There’s something queer about comics

In their 2018 introduction to a special issue of the journal “American Literature,” Darieck Scott & Ramzi Fawaz argue “there’s something queer about comics.” This queerness permeates the form, history, culture & content of comics. #PrideMonth #ComicsStudies 1/12

Scott & Fawaz argue the presumed homophobia & misogyny of the superhero genre, which has historically dominated American comics discourse, has dissuaded some scholars from seeing queerness in comics. Yet, “At every moment in their cultural history, comic books have been linked to queerness.” 2/12

Both readers of Silver Age superheroes & contemporary queer comics can evoke Eve Sedgwick’s theorization of queerness as both a universalizing & minoritizing discourse. Anyone can be queer, just as everyone reads comics. Yet comics fans “are a niche (read: queer, nerd, outcast, weirdo) group.” 3/12

Expanding on the queerness of comics readers, which can be either literal or metaphorical, Scott & Fawaz write: “The status of comics as marginal literature and art… situates comics as an outsider medium that elicits attachments from perceived social delinquents, outcasts, and minorities.” 4/12

Comics additionally can be queered by their “expansive representational capacity.” In comics, “anything that can be drawn can be believed,” including “an array of fantastical characters, worlds, and social interactions (among humans, mutants, aliens, cyborgs, and other ‘inhuman’ figurations).” 5/12

Citing Judith Butler’s theory that gender is constructed by repetition, Scott & Fawaz further argue: “The unpredictability of serial narrative… and the visual structure of comics as a set of sequential panels that repeat, but always with a difference, suggest that comics are formally queer.” 6/12

While Scott & Fawaz strongly assert that comics–as an art form and a cultural phenomenon–are brimming with queer potential, this does not mean that all comics are actively engaged in queer world-making, or that every reader will consciously observe or identify with the queerness of comics. 7/12

Some comics, like Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” are overtly queer & actively reflect on comics’ facility to represent & realize queerness. Others, including a majority of superhero comics, officially obscure & denounce queerness yet can be read queerly through practices of reparative reading. 8/12

In Sedgwick’s reparative reading, “Because the reader has room to realize the future may be different from the present, it is also possible to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethnically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently.” 9/12

IOW: reparative reading, which includes reading queerness back into texts that officially shun it, is a way of creating queer history as a foundation for queer futures. It also reveals queer history, since queer readers & artists have always existed, though they haven’t always been visible. 10/12

Ultimately, Scott & Fawaz are arguing that comics, with their infinite interpretability, multimodality, fantastical worlds, and subcultural status, are ideally positioned to underscore the fact that every piece of art, and every act of interpretation, is subjective and political. 11/12

More precisely, they are arguing comics are queer because taking comics seriously, whether in a fannish or a scholarly way, queers hierarchies of value and enduring assumptions art should be reducible to a single canonical meaning. In this, the queerness of comics is central to their vitality. 12/12