Proposal: Comics and feminism conference 2020

Abstract: Safety in numbers – challenging norms on the Swedish field of comics 

The radical shift in gender representation among Swedish comics artists during the 2000s (Lindberg 2014) is often described in quantitative terms, by comparing gender balance in publications, students accepted at comics educations, sales figures, critical attention in the media and so forth. Even though this shift is evident there has, as Robbins (1993) points out, always been women working in the comics business and in Sweden many of them have been successful, like Ingrid Vang Nyman, Birgitta Lilliehöök, Cecilia Torudd, Joanna Rubin Dranger and Lena Furberg, to mention a few. But since comics like theirs were coded as children’s-, girls- or women’s-, they were (up until recently) of little or no interest to the dominant pretenders on the field, where cultural capital was measured by the size of comics collections, encyclopaedic knowledge of (foremost American) comics and power of consecration as critics, editors and jury-officials. 

This however, does not mean that these pretenders were unaware of the unequal gender representation or abstained from discussing it. On the contrary. The question of “the absence of women in comics” have been a recurring theme ever since the early 70s, giving evidence of one of Broady’s “rules of thumb” in identifying an autonomous cultural field; the ability to translate themes and discourses imported from the outside into the field’s own logic (1998, s. 19ff).  In my paper I will present how this discourse has evolved since the early 70s and some of the key-factors that were involved in the radical shift mentioned above, including the comics collective Ink Angels (founded in 1999) and the use of Guerrilla Girls-tactics as a way to challenge male norms of quality./Gunnar Krantz

References:

Broady, Donald (1998) ”Inledning: en verktygslåda för studiet av fält” i Kulturens fält: en antologi av Broady, Donald & Albertsen, Niels (red.) Göteborg: Daidalos. Lindberg, Ylva (2014) ”Satiriska feministiska serier: Nina Hemmingsson och Liv Strömquist”. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, Vol. 44, no 2, 83-99 p.

Robbins, Trina (1993). A century of women cartoonists. Northampton, Mass.: Kitchen Sink Press