Barbarian Heroines, Comic Counter Narratives

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Rachael Brown  

The project of global sisterhood is immemorially compromised by imperial contours, producing a pedagogical stratification of the world’s women, and a conflict stunting of a valuable conversation. Piercing through marginalization is a generation of postcolonial scholars challenging entrenched epistemic structures, like the orthodox rescue model in narrating the victimized “third world woman," as against the barbaric male, within societies perishing in wait of manifest destiny. It shifts the center to the plurality of indigenous, long standing bodies of feminist though, including pan-Arab, pan-Asian, and pan-African feminism, framing a genuine transnational dialogue, on terms of equality. To do so, it spotlights an unlikely common language and rare instance where such mutual exchange has taken off: the language of comics. A distinctive American legacy, the comic book (and graphic novel) now finds itself re-appropriated into new geopolitical subjectivities. This work focuses on women writers of the Global South, bending this medium into a boomerang to talk back to reductionist models of engagement, singularly characterized by oppression and abjection. Populated with indigenous heroines, intricate treatments of their cultures and religions, and fully humanized versions of their men, such comics are not only wildly successful, but uniquely effective in addressing both gendered and political injustice. The principal task of this research is the juxtaposition of these writers' agential counter-narratives with their representation in American brand comics (primarily Marvel), contrasting the emic and etic in all too consequentially powerful images.