The graphic narrative has exhaustively – and convincingly – been theorized as inherently disruptive, not least in the fields of diaspora studies and queer studies. For scholars of diasporas, migration and of the transnational, graphic novels have become sites of ”foregrounding colonial legacies and (re)scripting missing or misrepresented identities in their precise contexts” (Mehta and Mukherji 2015, 2), often constructing ”sophisticated counter-geographies and alternative, cross-national imagined communities” (Davies 2019, 127). They have also been asserted as a medium ”well suited both to representing postcolonial issues and to generating provocation” (Knowles, Peacock, and Earle 2016, 379–80). For scholars of queer studies, graphic narratives have been understood as ”a distinctly queer mode of cultural production” (Scott and Fawaz 2018, 199) and as a form embedded with ”queer temporal openings” which ”provide a generative medium for queer worldmaking” (McCullough 2018, 377). Simultaneously, scholarship on queer diasporas has generated interdisciplinary routes of inquiry (e.g. Ellis 2020; Fernandéz Carbajal 2019; Gopinath 2020; 2005; Luibhéid and Cantú 2005; Patton and Sánchez-Eppler 2000) where questions of migrant, diasporic and racialized identity imbricate ”hybridized identificatory positions [that] are always in transit, shuttling between different identity vectors” (Muñoz 1999, 32). . As such queer diasporic graphic narratives expose and disrupt these interdependent tensions of gender, sexuality, nation and belonging. Against this backdrop, this Seminar will draw upon a cast range of graphic novels to help
• theorize approaches to studying graphic fiction
• understand graphic narratives as interconnected with other (audio)visual genres
• read the graphic form as a site of negotiating the intersections between diasporic formation and queerness
- Lehrende/r: Felipe Espinoza Garrido