Scholarship from print and digital culture, visual rhetoric, and media studies informs my feminist praxis as I deploy ethnographic, archival, and analytical methods to recover and amplify the voices of marginalized individuals. I am particularly drawn to the possibilities of serial publication to form communities, and both my published and forthcoming projects use analysis of paratexts, such as letter columns and digital comments, to track community formation over time. Comics, as pop culture texts, have an uncanny ability to cross boundaries of many kinds, connecting people across nations or providing insight into the links between the print and digital realms. My research examines and mirrors this boundary crossing, placing genres and forms that are seldom discussed together in dialogue with one another. Read more about my published work below. Check out my CV for book reviews, online scholarship, and forthcoming publications, including my two book projects.
Refereed Articles
LGBTQ Identity in the Correspondence Zone: Thinking Seriality with José Muñoz
This scholarly comic deploys the combination of sequentiality and simultaneity in the comics form to call attention to how the serial publication of single issues in a series can help marginalized readers build solidarity. By paying attention to the paratexts, the comic reveals the conversations about LGBTQ representation, printed in the letter columns of the Sandman series during the launch of the Vertigo imprint, that ushered in the idea of commercial comics as art.
English 177: Literature and Popular Culture, Introduction to the Graphic Novel
This section of English 177: Literature and Popular Culture, The Graphic Novel was designed to teach students to “make compelling arguments about and in various media” and to produce a “professional-like final product that represents their work to the world at large.” While twice weekly lectures by Professor Robin Valenza explored the development of the graphic novel as a genre, my section meetings focused on multimodal composition, helping students hone analytical skills and guiding them to create multimodal texts. After analyzing comics as multimodal texts, students worked in teams to interview members of the comics community–cartoonists, librarians, comics store owners, researchers, etc.–and craft documentary videos. The course mobilized the analytic potential of the comics form and its multimodal nature to encourage production of authentic texts that students viewed as having value beyond the classroom.
Breaking Barriers: Moving Beyond Orientalism in Comics Studies
Because the field of comics studies is still relatively new, critique of the rhetoric used by luminaries such as Scott McCloud and Paul Gravett pushes the study of comics closer to legitimation. Taking as my premise the assumption that criticism affects the development of its object of critique, I argue that Orientalism in the discourse of comics studies has been detrimental to the evolution of comics in the US. Orientalist rhetoric inscribes and partitions the East from the West, foreclosing the possibility of using Eastern subjects or styles in Western comics, and also presenting comics in both the US and Japan as monolithic and homogenous. If those who study US comics want to encourage further growth in their medium of study, then rather than perpetuating Orientalism, they need to recover cultural flow and the diversity of both manga and comics in the US. As critics open the door to cultural flow in their rhetoric, comics artists will be able to do the same for their techniques and subjects, learning from each other and growing the medium to reach its full potential
Book Chapter
Hands Across the Ocean: A 1970s Network of French and American Women Cartoonists
In 1976, the year after what the United Nations declared International Women’s Year (IWY), a comic by Sharon Rudahl called “Katy Cruelle,” originally published in English in an American women’s serial comics anthology, appeared in translation in a French women’s serial comics anthology. While the translation of a comic from English to French might at first seem unremarkable, the example of “Katy Cruelle” (called “Katy Cruel” in English) sheds light on how two communities of women cartoonists constructed genealogies of feminist media that stretched across time and space. The original publication of “Katy Cruel” appeared in the Bicentennial Issue of Wimmen’s Comix an American underground serial anthology created by and for women. The women included in the issue, edited by Rebecca Wilson and Barb Brown, adapted various marginalized media, from obituaries to popular songs and myths to letters, into comics form, positioning comics within a genealogy of American feminist media that stretched throughout time. When the translation appeared in the French anthology written by and for women called Ah! Nana, it appeared amidst comics by Italian, French, and English women, as well as alongside discussions of women in film, literature, theater, and television, positioning comics within a genealogy of contemporary feminist media that reached across the globe, from France to Canada and Russia to China. Paying attention to this network of women cartoonists reveals connections between American and French feminists in the 1970s that are often ignored in feminist cultural studies, while the anthology format captures a diverse representation of feminism within each culture.