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ABSTRACT
This essay compares the contributions by eight Indian and eight German-speaking visual artists to the 2016 issue of the all-women magazine Spring, an issue in which they reflect on gender roles, the titular ‘Elephant in the Room.’ Searching for transnational and national trends, I zoom in on three larger aspects: themes, genre, and visual style. Transnationally shared themes concern motherhood and female beauty standards. However, while artists across national and cultural borders ruminate about voluntary non-motherhood and engage expectations of feminine attractiveness, they differ in the extent to which they describe actually lived motherhood. The issue also shows culturally-specific beauty ideals, such as the Indians’ preoccupation with fair skin. In a similar way, artists from both continents use the genre of autobiography, but go to different depths with a notable ‘Indian’ preference to explore a grandmother’s past. Visually, too, the artists show interesting commonalities such as the tendency to tell their stories in a traditional comics format, yet the surface aesthetics differ. Whereas the Indian artists tend to employ a polished, fine-arts style, several German-speaking artists relish expressive abstraction. I provide possible reasons for these differences and end with an appraisal of how women artists might try to access the comics scene in the future.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. In using the word ‘gaze’ here, I am referring to the culturally-conditioned way of looking at things and people. Hence, the gaze both notices and imagines societal roles, it is what makes women, in Hillary Chute’s words, ‘both looking and looked-at subjects’ (Citation2010, 2).
2. This connects with some scholars’ critique who underscore the social aspects of what seems purely personal style. Jan Baetens (Citation2001), for instance, cautions, ‘[…] neither the ‘trace’ of the letter nor of the drawing is ever natural […] Graphic representation is a socialized act involving many codes and constraints. It is therefore not only the mechanical or modified reflection of a personality […]. Even if the drawing is very personalized or hyper-individualized, it is still as indirect as the writing itself’ (152).
3. Since the volume features English either as the only language or in translation, I use the provided English equivalents.
4. See, for example, Garima Gupta’s Hubbub in which a girl touching a cat hears the words ‘[…] such motherly touch this one has’ (2000), Ludmilla Bartscht's eponymous protagonist Juicy Lucy who confesses ‘I’m not sure if I want kids?’ (100), and one of Katrin Stangl’s Questions which asks ‘Do children make sense?’(16).
5. ‘marialuisa,’ written in lowercase and as one word, is the penname of Maria Luisa Witte.
6. Alternative terms for this genre are ‘autobiographical comics,’ ‘graphic life writing,’ and ‘autographics’ (see El Rafaie Citation2012, 5). I treat these terms as synonymous for the arguments made in this essay, the essential idea being that this genre uses the formal language of comics to tell and reflect on stories of personal memories and defining moments in a (comic) artist's life.
7. Some artists contributed multiple shorter pieces, therefore the number of stories exceeds the number of contributors in each group.
8. What distinguishes these three formats, especially illustration and drawing? I see illustration as a format that contains text, and accepts its primacy. Hence, Stangl’s act of ‘questioning’ in Some Questions is thematically and visually primary, the illustrations illuminate the text more than vice versa. In free drawing, the drawing does not give primacy to textual elements or often does not even possess any, as is the case in Pagalies’s Tempel. Especially with free drawing, I expect a product that is not just (relatively) ‘free’ of text, but also free of narrative harnessing. Instead, its goal is to visualise free-wheeling associations and affects, therefore its relative open-endedness of interpretation. Of course, form and narrativity are not necessarily yoked (i.e. there are non-narrative, abstract comics), but they often co-vary.
9. ‘Production Cooperative Glowing Future’ contains a sarcastic allusion to the GDR-specific term Produktionsgenossenschaft des Handwerks or productive cooperation of crafts, an economic cooperative model which had anything but a glowing future.
10. Embodiment is a hot topic in the discussion of many, especially autobiographical comics. As a representative example, see Elisabeth El Rafaie (Citation2012), specifically the second chapter.
11. Compare Klar (Citation2014) who asserts: ‘Especially the body-sign [Körper-Zeichen, i.e. the depiction of characters, J.L.] oscillates between iconicity – its pictorial similarity with reality – and symbolicity [Symbolizität] – conventional symbols’ (171, my translation).
12. This resonates with Philippe Marion’s notion of ‘mediagenius’ which Jan Baetens (Citation2001) describes as ‘the way in which the three notions of style, storytelling and medium are inevitably and necessarily intertwined and mutually dependent. None of these three elements can be defined without reference to the other two […]’ (146).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Julia Ludewig
Julia Ludewig is Assistant Professor of German at the Modern and Classical Languages Department at Allegheny College where she teaches all levels of language, literature, and culture classes. Her research interests focus on comics and graphic novels, language pedagogy, and environmental studies.