Drawing the body in: A comic essay on trans mobility and materiality. Councilor, K. Women's Studies in Communication, 41(4):441–453, October, 2018. Citation Key Alias: lens.org/073-012-211-786-303, pop00225 tex.type: [object Object]
Drawing the body in: A comic essay on trans mobility and materiality [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
This comic essay engages trans embodiment and temporality, representation and identity, passing, and drawing as a form of thinking. Although uncommon, comics have been established in academia as a genre worthy of literary study as well as scholarly inquiry in the broader humanities, social sciences, and the arts (Bukatman, 2012; Chute, 2010; Howard & Jackson, 2013; Cox, 2016). Recently, scholars have also studied the use of comics making as an analytical tool in qualitative research (Katz, 2013; Sousanis, 2015; Weaver-Hightower, 2013; Flowers, 2017; Henningsen, 2017; Johnson, 2018). This comic essay invites communication scholars to consider transgender embodiment and mobility through a visual medium that can illustrate complex problems of precarity, passing, and the crossing of both material and symbolic borders and boundaries. As a genre, comics allow for dense and layered information to be conveyed very quickly, and its affordances lend themselves well to portraying the tensions in and between trans and gender-nonconforming experiences. The speech bubble and the thought bubble, for example, can juxtapose in a single panel what two characters are saying to one another and what they are thinking and feeling as well as how they are interacting and communicating non-verbally. This graphic scholarship demonstrates why the unique genre of comics is particularly apt in rendering instances of microagression or passing. I argue that comics as a form enable a shift from abstract concepts back into the body, the materiality of which can get lost in academic discourse.
@article{councilor_drawing_2018,
	title = {Drawing the body in: {A} comic essay on trans mobility and materiality},
	volume = {41},
	issn = {0749-1409},
	shorttitle = {Drawing the body in},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1556979},
	doi = {10.1080/07491409.2018.1556979},
	abstract = {This comic essay engages trans embodiment and temporality, representation and identity, passing, and drawing as a form of thinking. Although uncommon, comics have been established in academia as a genre worthy of literary study as well as scholarly inquiry in the broader humanities, social sciences, and the arts (Bukatman, 2012; Chute, 2010; Howard \& Jackson, 2013; Cox, 2016). Recently, scholars have also studied the use of comics making as an analytical tool in qualitative research (Katz, 2013; Sousanis, 2015; Weaver-Hightower, 2013; Flowers, 2017; Henningsen, 2017; Johnson, 2018). This comic essay invites communication scholars to consider transgender embodiment and mobility through a visual medium that can illustrate complex problems of precarity, passing, and the crossing of both material and symbolic borders and boundaries. As a genre, comics allow for dense and layered information to be conveyed very quickly, and its affordances lend themselves well to portraying the tensions in and between trans and gender-nonconforming experiences. The speech bubble and the thought bubble, for example, can juxtapose in a single panel what two characters are saying to one another and what they are thinking and feeling as well as how they are interacting and communicating non-verbally. This graphic scholarship demonstrates why the unique genre of comics is particularly apt in rendering instances of microagression or passing. I argue that comics as a form enable a shift from abstract concepts back into the body, the materiality of which can get lost in academic discourse.},
	number = {4},
	urldate = {2019-10-02},
	journal = {Women's Studies in Communication},
	author = {Councilor, KC},
	month = oct,
	year = {2018},
	note = {Citation Key Alias: lens.org/073-012-211-786-303, pop00225
tex.type: [object Object]},
	keywords = {Comic essay, dept.com, embodiment, mobility, transgender},
	pages = {441--453},
}

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