We invite participants who look at comics and visual narrative through the lens of gender, sexuality, feminist, and transgender studies.

In 2023, Maia Kobabe's graphic memoir Gender Queer was the most banned book in the country, according to the PEN America Index of School Book Bans. Kobabe identifies as queer, bisexual, and nonbinary: the book models what it means to grapple with questions about gender expression and sexual orientation. Gender Queer is just one of 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship in 2023, and when we look at targeted books, graphic memoirs are often some of the most banned books, among them, Art Speigelman’s memoir Maus, which tells the story of Speigelman’s father, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. As Art Speigelman wrote in the 1970s, “Maybe vulgar, semiliterate, unsubtle comic books are an appropriate form for speaking of the unspeakable.”

In this session, we will discuss comics from the perspectives of editors, artists, writers, scholars, and teachers of comics in the classroom. We solicit work on comic and visual narratives which deal with such forms of speaking the unspeakable, from scholarly, editorial, and pedagogical perspectives.

Submit abstract here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21049

Learn more about NeMLA and the conference here: https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla.html