Body/Images - Foreign/Gazes: (Feminine) Territoriality and CorpoGraphy in Latin American Graphic Narratives

In the last two decades, graphic narratives have become a prominent artistic space of feminist resistance in Latin America. Although the comics scene is still dominated by male artists and readers, women are increasingly using the medium to question hegemonic and heteronormative social structures and repressive visualities. This examination of (neo)colonial relations, patriarchy, and reproductive rights in Latin America is taking place in a region whose history and geographic toponomy is marked by the allegorical 'feminization' of lands and territories. Many of these processes are carried out through repressive visualities, not least in comics, a medium where women's bodies have historically been subjected to the (White) male gaze. Nevertheless, the graphic language of comics, with its multimodal nature, allows for a critical but also ironic and playful subversion of hegemonic visual and textual traditions. These reasons indicate why comics have become a highly effective artistic tool for diverse political movements such as the Argentinean 'green wave' protests.

This project has a three-fold dimension: (A) It explores the publishing and gatekeeping strategies as well as platforms Latin American women use to circulate their graphic art, paying special attention to the role of social media and to the formation of transnational collectives. (B) Through an extensive archival research, it examines the transmedial dialogues established with hegemonic/colonial art traditions, repressive visualities, and Indigenous and African iconographies, focussing especially on the representation and resignification of the female body. Finally, (C) the project asks how these comics contribute to feminist protest culture and political resistance in the Global South, pointing to the leading role that Latin America has in fourth-wave feminism and showing how the graphic forms of protest have become a role model internationally.