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Abstract
This comic essay engages trans embodiment and temporality, representation and identity, passing, and drawing as a form of thinking. Although uncommon, comics have been established in academia as a genre worthy of literary study as well as scholarly inquiry in the broader humanities, social sciences, and the arts (Bukatman, 2012; Chute, 2010; Howard & Jackson, 2013; Cox, 2016). Recently, scholars have also studied the use of comics making as an analytical tool in qualitative research (Katz, 2013; Sousanis, 2015; Weaver-Hightower, 2013; Flowers, 2017; Henningsen, 2017; Johnson, 2018). This comic essay invites communication scholars to consider transgender embodiment and mobility through a visual medium that can illustrate complex problems of precarity, passing, and the crossing of both material and symbolic borders and boundaries. As a genre, comics allow for dense and layered information to be conveyed very quickly, and its affordances lend themselves well to portraying the tensions in and between trans and gender-nonconforming experiences. The speech bubble and the thought bubble, for example, can juxtapose in a single panel what two characters are saying to one another and what they are thinking and feeling as well as how they are interacting and communicating non-verbally. This graphic scholarship demonstrates why the unique genre of comics is particularly apt in rendering instances of microagression or passing. I argue that comics as a form enable a shift from abstract concepts back into the body, the materiality of which can get lost in academic discourse.
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Notes
Notes
Page 442: The character in the first panel thought bubble is Kadin Henningsen, drawn in his style, and his quote is from an MLA panel presentation he did as a performative comic. For other academic work drawn as a comic, see for example, Flowers, Katz, Sousanis, and Wilson and Jacot.
Page 444: El Refaie (4). The full quote reads, “the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one’s self necessarily involves an intense engagement with embodied aspects of identity, as well as with the sociocultural models underpinning body image.” She terms the practice of engaging with one’s identity through drawing self-portraits “pictorial embodiment.”
Page 448: Flowers (textual quote from p. 32 and drawings copied from p. 31). Flowers writes, “Inhabitation extended my analysis to include sharing in the production of corporeal forms of agency that emerged during fieldwork. … Comics making was an explicit means for me to show and experience these more tacit ways of knowing about complex terms like agency, identity, and meaning-making” (32); quote from Sousanis (Unflattening 78) and drawing copied from Sousanis (Unflattening 9).
Page 449: Quoted in Wilson and Jacot (151–52), which is an interview with Joe Sacco in comic form. Sacco is referring to his experiences of witnessing violence and conflict and then recreating them through drawing as a journalist. The trauma of experiencing direct violence is distinct from the vicarious trauma of witnessing it. As Sacco’s quote suggests, drawing forces one to inhabit every part of an interaction, which he argues makes the vicarious trauma more intense.
Page 451: McDonald (2). You can find more of Favianna Rodriguez’s work at favianna.com and more from Micah Bazant at micahbazant.com.
Page 452: The suggestions I include on this page for how to engage comics making are based on the training and practice Flowers and I have shared and those she offers in her 2017 article.