Graphic Embodiments

Comics and other graphic narratives powerfully represent embodied experiences that are difficult to express in language. A group of authors from various countries and disciplines explore the unique capacity of graphic narratives to represent human embodiment as well as the relation of human bodies to the worlds they inhabit. Using works from illustrated scientific texts to contemporary comics across national traditions, we discover how the graphic narrative can shed new light on everyday experiences. Essays examine topics that are easily recognized as anchored in the body as well as experiences like migration and concepts like environmental degradation and compassion that emanate from or impact on our embodied states. Graphic Embodiments is of interest to scholars and students across various interdisciplinary fields including comics studies, gender and sexuality studies, visual and cultural studies, disability studies and health and medical humanities.

Visual infrapolitics: gender performance in the Italian entertainment industry, between secret visuality and postfeminist resistance

This article discusses postfeminist practices of resistance within contemporary visuality. Drawing on concepts used in visual and cultural studies, it describes and interprets the gender performance through which Giulia, avelina,challenges her own sexual and economic domination in her everyday affective labour and work. For this purpose, I report Giulia’s account of herself, resulting from a series of interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015. In the first part of the article, I will describe Giulia’s gendered etiquette, i.e. a complex of corporeal and behavioural prescriptions. Next, I will describe a set of acts of resistance performed by Giulia in her everyday social interactions in order to protect herself, to speak out and to build alliances against the violence implied by the stigma attached to thevelina’s gender/class norm. Finally, I will apply the concept of visual infrapolitics to the open field of visual practices through which a female worker of the entertainment industry criticises the gender-based violence implied by her labour form and by the stigma attached to her gender etiquette. I argue that such a wide field of practices pertains to a postfeminist sensibility and materialises the possibility for collective acts of resistance.