Let’s hear it for the girls! Representations of girlhood, feminism and activism in comics and graphic novels

Gibson, Mel (2018) Let’s hear it for the girls! Representations of girlhood, feminism and activism in comics and graphic novels. MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, 1 (1).

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Abstract

Notions of agency and activism loom large of late in feminist debates; however, the relevance of such concepts to young women and girls in particular is often recuperated via the language of postfeminism, a manoeuvre which is pernicious in its deflation of a radical feminist politics. For this reason, I contend that the comics Sally Heathcote: Suffragette by Mary Talbot, Kate Charlesworth and Bryan Talbot (2014), Lumberjanes (2015-date) by Shannon Watters, Grace Ellis, Brooke A. Allen, Noelle Stevenson and others, and Ms Marvel (2014-date) where the creative team is also flexible (but is predominantly led by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona, with Sana Amanat as editor) collectively represent a vital intervention in terms of young feminist politics. In short: these three titles foreground agentic, activist and feminist perspectives which are aimed at specifically a young female audience. In what follows, through close reading, I will outline why this is important: for as Berry Mayall states regarding childhood, agency is the way that children are now seen as people who can make a difference through their individual actions, ‘to a relationship, a decision, to the workings of a set of social assumptions or constraints’. (Mayall 2002: 21)

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