Introduction: Queer about Comics
2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00029831-4564274
ISSN1527-2117
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Feminism, and Media
ResumoThere’s something queer about comics. Whether one looks to the alternative mutant kinships of superhero stories (the epitome of queer world making), the ironic and socially negative narratives of independent comics (the epitome of queer antinormativity), or the social stigma that makes the medium marginal, juvenile, and outcast from “proper” art (the epitome of queer identity), comics are rife with the social and aesthetic cues commonly attached to queer life. Moreover, the medium has had a long history as a top reading choice among those “queer” subjects variously called sexual deviants, juvenile delinquents, dropouts, the working class, and minorities of all stripes. Despite this, comics studies and queer theory have remained surprisingly alienated from each other. On the one hand, classical comics studies’ tendency to analyze the formal codes of sequential art separately from social questions of sexual identity and embodied difference has often led to a disregard for a nuanced queer and intersectional critique of the comics medium. On the other, the prevailing assumption that mainstream comics (namely, the superhero genre) embody nationalistic, sexist, and homophobic ideologies has led many queer theorists to dismiss comics altogether or else to celebrate a limited sample of politically palatable alternative comics as exemplars of queer visual culture. In this logic, “Queer zines, yes! Superhero comics, no!”This alienation—at times even antagonism—evinces a failure of recognition in the current development of scholarship rather than a true gulf between the foundational questions and concepts of the two fields. The conceptual and historical intersections of queer theory (and sexuality more broadly) and comics culture, in both its visual and narrative production and its fan communities, are rife and rich. At every moment in their cultural history, comic books have been linked to queerness or to broader questions of sexuality and sexual identity in US society. In the 1930s and 1940s Wonder Woman visually celebrated S-M practices and same-sex bonding between women, metaphorized through the image of the chained, shackled, or bound submissive; in the late 1940s and early 1950s crime and horror comics presented what was arguably the most antisocial critique of postwar domestic life outside of noir cinema, spectacularizing forms of violence, gore, and criminality that radically upended the ideals of nuclear-family harmony and the sublimation of desire in material goods; in the late 1950s Mad magazine elicited affective pleasure in the satiric critique of the nuclear family and its blatant refusal of the Cold War security state; in the 1960s and 1970s Marvel Comics revitalized the superhero comic book by infusing its art with the visual politics of gay and women’s liberation while the artists who contributed to the Wimmen’s Comix anthology (1972–92) brought a radical sexual politics to the visual culture of comic books; and from the 1960s to contemporary times, gay, lesbian, and queer culture has taken up comics as sites of sexual pleasure, such as in the graphic sex narratives of Tom of Finland and the cartoonists inspired by him, many of whom testify to beginning their cartooning by tracing and imaginatively redrawing the male figures they encountered in superhero comics. These latter crosscurrents now flow strongly in both directions, as evidenced by the recent proliferation of explicitly LGBTQ characters and scenarios in contemporary comics from the X-Men’s “legacy virus” (a potent metaphor for HIV/AIDS) to the lesbian Batwoman and the gay Green Lantern. Moreover, the ubiquity of the medium—comic books being among the most mass-produced and circulated print media of the twentieth century—alongside its simultaneous stigmatization as the presumed reading material of a small slice of immature youth and social outcasts, models Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1990) now-classic formulation of queerness as both a universalizing and a minoritizing discourse: anyone and everyone can be queer, but actual queers are a minority group in the larger culture; similarly, comics end up in the hands of nearly everybody, but comic book readers are a niche (read: queer, nerd, outcast, weirdo) group.As this broad sketch of comics’ queer attachments suggests, rather than needing to be queered, comics themselves “queer” the archive of US culture. Encounters between queer theories and comics studies potentially offer broader historical assessments of how the literary medium of comics, and its larger aesthetic and production history, might be understood as a distinctly queer mode of cultural production that has functioned as queer history, rather than its serialized supplement. When we understand the history of sexuality and the history of comics as mutually constitutive, rather than merely reflective or coincidental, we can gain insight into the ways that the comic book medium’s visual structures not only lend themselves to questions of sexuality and sexual identity but have also taken shape historically in response to transformations in the history of sexuality.The coeditors’ aim for this special issue has been to elicit sustained theorizations of the pairing of queerness and comics, and explorations of the implications of that pairing for reading American literature as well as for queer theory, queer politics, and comics studies. Among the questions we consider to be fecund for exploring what’s queer about comics—and what aspects of comics represent and give meaning to queerness—are the following: How might a medium made up of the literal intersection of lines, images, and bodies capture the values of intersectional analysis? How do comics’ attention to the visual orientation of images in space model a conception of sexual orientation—especially in relation to race and gender, since all these are coordinates of embodied being not truly “present” on the two-dimensional page but signified and referred to by combinations of text and image? How might the medium’s discontinuous organization of images map onto disability’s discontinuous relationship to heterosexual able-bodied existence? How might the medium’s courting of marginal and outsider audiences allow for the formation of queer counterpublics? How do the comics medium’s formal properties provide material analogies for or creatively materialize and literalize seemingly formless experiences of nonnormative erotic desire, pleasure, and intimacy? These questions only begin to scratch the surface of productive encounters between comics studies and queer studies, but they suggest a synthetic approach to comics that considers the medium’s queerness as opening out into a variety of formal and narrative experiments that have attempted to deal with the problem of being literally and figuratively marginal or “queered” by social and political orders.In the interest of developing some of these links, we would like here to map a few of the primary sites where we see queerness as a social/affective force intersecting productively with comics as a medium. This list functions merely as a starting point for identifying those locations where queerness—understood variously as a social force, a complex network of erotic and affective ties, or an entire shared culture—appears intimately bound up with the formal and narrative capacities of the comics medium.Each of these areas of nexus is rich unto itself and allows scholars working at the intersection of queer theory and comics studies to talk about a range of things—from the cultivation of rarefied fan communities, to the production of queer intimacies between readers and fantasy characters, to formal and representational feats that lend themselves to being articulated to the depiction of nonnormative or queer orientations to the world.Following is an example of how a reading attentive to these vectors of confluence reveals that the most quotidian—or what we could heuristically propose as paradigmatic—encounter with even mainstream superhero comics is replete with queer meanings. Figure 1 shows the cover of the first comic book that coeditor Darieck Scott remembers buying as a child. This cover features Nubia, the iconic superhero Wonder Woman’s black twin sister, who debuted in 1973 (Bates and Heck 1973; the cover artist is Nick Cardy). Nubia was in many ways a failed superhero character. She appeared on this cover and in a part of DC Comics’ bid during the bronze age (c. 1970–84) to broaden its consumer audience, to capitalize on the apparent success of Blaxploitation films, and to signal that the fantasy world of DC Comics, like that of its rival Marvel Comics, was engaged with “real” contemporary developments like racial integration and the emergence of the site of the black ghetto in US cultural discourse. The character Nubia, however, unlike other DC Comics 1970s assays in racial diversity such as now-mainstay character John Stewart, “the black Green Lantern,” gained little traction, disappearing from Wonder Woman after three issues and never becoming a frequently recurring secondary or even tertiary character in DC’s fantasy world. Yet Nubia’s apparent inability to capture the attention of her creators (Don Heck, penciller; Cary Bates, the principal writer; and Robert Kanigher, the editor) did little to prevent the character from becoming a template figure for a range of fantasies of black power and beauty proliferating in a fan counterpublic—a fandom aware of its “subordinate” or “alternative” status within the larger counterpublic of never-quite-mainstream Wonder Woman fans. Typing “Nubia Wonder Woman” into an internet image search nets you pages of fan-created images of the character, as well as references to the web page for “Nubia, the Illustrated Index” (Strickland n.d.). (A recent book on comics by Deborah Elizabeth Whaley [2015], Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime—reviewed in this special issue—devotes seven-plus pages to considering Nubia.)Scott, unaware of this context or this future for Nubia when he was first powerfully attracted to the cover image, became an initiate of Nubia’s counterpublic in a way that can scarcely be understood without the assistance of queer theory. Having had no previous exposure to Wonder Woman as a six-year-old in 1973, Scott was entranced by, desirous of, and identified with this image of a dark-skinned, glamorous, powerful black woman warrior. Nubia was the kind of black and queer object of desire that contributor andré carrington describes in his essay, “Desiring Blackness: A Queer Orientation to Marvel’s Black Panther, 1998–2016.” It was also, significantly, and in the paradigmatic manner in which comics provide sources of fantasy for their readers of whatever age, an education instantiating such desire, before Scott could have named black and queer as objects of desire, in a world that, of course, makes the satisfaction of such desires exceedingly difficult. Scott’s attraction to this cover image and to Nubia’s story inaugurated a fantasy of black power and black beauty, conjunctions that could not appear as other than at least partly if not wholly fantastic within what was apparent even to a child as an antiblack “real” world. Here, then, we see a comic operating precisely as a queer orientation device, productively directing young Scott and other readers both then and later toward new desires for fantasy counterworlds that rebel against the constraints of everyday life.But of course the cover image is also shot through with the discourses of antiblackness, signaled by its use of well-worn tropes that enable a much more demoralizing reading. Above we note that queer orientation devices direct readers toward “deviant bodies” as much as new desires, and here we can discern, not without dismay, the price that deviance pays even in fantasy, when measured on a scale of value that pushes against but cannot escape the racist contexts of its creation. Apart from the interesting choice of “Nubia” as the character’s name, the otherwise glorious leopard-skin skirt here functions, through signifying wildness, animality, and their overdetermined exemplars the “jungle” and “Africa,” as though it were a kind of transnational or supranational costume of blackness—a blackness and an Africa made powerful by the fact that Nubia is powerful, a wildness and animality rendered glamorous by her superheroic aura. These associations open the image to fully justified accusations of caricature and stereotyping. (Importantly, this costume appears only on this cover, where Nubia’s identity has to be established with a minimum of text or story contextualization; in fact, Nubia never appears in this costume in the comic books and instead wears feminized Roman armor.) At the same time, this concatenation of effects and affects is flanked by the presence of the sword and the Roman-helmeted villain in ghost form looming behind, linking them to the familiar imagery of the classic ancient world and to classical evocations of mythic heroism: in such a way that the combined Barthesian studium and punctum, as it were, of the image achieves what Kobena Mercer (1994, 200–201) says (provisionally) of some of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men, where men “who in all probability” come from the disenfranchised, disempowered late-capitalist underclass are “in the blink of an eye” “elevated onto the pedestal of the transcendental Western aesthetic ideal.”On Wonder Woman’s cover Nubia appears historyless, except insofar as her history is that of repeated iterations of racialized types—with all their dangers, harms, and eked-out pleasures—and of largely (but not only) malignant metonyms. The frisson of excitement and pleasure beholding Nubia in 1973—and even now—is the effect of the projections her mute two-dimensional figure invites. As an entirely new superhero then and a rarely featured one now, her image is an example of how the comic book form or the sequential graphic narrative form appeals for and requires the participatory imagination of the reader-viewer. We are invited to imagine the world that makes a powerful black Wonder Woman possible, and from there, we are asked to imagine her presence in the “real” world and the wrongs that her power and beauty might right. Moreover, we are, perhaps, even encouraged to identify with both this black Wonder Woman and her potential power (which may lie ultimately in her very ability to incite endless fabulation on the part of the viewer).In a different time and context, yet with parallel resonance, Fawaz remembers his own first comic book reading experience in 1998, when he encountered the X-Men, a cadre of mutant outcasts gifted with extraordinary abilities due to an evolution in their genetic makeup. Fawaz was thirteen years old when he picked up X-Men #80, the series’ thirty-fifth anniversary issue (Kelly and Peterson 1998), at a local comic book shop in Tustin, California, and beheld its radiant holographic pink cover depicting a tower of dazzling, disco-attired superheroes (see fig. 2). At its center appears the steel-plated Colossus carrying the puckish warrior Wolverine aloft his impossibly muscular arm, with the teleporting blue elf Nightcrawler leaping upward near their feet; surrounding this trio are an explosive group of superhuman woman warriors, the intangible Shadowcat, the weather goddess Storm, the nigh-invulnerable powerhouse Rogue, and the bone-wielding rebel Marrow. Growing up in a queer family, sibling to a gay brother, and bullied to tears on a daily basis for his own exuberant gayness, Fawaz immediately connected with the words “A team reunited . . . a dream reborn” emblazoned on that cover, which spoke to him of the promise and possibility of queer kinship and solidarity in the face of overwhelming odds. Above all, what struck Fawaz about that cover was the sheer variety of characters depicted—how could a man made of steel, an intangible woman, a white-haired weather goddess, a butch teen girl with bones sticking out of her skin, and a teleporting blue elf be any kind of a team? Who were these people, and what dream did they share? Almost demanding an act of critical fabulation from its reader, the image elicits a desire to understand how disparate, monstrous mutant heroes might act in concert. In less lofty yearnings, the fantasy of standing atop the arm of a muscle-bound Adonis surrounded by powerful mutant women, in pink holographic form, was at least one gay boy’s dream come true.Like so many readers of the X-Men series over the decades, no character drew Fawaz in more than the weather goddess Storm, a Kenyan-born immigrant to the United States, the first black woman superhero in a mainstream comic book, and the X-Men’s team leader by the 1990s. In that same anniversary issue, at a low point in the team’s battle with an imposter group of X-Men, Storm rallies her bruised and beaten comrades by reminding them that what defines their bond is a set of shared values, a chosen kinship maintained through mutual love and respect, not by force or expectation. With his budding left-wing consciousness, on one side, and his attachment to queer family, on the other, Fawaz fell in love with this fictional mutant goddess and her team: this was the kind of community he longed for. What was it about the visual and narrative fantasy offered by a mainstream superhero comic book circa 1998 that could allow a thirteen-year-old Lebanese American suburban gay boy to so deeply and sincerely identify with an orphaned, Kenyan, mutant immigrant X-Man? If one were to try and explain this question by turning to recent public debates about superhero comics, we might put forward the answer, diversity. Yet this term and its shifting meanings—variety, difference, or representational equality—would have rung false to Fawaz’s teenage ears. It was not simply the fact of Storm’s “diverse” background as Kenyan, immigrant, woman, or mutant that drew Fawaz to her but rather her ethical orientation toward those around her, her response to human and mutant differences, and her familial bond with her fellow X-Men. These were distinctly queer attachments in that they were grounded in the terms of alternative intimacy, kinship, and belonging. Both the cover image and the narrative that unfolded behind allowed for multiple queer attachments to intermingle at once, from affective aspirations for alternative community, to burgeoning erotic desires for a range of superhuman male bodies, to cross-gender and racial identifications.These two examples of readerly identification and fabulation underscore a well-worn yet endlessly generative fact about the comics medium: the participation of the reader in completing the story usually is invited to occur between separate panels of images, in the “gutters.” Scott McCloud (1993, 60–74), a pioneer in theorizing the comic book form, calls this structural element in sequential-art comic book storytelling “closure.” McCloud identifies six different kinds of panel-to-panel transitions that insist on the reader’s imaginative contribution of completion to story elements: moment-to-moment transitions; action to action; subject to subject; scene to scene; aspect to aspect; and non sequitur (i.e., no apparent sequential relation). To return to Scott’s example, Nubia’s cover image is not strictly speaking an instance of this kind of structure of graphic storytelling, since Nubia here is iconic, presented in the recognizable postures of the adored superhero, rather than placed in a sequence. Yet the function of the gutter is taken up within the “panel” itself by Nubia’s clear mirroring of Wonder Woman in all but skin color and costume, a repetition with a difference that asks to us to consider the sibling relationship announced in the caption between the two characters and to ponder at once the possibilities and the limits of their equality. It is possible to see that in fact there are transitions from McCloud’s taxonomy in operation: an implied action-to-action transition, because Wonder Woman and Nubia have their swords raised and appear to be charging each other; a subject-to-subject transition, because the characters are divided by the sword and because they are presented as radically differentiated mirror images of each other; and perhaps even a non sequitur transition, precisely because of the image’s invitation to see the characters as so radically different, a difference underlined and intensified by the unnecessary presence of the leopard-skin skirt, which acts like a multiplier of racialized difference and an elaborate stage-hook begging us to pull stereotypes into the frame.Once you open the cover and read the story within, Nubia’s history is the same modern reimagining of the mythological as Wonder Woman’s—she, too, was fashioned from clay and breathed into life by the gods, just darker clay than that of the pink-skinned Diana. The dividing sword and its gutter-within-the-panel function may illustrate how Nubia’s character and image are engaged in an act of “crossover,” just as pre-hip-hop black recording artists like Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Prince were often measured—and criticized—by the fact that the buyers of their records were not just black but included a significant white fandom. As such a crossover (though in reverse with respect to the positions and numbers of creators and consumers), Nubia registers in ways that always retain an element of being seen as different from white. She provides a template for a fantasy wherein blackness and black woman-ness are powerful, beautiful, and glamorous but largely within the limits of a perspective founded in Negrophilia (at best) and Negrophobia (at worst). This is not without powerful affective charge, especially in a genre like superhero comics in 1973 (and now), where the image of a black woman as heroic or powerful is uncommon and arguably actively repressed; but the image’s work at the level of empowering anti-antiblack fantasy is perhaps either foreclosed or too much deferred by its appeal to either a notion of equality that smuggles in alongside it whiteness as the standard or to a fairly simple inversion of black-versus-white values. The cover image’s formal comic book queerness, though, throws open and makes at least ephemerally manifest what racialized modes of beholding foreclose and defer. The repetition within the cover image, its mirroring and reversal of mirroring, is also an education about the proximities of the supposed gulf between races (the image makes Nubia’s difference from Diana one of coloring process and costume only) and as a microcosm of the seriality of comics representation, where the stories and images, as they extend and repeat with alterations from issue to issue, in the hands of different pencillers, writers, inkers, and colorists—both professional and fan—allow for no fixity of image, form, or meaning.Hence, we can find in reading this image and the palimpsest of many readings that layer it from 1973 on, or in a holographic X-Men cover and the affective aspirations of its teenage viewer, paradigms of comic book fandom—a young boy buys a comic book and falls in love with superheroes—and an illustration of how that paradigm, by usual accounts masculinist, covertly raced along the lines of white supremacy (i.e., baseline human is white), and imbued with a nostalgia conducive to any number of wicked conservative politics, is far queerer than it may appear. The stories we have recounted are actually that of a black and a Lebanese American boy’s introduction to superhero comics happening via identification and disidentification (in the sense of José Esteban Muñoz [1999, 31]) with an image of a female character presented as “black” and in a context where this image is a novelty within the pantheon of superheroic images, since few black-appearing characters grace comic book covers (significant exceptions being Marvel’s Luke Cage in 1972 and John Stewart on a Green Lantern cover in 1971). In this light, the marginal appearance in a marginal, dismissed-as-childish genre of representation rendered that marginal world of comics a world for Scott’s and Fawaz’s own differences—of blackness in an antiblack world and of cross-gender identification in a misogynist world that punishes boys for “girly” behavior as it constantly punishes cisgendered girls as “inferior.” Thus, this particular paradigm of comics fandom is a story of queer intimacy among character, reader, genre, and form.What is most striking and generative about the collection of essays brought together in this special issue is the vast range of conceptual maneuvers they accomplish. Some of the essays provide fully formed queer theories of comics form. Others develop meticulous close readings attuned to the eruption of queerness on the comics page, thereby teaching us how to read comics for their capacity to represent or make visible nonnormative desires, intimacies, and affiliations in ways that might elude other mediums. Yet others track how comics provide an archival visual history of the shifting nature of sexuality in the United States. All make explicit how the formal terms and conceits by which serial comics operate—including sequentially unfolding panels, multidirectional modes of reading, long-form serial narratives, and admixtures of text and image, among others—are repeatedly articulated to the central questions of queer theory, including the relationship of embodiment to desire, the legibility of queer intimacies, and the struggle to make queer modes of living and affiliating both representable and desirable. Rather than offering a single unified queer theory of comics or merely tracking individual representations of queers in comics, these essays model the variety of ways that comics produce their own visual theories of queer desire.“Desiring Blackness: A Queer Orientation to Marvel’s Black Panther, 1998–2016,” by andré carrington, deftly handles the sometimes dissonant registers confronting comics scholarship. The essay takes seriously the notion that something as apparently ephemeral as fantasy and as supposedly childish as superheroes is immersed in, emerges from, partakes of, and comments on lived realities such as race and the discourses that construct those realities. Focusing on the divergent treatments of Black Panther comics by authors Christopher Priest (1998–2003) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (2016) of the title character’s black female comrades-in-arms, carrington interrogates how race consciousness and colonial legacies inform the discourses of desire operating within the comic. carrington’s Black Panther is a fantasy of an African past not subject to European colonialism and of an African utopian present and future that imagine their own forms of queer relationships. carrington brings the often contradictory influences and intertexts shaping Black Panther comics together in a meditation on the limits and possibilities of desiring what—from an Afro-pessimist point of view—is structured as the undesirable: blackness. carrington notes how utopian fictions often posit or assume the transcendence of racial distinctions, though the resulting representation frequently, and nigh universally, depicts a kind of assimilation that evacuates racial distinctions of all meaning, such that utopias, if they consider racial conflict at all, usually posit that the horrors of racism are defeated by eliminating the cognizance of race altogether. This common utopia-constituting move at once evidences an emancipatory imagination (and emancipatory politics) and a fundamental antiblackness that can name blackness only as something undesirable. carrington is interested in how the utopian imagination can maintain racial distinction while still fulfilling, or aiming toward the fulfillment of, utopia’s promises of a better, more just society; how in the utopian imagination of Black Panther comics, though blackness cannot free itself from the anti-blackness that informs and forever subtends it, blackness nevertheless becomes desirable.In “‘Flesh-to-Flesh Contact’: Marvel Comics’ Rogue and the Queer Feminist Imagination,” Anthony Michael D’Agostino argues that the comic book superhero can function as a highly generative conceptual resource for queer theory’s investigation of unruly or “rogue” identifications across embodied and cultural differences. D’Agostino conducts a breathtakingly crystalline reading of a single superheroic fantasy figure, the infamous and beloved character Rogue from Marvel Comics’ long-running X-Men series, which follows the adventures of a cadre of genetically evolved (or “mutant”) superheroes who are socially outcast from humanity. Within the long history of superhero comics narratives, D’Agostino argues, Rogue’s superhuman ability to absorb the psyches and mutant powers of others has functioned as an extended meditation on the possibilities, risks, and pleasures (both erotic and affective) of coming into contact with those who are unlike us, and consequently it allows us to forge identifications that may alter the very fabric of our being with unexpected results. He compellingly argues, “Rogue coheres as a metafictional figure not just for the specific heroes she touches but for the superhero genre’s general conception of superhuman power as consubstantial with a nonnormative body, which is produced through transformative contact that renders differences mobile across a blurred boundary between subject and object.” In so doing, D’Agostino suggests that increasingly fraught and defensive postures toward appropriation, assimilation, and other modes of presumably unethical identification with others in contemporary queer politics and theory are productively unsettled by superheroes, fantasy figures with whom we develop deep affective attachment because of their bodily vulnerability to outside forces. D’A
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