped by global, transnational, and local trends, curating analyses of multinational comic art that encompass themes of gender, sexuality, power, vulnerability, assault, abuse, taboo, and trauma.
The chapters illuminate in turn the defining features of the aesthetics, materiality, and thematic content of their source material often expressed with humorous undertones of self-reflection or social criticism as well as recurring strategies of visualising and narrating female experiences. Broadening the research perspective of feminist comics to include national comics cultures peripheral to the cultural centres of Anglo-American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese comics, the anthology explores how the dominant narrative or history of canonical works can be challenged or deconstructed by local histories of comics and feminism and their transnational connections, and how local histories complement or challenge the current understanding of the relationship between feminism and comic art.
This is an essential collection for scholars and students of comics studies, women and gender studies, media studies, and literature.
Kristy Beers Fgersten is Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of Culture and Education at Sdertrn University.
Anna Nordenstam is Professor of Comparative Literature at Gothenburg University.
Leena Romu is a post-doctoral researcher at Tampere University.
Margareta Wallin Wictorin is Senior Lecturer of Cultural Studies at Karlstad University.
Routledge Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Comics
Series Editor: Frederik Byrn Khlert, University of East Anglia
Routledge Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Comics publishes original research in the areas of gender and sexuality studies as they relate to comics cultures past and present. Topics in the series cover printed as well as digital media, mainstream and alternative comics industries, transmedia adaptions, comics consumption, and various comics-associated cultural fields and forms of expression. Gendered and sexual identities are considered as intersectional and always in conversation with issues concerning race, ethnicity, ability, class, age, nationality, and religion.
Books in the series are between 60,000 and 90,000 words and can be single-authored, co-authored, or edited collections. For shorter works, the companion series Routledge Focus on Gender, Sexuality, and Comics publishes shorter-form books between 25,000 and 45,000 words.
Series editor Frederik Byrn Khlert is a lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia, where he is also the coordinator of the Master of Arts programme in Comics Studies. In addition to several journal articles and book chapters on comics, he is the author of Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics.
Comic Art and Feminism in the Baltic Sea Region
Transnational Perspectives
Edited by Kristy Beers Fgersten, Anna Nordenstam, Leena Romu, and Margareta Wallin Wictorin
www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Gender-Sexuality-and-Comics-Studies/book-series/GSC
Comic Art and Feminism in the Baltic Sea Region
Transnational Perspectives
Edited by
Kristy Beers Fgersten, Anna Nordenstam, Leena Romu, and Margareta Wallin Wictorin
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2021 selection and editorial matter, Kristy Beers Fgersten, Anna Nordenstam, Leena Romu, and Margareta Wallin Wictorin; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Kristy Beers Fgersten, Anna Nordenstam, Leena Romu, and Margareta Wallin Wictorin to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-48333-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-02496-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-03940-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
Contents
Kristy Beers Fgersten, Leena Romu, Anna Nordenstam, and Margareta Wallin Wictorin
PART I
Swedish feminist comics artists
Anna Nordenstam and Margareta Wallin Wictorin
Kristy Beers Fgersten
PART II
Gender, sex, and sexuality in German-language comics
Marina Rauchenbacher and Katharina Serles
Elizabeth Biz Nijdam
Anna Vuorinne
PART III
Non-binary and queer expression in comics
Anna Beckmann
Mike Classon Frangos
PART IV
Addressing violence in Finnish comics
Ralf Kauranen and Olli Lytty
Leena Romu
PART V
Memoir and remembering in Polish and Russian comics
Magorzata Olsza
Jos Alaniz
Jos Alaniz is Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has published two monographs, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (2010) and Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (2014); and two co-edited collections, Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (with Martha Kuhlman 2020) and Uncanny Bodies: Disability and Superhero Comics (with Scott T. Smith 2019). From 2011 to 2017, Alaniz chaired the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), a leading comics studies conference in the US. His current book projects include Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia and a history of Czech graphic narrative.
Anna Beckmann is currently working on her dissertation on forms of unreliability and ambiguity in comics at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School in Berlin. She is a member of the Berlin Comic Colloquium, the AG Comic Research of the Society for Media Studies, and the Society for Comic Research. In 2013, Beckmann supported the organisation of the 9th annual conference of the Society for Comic Research in Berlin, and from 2013 to 2015, she was a student assistant at the Humboldt University, leading a seminar on the Political Aesthetics of Comics. Beckmanns publications include the co-authored chapter, Aushandlungen von gender in der Hure h von Anke Feuchtenberger und Kathrin de Vries in
