Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips by Susan E. Kirtley (En

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Uses a rhetorical framework to explore womanhood and feminism in female-created comic strips.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

Winner, 2022 Charles Hatfield Award from the Comics Studies Society In the years following 1975, a group of female-created comic strips came to national attention in a traditionally male-dominated medium. Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women's roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. This impressive, engaging, and timely study illustrates how these comics express the complexities of women's experiences, especially as such experiences were shaped by shifting and often competing notions of womanhood and feminism. Including the comics of Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook's Comeek), Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I'm Coming From), Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), and Jan Eliot (Stone Soup), Typical Girls is an important history of the representation of womanhood and women's rights in popular comic strips.

Author Biography

Susan Kirtley is Professor of English at Portland State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction The Women's Liberation Movement in Comic Strips Chapter 1 Crocodilites and Cathy : The Worst of Both Worlds Chapter 2 Visualizing Motherhood in the Comic Frame: For Better or For Worse Chapter 3 Punk Rock Girl: Constituting Community in Barry's Girls and Boys Chapter 4 Nicole Hollander's Sylvia : Menippean Satire in the Mainstream Chapter 5 "The Lesbian Rule" in Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For Chapter 6 Establishing Community through Dis/Association in Barbara Brandon-Croft's Where I'm Coming From Chapter 7 Something from Nothing: The Inductive Argument of Stone Soup Works Cited Index

Review

"Typical Girls charts the way for comics studies to critically re-examine recent newspaper strips beyond the canon of accepted classics. ... Kirtley's ability to reveal the hidden depths of even the most apparently simple or naive strip is made possible by her careful ear for ambivalence, indecision and contradiction." --Fi Stewart-Taylor, Studies in Comics"Typical Girls provides a delightful tour of seven female comic strip creators and their approaches to their art and their politics in their comic strips. ... Kirtley carefully delineates the many feminisms and how the artists illustrate them throughout, maintaining a balance between the relationship of the artists and their protagonist/s to feminisms. ... Summing up: Highly recommended." --A. N. Valdivia, CHOICE"An excellent overview of and rumination upon an aspect of comics that is often overlooked, and as Kirtley stresses is a baton that ought to be taken up by other scholars of both feminism and comics studies. The texts she chooses to examine are both important and telling: important because of the ways in which they reflect and speak back to the culture of the times in which they were produced and telling because they are so few and far-between." --Houman Sadri, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture"Typical Girls reads comic strips alongside contemporary discourses of womanhood, motherhood, and feminisms, resulting in vital interpretations that forcefully remind us of how political discourses were expressed in newspaper comics." --Lara Saguisag, author of Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics"Eisner-Award-winner Susan Kirtley returns with a must-read book on how female-created comic strips changed the perceptions of womanhood and women's rights. As that fight continues, Kirtley's book offers a reminder of where the struggle has been and where it needs to go from here." --Philip Nel, author of Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books

Review Quote

" Typical Girls reads comic strips alongside contemporary discourses of womanhood, motherhood, and feminisms, resulting in vital interpretations that forcefully remind us of how political discourses were expressed in newspaper comics." --Lara Saguisag, author of Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics

Excerpt from Book

Individually and collectively the scope of these strips has not yet been considered in academic writing, but comic strips are certainly, as scholar Tom Inge points out, "well loved" (xxi). However, these artists "should also be respected for what they have contributed to the visual and narrative arts of the world" ("Comics as Culture" 191). Though comic art has until recently been largely overlooked by scholars, when examined closely, the form demonstrates a highly sophisticated structure of its own, linking text and image in complex and intriguing ways, and building a story that could not be related by text or image alone. Joseph Witek argues that comic art demonstrates "a highly developed narrative grammar and vocabulary based on an inextricable combination of verbal and visual elements" (3). This study will explore how this intriguing pairing of words and pictures creates a rhetoric of womanhood specific to the form. Thus, this project, while acknowledging its limited focus on a small sampling of female comic strip creators' work during a limited time period, seeks to offer a novel assessment of the historical moment during which the Women's Rights movement became a national conversation (focusing on the 1970s and 1980s, in particular), demonstrating the ways in which the most prominent and widely read comic strips created by women of the time bolster stereotypes of gender and domesticity even as they challenged them, presenting complicated women struggling to reconceive of success and fulfillment amidst competing visions of female identity, femininity, and domesticity. The comic strips of Lynn Johnston, Cathy Guisewite, Nicole Hollander, Lynda Barry, Barbara Brandon-Croft, Alison Bechdel, and Jan Eliot offer a nuanced understanding of females coming to terms with the many competing demands and opportunities for women. When considered as a group and even within the individual strips, complications and incongruities abound. Main character Cathy campaigns for Dukakis, the Family Medical Leave Act, and better childcare options for working families even as she obsesses over her weight and hairstyle. Elly from For Better or For Worse struggles with tedium and lack of recognition in her role as a stay-at-home mother, but basks in the male attention she garners when she dresses up for a night on the town. Brandon-Croft's characters worry about facial hair and police brutality. And Hollander's Sylvia soundly criticizes sexist double standards while reinforcing tropes of shrewish female behavior even as Barry's strip revels in the absurdity of courtship in a new landscape in which past rules and practices no longer apply. The protagonists of Stone Soup puzzle about the rituals of dating and double standards at the office. How do we view these contradictions? What can be gleaned from reading newspaper comic strips created by women from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s? As these strips reveal a small accretion of daily truths, they can help develop a fuller understanding of the media's conception of a particularly turbulent moment in American history--the Women's Rights movement. Furthermore, this analysis focuses on comic strips, and thus both literally and more figuratively takes a "comic" point of view, the perspective that theorist Kenneth Burke argues is most "charitable" ( Attitudes 107) and "most serviceable for the handling of human relationships" (106). Indeed, Burke's notion of the various "frames of reference," can prove a useful tool for interpreting and analyzing comic strips, as he argues that the frames specified in the analysis of literature can also usefully be applied to human relations, and that these assorted "attitudes" can shape the interpretation of experiences fictional and real.

Details ISBN0814257933 Author Susan E. Kirtley Short Title Typical Girls Publisher Ohio State University Press Series Studies in Comics and Cartoons Language English Year 2021 ISBN-10 0814257933 ISBN-13 9780814257937 Format Paperback Publication Date 2021-05-13 Subtitle The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips Imprint Ohio State University Press Pages 276 UK Release Date 2021-05-13 Place of Publication Columbus, OH Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2021-05-13 NZ Release Date 2021-05-13 US Release Date 2021-05-13 Illustrations Illustrations, unspecified DEWEY 741.53522 Audience General We've got this

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