BOBC

“Both comics and queerness have occupied the margins, culturally, historically, and academically. While both have made forays to the center, finding value and currency in academia in particular, many consider both comics and queers too outside the realm of respectability to be granted voice and legitimacy. And perhaps they should remain on the margins because, as Harriet Malinowitz (1995) observes, the margin is “a site both of annihilation and actualization, of disempowerment and electrifying resistance,” capable of producing “not only abject outsiderhood but also profoundly unique ways of self-defining, knowing, and acting” (p. 251). In this essay, I suggest that the multimodal affordances of comics are also capable of producing profound expressions of queerness and queer world- making. Indeed, in analyzing several queer comics, this essay demonstrates how comics produced by and for queers become a site of multimodal queer rhetoric, a rhetoric that disrupts and remakes (hetero)normative discourses through combining multiple modes of meaning making.”