CFP: The Comics World (essay collection) / Dec. 15

The Comics World:

Comics, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics

Call for Chapters

Benjamin Woo and Jeremy Stoll, eds.

In Comics versus Art, Bart Beaty introduces the notion of the comics world to describe the field of cultural production that is oriented to comics and comic art. Beaty is drawing on institutional approaches in the sociology of art that take all the actors involved in producing a work – not only the “artists” themselves but also curators, agents, dealers, critics, technical support staff, makers of specialized equipment or supplies, and various audiences – as their object of analysis. In this volume, we understand the comics world, by extension, as a set of interacting communities that condition the production, mediation, and consumption of comics and graphic novels. All these publics – in their differentiated but shared orientation to comics – make the comics world go round.

The comics world is a social space, and it needs to be approached in those terms. With this volume, we seek to provide an accessible introduction to social-scientific approaches to comics and graphic novels while simultaneously filling in the social, cultural, and institutional contexts of comics’ production and circulation with respect to particular communities of people engaged in comics-oriented practices.

We welcome contributions from a range of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies seeking to make sense of the people and practices oriented to comics. Proposals may include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Creator communities (defined in terms of occupational role, publishing sector, gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, etc.)
• Business, production and other support staff
• Teachers and students
• Distributors, retailers, critics, and other cultural intermediaries
• Conventions, their organizers and participants
• Audiences and fandoms
• Relations of affiliation or conflict between any of these communities

The editors have received an expression of interest from a university press with a well- established list in comics studies.

Please submit an abstract of 500–800 words to Benjamin Woo (benjamin.woo@carleton.ca) by December 15, 2014. Abstracts should clearly outline the scope of the argument and describe the nature of the research undergirding this analysis. Final chapters will be between 7,000 and 8,000 words. Submitters will be notified of acceptance by January 15.

CFP: A Comic of Her Own: Women Writing, Reading, and Embodying in Comics (UF) (Jan 15; Mar 15-17)

A Comic of Her Own:

Women Writing, Reading, and Embodying in Comics
10^th Annual UF Comics Conference

in association with ImageTexT
March 15-17, 2013

Keynote Speaker: Trina Robbins

Guest Artist: Leela Corman

Guest Artist: Megan Kelso

Trina Robbins’ A Century of Women Cartoonists responds to a comics history which often forgets women.  In the past few years, interest has grown around women working in the comics industry, perhaps best exemplified by Hillary Chute’s 2010 Graphic Women. Similarly, academia has made many inroads into comics and gender through scholarship on superheroines in mainstream comics. Mike Madrid’s 2009 The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines and Jennifer Stuller’s 2010 Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology, not to mention works by Trina Robbins and Lillian Robinson, attest to this growing interest in the representation of women in comics. However, these two scholarly fields rarely engage in meaningful dialog, despite their mutual interest: the examination of women in comics, whether behind the scenes or on the page. This conference hopes to facilitate this dialog and foster the scholarly exploration of intersections between women’s writing in comics, women represented in comics, and the women who read them. To accommodate this goal, the conference will feature a mixture of formats: keynote lectures, workshops with guest artists, Q & A sessions, panel discussions, and traditional academic conference presentations.

We encourage scholarly submissions on any one of these topics, as well as proposals for papers that explore the apparent gaps between them. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Superheroines in comics—how super are they, really?
• Good Girls vs. Bad Girls in mainstream comics
• Women’s writing as autobiography
• What women want—explorations of titles that are popular with female readers
• Queer women in comics
• Girly men and manly women in comics—how is gender drawn?
• Feminist readings of mainstream comics—are women still in the refrigerator?
• Monstrous women in comics—sexed/gendered readings of monstrous, radioactive, and generally othered bodies in mainstream comics
• Female sexuality in comics—from mainstream sex goddesses to queer alternatives
• Studies of work by particular women writers and/or artists
• Challenges to the “graphic women” canon
• Girls in children's picture books and children's picture books “for girls”
• Adaptation of comics superheroines to the big screen—representational differences and challenges in media adaptation
• Women in animation—the female form in motion

Please send 250-word abstracts to imagetext@english.ufl.edu by January 15^th, 2013.

CFP: Gender and Superheroes (Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics; January 1)

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

Special Issue: Gender and Superheroes

Editors: David Huxley and Joan Ormrod

Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Consulting Editor: Roger Sabin

The superhero genre dominates the comics industry with representations of hypermuscular action men or sexy women wearing costumes that show off their near naked bodies. There are examples of more diverse approaches to both creating and analysing these figures but they remain, as yet, in the minority. Much of this work is produced by mainly male creators for similarly constructed audiences. Whilst that does not limit the possibilities of the superhero, to date there has been little substantial work in superheroes and gender beyond Trina Robbins work on women superheroes and Ndalianis’s edited collection of essays on heroism in which a few essays touch upon superheroes. This area, however, is of great interest to academia as evidenced by a significant proportion of papers submitted to the journal in recent months. We are, therefore, proposing a special issue in which this topic can be examined in a more sustained manner. Submissions are invited of papers 5000-7000 words by January 1, 2011 relating but not limited to the following topics:

Representation

• Representing gender: masculinity, femininity, gay, transvestite superheroes – transgression or queer readings
• The superhero/ine body
• Superheroes in other nations – eg: British, Indian or Latin American superheroes and how they hail transnational and national identities
• Representing superheroes in comics – eg: Love and Rockets, Kim Dietch’s The Cat
• Revisioning of the character – for instance, the reworking of Catwoman

Theoretical Issues

• Feminist theory and gendered identities – Judith Butler
• Gaze and psychoanalytic
• Class and the superhero

Audiences

• Manga superheroes and their audiences
• Girls reading superheroes
• Fanboys and specific heroes
• Fan production – slash fiction, changing gendered identities

History and Industry

• Online comics – fan production or industrial production
• Tracing specific characters within an industrial context
• Creators’ representations of gender – eg: Alan Moore, Promethea, Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

SUBMISSION DETAILS
We’ll be happy to address any queries about the issue if you email either Dave Huxley d.huxley@mmu.ac.uk or Joan Ormrod j.ormrod@mmu.ac.uk.

If you are submitting an article please remember to check our format guidelines and obtain agreement from copyright holders for any images you plan to use. If you have queries about this then visit the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics website for clarification. We can publish black and white or colour images.

www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rcom

CFP: Comics Conference on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality (University of Florida, 3/21-22/2008)

Just announced, and highly recommended:

The University of Florida's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the 2008 UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels: "ImageSexT: Intersections of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality," which will be held in Gainesville, Florida, on March 21-22, 2008.

The sixth annual conference on comics will focus on issues of representation in the most literal sense: that of the image on the page (screen, monitor, etc.). We are interested in papers that move beyond facile reiterations of identity politics to explore the complexities and complexes of bodies and desires for artists, writers, and readers of comics. Here we are using "comics" in its broadest sense, to include animation, manga, anime, graphic novels, webcomics, political cartoons, and even some "fine art." Theoretically grounded work is preferred, but we also have an interest in archival, historical, and creative papers. The goal of this conference is to encourage interdisciplinary discussion incorporating diverse approaches to the comics representation of sex, gender, and sexuality.

Confirmed guests for this year include Phoebe Gloeckner (Diary of a Young Girl) and Gail Simone (Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman); invited guests include Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets).

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Autobiographical and authorial issues of sex and gender in comics, including issues of veiled autobiography, writing across gender lines, collaboration, and adaptation (Stuck Rubber Baby, Fun Home, The Authority, Fritz the Cat)
• Archival/historical work on depictions of the body, intercourse and identity including persistence and/or revision of stereotypes (Tijuana Bibles, Charles Atlas ads, homosexuality in early animation, Air Pirates Funnies)
• Who's drawing my body? Self- and Other-representations and culture wars (Goth comics, Superhero[ine] physiques, Dirty Plotte)
• Fans turn Pro (and vice versa): sex and gender issues at the boundary between and in the transition from fandom to professional comics (letters pages, undergrounds, fanzines, weblogs, fanfic, slash and doujinshi origins)
• Indeterminacy, including queer readings, secret identities, and the act of passing in and through comics (How Loathsome, Death Note, Black Hole, The Book of Lost Souls)
• "How ethics spoiled my pleasure": including how female fans read and enter comics, our implication in – and pleasure from – objectification, and the comic as part of a cultural circuit of capital and power (Girl-Wonder.org, Women in Refrigerators, Sequential Tart)
• The comic book fetish, including the materiality of the comic, the pleasure of reading, and "slabbing"
• The perversity of children's narratives (Strawberry Panic, Hikaru no Go, Lost Girls, Diary of a Young Girl)
• Politics and sex, including political allegory in comics, metaphors of otherness, and sex and censorship (V for Vendetta, Y the Last Man, Alias, Superfly)
• Representation and its necessary problems, from signifying male- or femaleness to figuring sex and desire, through drawings of bodies and acts, or depicting intimacy and pleasure (Diary of A Dominatrix, Clumsy, Playboy comics, [non-] explicit animation)
• International issues, including trade and censorship, translations, and taboos (scanlations, fansubbing, "official" translations, cross-cultural marketing and audiences)

Abstract submissions should be approximately 250-500 words in length. Presentations will be 15 minutes with 5 minutes of question and answer. The deadline for abstract submissions is December 1, 2007.

Image: UG Graphic Novel Conferences header, by Dylan Horrocks.