CFP

MLA 2025

Picturing Political Power in Comics

Visual culture, from cartooning to photography, has long been used to both critique and make claims to the political. Alison K. Lange’s Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (2020), from which we borrow our title, examines the role of public images in creating a shared national language around gender, power, and the vote during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2013), Leigh Raiford traces how Black activists used photography to demand political recognition and resist stereotypical images in Black freedom struggles throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on this work to recognize the political power and potentialities of images, this panel asks, how might comics studies contribute to these conversations? Given the ways that comics of all forms have been inculcated in the “popular” from their inception and are often positioned as a more “democratic” form than other media, how can, or do, comics picture political power? How do comics, in their visual form, make visible the machinations of structural power dynamics and inequalities? We invite papers that respond to these questions from a variety of periods, theoretical approaches, and comics forms.

Potential topics could include:

  • The evolution of editorial and political cartoons
  • Visual satire and caricature in comics
  • Comics in/and about the 2024 US presidential election
  • Feminist, queer, and trans reframings of the political in comics and zines
  • Antiracist and antifascist comics
  • Discussions of migration, national borders, and panel borders
  • Nonfiction comics and graphic memoir about political figures and activists
  • Comics that do not simply seek inclusion within dominant political structures but re-envision those structures.

Send 250-word abstracts and short bios (in English) by March 15, 2024 to Qiana Whitted (whitted@sc.edu) and Maite Urcaregui (maite.urcaregui@sjsu.edu).