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Sammond, Nicholas. "A Matter of Fluids: EC Comics & the Vernacular Abject." Abjection Incorporated. Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence. Eds. Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2020. 217–42. Added by: joachim (21/11/2020, 20:14) Last edited by: joachim (21/11/2020, 20:49) |
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| Resource type: Book Chapter Language: en: English BibTeX citation key: Sammond2020 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: "Mad Magazine", Cold War, EC, Gender, Grotesque, Kristeva. Julia, USA, War Creators: Hennefeld, Sammond Publisher: Duke Univ. Press (Durham) Collection: Abjection Incorporated. Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence |
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In “A Matter of Fluids: EC Comics and Vernacular Abjection,” Nicholas Sammond explores the circulation of immanent and persistent wartime traumas—both the nightmarish residues of World War II and the unthinkable and unremitting possibility of nuclear war—in Cold War–era pulp comics, especially in Mad magazine. Sammond discusses how romance, horror, and satire comics and magazines mobilized the abject in their images (especially those of corrupted flesh, blood, spit, and sweat), as well as through destabilized graphic designs. He argues that in their insistent repetition they formed objections to an increasingly pervasive domestic authoritarianism that marked the early days of the Cold War. Sammond notes that vernacular media such as comics translated the extreme abjection of an already heavily constrained postwar femininity into blatantly misogynistic social commentaries—even though media makers imagined that misogyny as an incisive critique of normative performances of gender and social repression during the Cold War. “Life in the vernacular,” Sammond claims, “plowed the furrows of the banal, offering in the mundane and repetitive themes of love, sex, and death a riotous rebellion against a postwar project that could only imagine … a deathless fantasy of love in the service of the future.”
Added by: joachim |