The new slow journalism of the moral draughtsman: Joe Sacco’s coverage of state sanctioned sexual violence

ABSTRACT

This article considers documentation of sexual violence as a war crime as exemplified by two pieces of nonfiction comics by Joe Sacco. In his introduction to Safe Area Goražde, Christopher Hitchens describes Sacco as ‘the moral draughtsman’ (Hitchens 2001, ii). Sacco’s comics journalism is built upon a testimonial impulse that Hitchens’ description captures. Readers of the comics are called to bear witness to many atrocities, including acts of sexual violence against Muslim women by Chetnik soldiers in Safe Area Goražde, and against Muslim men by American soldiers in ‘Iraq: Trauma on Loan.’ In both comics, the cartoonist visually and textually renders testimony of victims of sexual violence for forensic and epideictic testimonial purposes. However, Sacco’s representations of these scenes implicitly begs questions of ethics. Using theoretical insights borrowed from literature on comics journalism and testimonial non-fiction, this article examines the formal choices Sacco makes and considers critical contexts for the ethical implications of those choices.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• comics journalism
• rape/sexual violence
• Joe Sacco
• testimonio
• testimonial comics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sandra Cox

Sandra Cox is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Southeast Missouri State University. Her research examines the intersections of ethnicity, race, sex, gender, and sexuality in contemporary texts by U.S. American writers. That research has been published in a handful of edited volumes and appeared in the journals Antipodas, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Southwestern American Literature, Studies in American Indian Literatures, Red Feather, [inter]sections, Watchung Review, and most recently Postcolonial Interventions. Her first book, An Ethics of Reading: Interpretative Strategies for Contemporary Multicultural American Literature, was published in 2015. Dr Cox would like to thank Dr Susan Kendrick and Mr Joshua T. Horton for editorial assistance, and Fantagraphic Books and Henry Holt and Company for permissions to include images from Joe Sacco’s work.