Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips (Studies in Comics and Cartoons) - Softcover

Kirtley, Susan E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814257933 ISBN 13: 9780814257937

Verlag: The Ohio State University Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Winner, 2022 Charles Hatfield Award from the Comics Studies Society In the years following 1975, a group of female-created comic strips came to national attention in a traditionally male-dominated medium. Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women's roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. This impressive, engaging, and timely study illustrates how these comics express the complexities of women's experiences, especially as such experiences were shaped by shifting and often competing notions of womanhood and feminism. Including the comics of Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook's Comeek), Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I'm Coming From), Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), and Jan Eliot (Stone Soup), Typical Girls is an important history of the representation of womanhood and women's rights in popular comic strips.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan Kirtley is Professor of English at Portland State University.

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Individually and collectively the scope of these strips has not yet been considered in academic writing, but comic strips are certainly, as scholar Tom Inge points out, “well loved” (xxi). However, these artists “should also be respected for what they have contributed to the visual and narrative arts of the world” (“Comics as Culture” 191). Though comic art has until recently been largely overlooked by scholars, when examined closely, the form demonstrates a highly sophisticated structure of its own, linking text and image in complex and intriguing ways, and building a story that could not be related by text or image alone. Joseph Witek argues that comic art demonstrates “a highly developed narrative grammar and vocabulary based on an inextricable combination of verbal and visual elements” (3). This study will explore how this intriguing pairing of words and pictures creates a rhetoric of womanhood specific to the form.

Thus, this project, while acknowledging its limited focus on a small sampling of female comic strip creators’ work during a limited time period, seeks to offer a novel assessment of the historical moment during which the Women’s Rights movement became a national conversation (focusing on the 1970s and 1980s, in particular), demonstrating the ways in which the most prominent and widely read comic strips created by women of the time bolster stereotypes of gender and domesticity even as they challenged them, presenting complicated women struggling to reconceive of success and fulfillment amidst competing visions of female identity, femininity, and domesticity. The comic strips of Lynn Johnston, Cathy Guisewite, Nicole Hollander, Lynda Barry, Barbara Brandon-Croft, Alison Bechdel, and Jan Eliot offer a nuanced understanding of females coming to terms with the many competing demands and opportunities for women. When considered as a group and even within the individual strips, complications and incongruities abound. Main character Cathy campaigns for Dukakis, the Family Medical Leave Act, and better childcare options for working families even as she obsesses over her weight and hairstyle. Elly from For Better or For Worse struggles with tedium and lack of recognition in her role as a stay-at-home mother, but basks in the male attention she garners when she dresses up for a night on the town. Brandon-Croft’s characters worry about facial hair and police brutality. And Hollander’s Sylvia soundly criticizes sexist double standards while reinforcing tropes of shrewish female behavior even as Barry’s strip revels in the absurdity of courtship in a new landscape in which past rules and practices no longer apply. The protagonists of Stone Soup puzzle about the rituals of dating and double standards at the office.

How do we view these contradictions? What can be gleaned from reading newspaper comic strips created by women from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s? As these strips reveal a small accretion of daily truths, they can help develop a fuller understanding of the media’s conception of a particularly turbulent moment in American history—the Women’s Rights movement. Furthermore, this analysis focuses on comic strips, and thus both literally and more figuratively takes a “comic” point of view, the perspective that theorist Kenneth Burke argues is most “charitable” (Attitudes 107) and “most serviceable for the handling of human relationships” (106). Indeed, Burke’s notion of the various “frames of reference,” can prove a useful tool for interpreting and analyzing comic strips, as he argues that the frames specified in the analysis of literature can also usefully be applied to human relations, and that these assorted “attitudes” can shape the interpretation of experiences fictional and real. 

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The Ohio State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0814257933
• ISBN 13: 9780814257937
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 276
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland