13th Annual Conference of the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor)
University of Cologne, 17/09/2018 – 19/09/2018
For decades, comics have been perceived as a mass phenomenon situated in popular culture, which manifests, establishes and perpetuates stereotypical (gender) representations. Hence, the image of a particularly helpless, passive, but all the more attractive female victim is at home in the repertoire of the medium no less than the representation of a radiant, muscular, white, heterosexual hero, whose first duty consists of protecting the world and its inhabitants from catastrophe. In this sense, comics might seem alike to other forms of mass media in the age of mechanical reproduction and their tendency towards generalisations and clichés. From a historical perspective, reactions to the worldwide anti-comics campaigns of the 1950s, including self-censorship among numerous comic book publishers, also exemplarily point to heteronormative and xenophobic tendencies within mass media comics culture, which was in turn long reflected in the demographics of its readership. However, as a popular and oftentimes marginalised medium, comics never completely became one with this role of a (reactionary) stabilising force. Rather, comics are imbued with a socio-political dimension that has always encouraged comics artists to use the spaces between in a creative way, and to question and subvert (social) norms.
The 13th annual conference of the German Society for Comics Studies will examine this productive potential of comics by uncovering and analysing different forms of the ‘spaces between’ within the art form itself, but also within its production and its audience. The internationally and inderdisciplinarily assembled talks will focus on the question how gender, identity and diversity are represented and negotiated in sequential art. The conference topic Spaces Between – Gender, Diversity and Identity in Comics will draw our attention to the nexus between the medium of comics and categories of difference and identity such as gender, dis/ability, age, and ethnicity, in order to open and deepen an interdisciplinary conversation between comics studies and intersectional identity studies within the international comics studies community. In this respect, the 13th annual conference of the German Society for Comics Studies will not only contribute to the disclosure of exclusions, power structures and (hetero-)normative allocations in comics, but will also critically analyse their socio-political and communicative forms of (re-)production.
Conference venue:
COPT-Building (Building No. 315)
Rooms H230, S231-S233
Luxemburger Str. 90 | 50939 Cologne
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:
Monday, 17. September 2018 | |
10:30h | Meeting of the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) |
12:00h | Lunch Break |
13:00h | Welcome & Introduction |
| Conference Organizers | ComFor-Chair | Vice-Rectorate for Gender Equality and Diversity of the University of Cologne |
13:30h | Artistic Lecture |
| Philip Crawford (Berlin, GER) |
| My Noose Around That Pretty’s Neck |
| Chair: Barbara Margarethe Eggert |
14:15h | Panel 1: Representations of Dis/Ability |
| Chair: Anne Waldschmidt |
| Olga Tarapata (Köln, GER) |
| Between Crooked Lines: Disability in E.T. Russian’s Feminist Comic Books |
| Natalie Veith (Frankfurt a.M., GER) |
| Othering Voices and the Voice of the Other: The Depiction of Joseph Merrick in From Hell |
| Jonas Neldner (Köln, GER) |
| Noir Surrealism: The Hybrid Bodies of Charles Burns |
15:45h | Coffee Break |
16:15h | Panel 2: Graphic Medicine: Intersections of Comics, Health and Corporeality |
| Chair: Christina Maria Koch |
| Susan Merrill Squier (Pennsylvania, USA) |
| The Spaces Between: Negotiating Gender and Race in Transdisciplinary Comics Collaborations |
| Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff (Berlin, GER) |
| Telling and Showing Dis/Continuities: Comics on Dementia |
| Alexandra Alberda (Poole, UK) |
| The Gaze, the Other and the Exhibit: Curating Graphic Medicine |
17:45h | Coffee Break |
18:30h | Keynote 1 |
| Tahneer Oksman (New York City, USA) |
| An Art of Loss |
| Chair: Véronique Sina |
Tuesday, 18. September 2018 | |
9:30h | Panel 3: Making Comics and Exhibiting their Physicality |
| Chair: Christine Gundermann |
| Erin La Cour (Amsterdam | Utrecht, NL) |
| No Longer In-Between: Towards a Social Abstraction in Comics Exhibitions |
| Ann Miller (Leicester, UK) |
| The Nude and the Naked: From Fine Art to Comics |
| Katharina Brandl (Basel, CHE) | Anne Elizabeth Moore (Detroit, USA) |
| Do What You Love, or: About Precarious Living and Working Conditions in the Comics Industry |
11:00h | Coffee Break |
11:30h | Panel 4: (Trans-)Cultural Identities |
| Chair: Laura Schlichting |
| Anne Magnussen (Odense, DNK) |
| Mexican Comics and the Revolution |
| Anna Nordenstam (Gothenburg, SWE) | Margareta Wallin Wictorin (Karlstad, SWE) |
| Talking Back Strategies in Swedish Feminist Comics |
| Nina Mickwitz (London, UK) |
| Precarity and the Gendered Migrant Body in Nina Bunjevac’s Heartless |
13:00h | Lunch Break |
14:45h | Panel 5: (De-)Constructing Race and Ethnicity |
| Chair: Marie Schröer |
| Priscilla Layne (Chapel Hill, USA) |
| Weyhe’s Postcolonial Approach to the Documentary Graphic Novel |
| Jonathan W. Gray (New York City, USA) |
| Descendants of Kings and Queens: Black Panther and Entangled African Cosmopolitanism |
| Jaqueline Berndt (Stockholm, SWE) |
| Destabilizing Gender but not Race? Effeminate Boys, Caucasian Appearances, and Uncertain ›Gutters‹ in (Shōjo) Manga |
16:15h | Coffee Break |
16:45h | Panel 6: Superheroes Revisited: Intersections of Gender and Genre |
| Chair: Stephan Packard |
| Jeffrey Brown (Ohio, USA) |
| Batman: Anchor for the Space Between |
| Ranthild Salzer (Wien, AUT) |
| Objectifying the Male: Early Superhero Comics as Fantasies of Masculinity |
| Olivia Hicks (Dundee, UK) |
| »No Place for Trespassers«: The Supercats and the British Superheroine |
18:15h | Coffee Break |
19:00h | Keynote |
| Carolyn Cocca (New York City, USA) |
| Reproducing Inequality and Representing Diversity: The Politics of Gender in Superhero Comics |
| Chair: Nina Heindl |
Wednesday, 19. September 2018 | |
9:00h | Panel 7: Structures of Power and Difference in Superhero Comics |
| Chair: Lukas R.A. Wilde |
| Markus Engelns (Duisburg-Essen, GER) |
| The ›Man of Tomorrow‹ as Copy Template – Male Hegemony and its Reproduction in Superhero Comics |
| Thomas P. Scholz (St. Louis, USA) |
| Deconstructing the Superhero Genre: BDSM, Hypersexuality and Marshal Law |
| Juliane Blank (Saarbrücken, GER) |
| Rethinking the World of a Female Superhero. Marvel’s Jessica Jones as an Example of a Gender-Sensitive Marvel Adaptation |
10:30h | Coffee Break |
11:00h | Panel 8: Queering Comics |
| Chair: Daniel Stein |
| Frederik Byrn Køhlert (Norwich, UK) |
| Queer as Style: Ariel Schrag’s High School Comic Chronicles |
| Romain Becker (Lyon, F) |
| The Binary Comics of a Non-Binary Artist: How Vaughn Bodé's Gender Structures his Work |
| José Alaniz (Seattle, USA) |
| TranSiberia and Queer Comics in Russia |
12:30h | Lunch Break |
14:00h | Panel 9: Fluide Körper [German] |
| Chair: Ole Frahm |
| Marina Rauchenbacher (Wien, AUT) | Katharina Serles (Dresden, GER) |
| Gerahmt und zerstückelt. Zeichenhaftigkeit und Wahrnehmung von Körpern in Comics |
| Anna Beckmann (Berlin, GER) |
| Strategien der Ambivalenzen – Uneindeutige Geschlechteridentitäten im Comic |
| Daniela Kaufmann (Graz, AUT) |
| Color Change & Gender Fluidity. Zur Korrelation von Farbe und Geschlecht bei George Herrimans Krazy Kat |
15:30h | Coffee Break |
16:00h | Panel 10: Alternative Comics und Feminismus [German] |
| Chair: Dietrich Grünewald |
| Sylvia Kesper-Biermann (Hamburg, GER) |
| »…denkt lieber mal nach, wie das so zu Hause bei euch läuft«. Geschlechterverhältnisse in Alternativ-Comics der 1970er Jahre |
| Kalina Kupczynska (Łódź, PL) |
| BLUT, oder: Gender und Nationalität im polnischen Comic |
| Sophie Bürgi (Basel, CHE) |
| »Common scents«: Geruchsregime und affektive Zwischenräume in Lynda Barrys Comic One! Hundred! Demons! |
17:30h | Concluding Discussion |
| Chair: Nina Heindl | Véronique Sina |
Conception
Christine Gundermann (University of Cologne | Department of History)
Nina Heindl (University of Cologne | a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne)
Véronique Sina (University of Cologne | Department of Media Culture and Theatre)
Conference organisation
Nina Heindl (University of Cologne | a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne)
Véronique Sina (University of Cologne | Department of Media Culture and Theatre)
Contact: comfortagung2018@gmail.com | www.comicgesellschaft.de
Registration:
Attendants are kindly asked to register until August 31st 2018 at comfortagung2018@gmail.com
The conference fee will be:
30 € for professors and postdocs | 25 € for PhD-students and ComFor-members 15 € for students.
Please transfer the conference fee to our account (see below) no later than September 3rd 2018.
Nina Eckhoff-Heindl
IBAN: DE76 5001 0517 5425 2931 20
BIC: INGDDEFFXXX
Reference: Conference fee, name of conference participant
Exhibition: From June to September 2018 the exhibition SuperQueeroes: Our LGBT-Comic Heroes will be shown at the University of Cologne. The exhibition is a cooperation with the Schwule Museum* Berlin. For further information: www.comicgesellschaft.de
Exhibition organization:
Christine Gundermann (University of Cologne | Department of History)
The conference is being sponsored by: DFG, German Research Foundation | Finanzfonds der Universität zu Köln zur Umsetzung des gesetzlichen Gleichstellungsauftrags | the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) | MedienStiftung Kultur | a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne | Department of Media Culture and Theatre, University of Cologne.
Dr. Véronique Sina (veronique.sina@uni-koeln.de)
Institut für Medienkultur und Theater
Universität zu Köln
Meister-Ekkehart-Str. 11 | 50937 Köln