New MALAS Seminar, Fall 2023! Queering Comics with Jess Whatcott!

LGBT 550/MALAS 600A - Queering Comics  

Professor Jess Whatcott

“Queering Comics” is an exploration of LGBTQ+ culture, ideas, aesthetics, relationships, identity, and politics through the prism of sequential art. We will use the medium of comics to explore the politics of representation, assessing both the consequences of the absence of complex queer and trans characters, and conversely the stereotypes that are reproduced when queer and trans people do appear. We will also explore how queer and trans people have practiced disidentifying with comics, teaching themselves to locate queerness even in narratives not intentionally created as queer. We will encounter creators who have used comics and graphic narratives to communicate queer ideas, express queer sexuality, and build queer community, sometimes subversively when queer identities are politically suppressed. We will evaluate the backlash against queer and trans comics, the politics of censorship, and the banning of queer visual narratives as sexually explicit content. Finally, we will celebrate the joyful struggle to continue to create and distribute queer and trans graphic narratives.  More here: https://comics.sdsu.edu/grants/neh-hsi/courses/whatcott

Jess Whatcott (they/them) is Assistant Professor of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies. Their forthcoming book from Duke University Press revisits the eugenics practice of segregation -- the mass confinement of disability in early twentieth century California. The book also connects this history to on-going reproductive and social control in today’s state institutions. Their research on eugenics, carcerality, and speculative fiction appears in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Feminist Formations; Politics, Groups & Identities; Lateral; and edited book collections. Dr. Whatcott is affiliated with the SDSU Center for Comics Studies, and you can find them at Comic Con International presenting on "Comic Justice."