cfp.english.upenn.edu

Keynote Speaker: Trina Robbins
Guest Artist: Leela Corman
Guest Artist: Megan Kelso

Trina Robbins’ A Century of Women Cartoonists responds to a comics history which often forgets women. In the past few years, interest has grown around women working in the comics industry, perhaps best exemplified by Hillary Chute’s 2010 Graphic Women. Similarly, academia has made many inroads into comics and gender through scholarship on superheroines in mainstream comics. Mike Madrid’s 2009 The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines and Jennifer Stuller’s 2010 Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology, not to mention works by Trina Robbins and Lillian Robinson, attest to this growing interest in the representation of women in comics. However, these two scholarly fields rarely engage in meaningful dialog, despite their mutual interest: the examination of women in comics, whether behind the scenes or on the page. This conference hopes to facilitate this dialog and foster the scholarly exploration of intersections between women’s writing in comics, women represented in comics, and the women who read them. To accommodate this goal, the conference will feature a mixture of formats: keynote lectures, workshops with guest artists, Q & A sessions, panel discussions, and traditional academic conference presentations.

We encourage scholarly submissions on any one of these topics, as well as proposals for papers that explore the apparent gaps between them. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Superheroines in comics—how super are they, really?
- Good Girls vs. Bad Girls in mainstream comics
- Women’s writing as autobiography
- What women want—explorations of titles that are popular with female readers
- Queer women in comics
- Girly men and manly women in comics—-how is gender drawn?
- Feminist readings of mainstream comics—are women still in the refrigerator?
- Monstrous women in comics—-sexed/gendered readings of monstrous, radioactive, and generally othered bodies in mainstream comics
- Female sexuality in comics—-from mainstream sex goddesses to queer alternatives
- Studies of work by particular women writers and/or artists
- Challenges to the “graphic women” canon
- Girls in children's picture books and children's picture books “for girls”
- Adaptation of comics superheroines to the big screen—- representational differences and challenges in media adaptation
- Women in animation—-the female form in motion

Please send 250-word abstracts to imagetext@english.ufl.edu by January 15th, 2013.