Children Reading and Authoring Comics to Critically Inquire Into Gender

• In Event: 61.026 - Comics and Critical Engagement in Literacy Education and Research

Abstract

Objectives:
Educational researchers have long studied children’s understandings of gender. Thorne (1993) offers the term ‘borderwork’ to describe how gender expectations are negotiated by children, and Davies (1989) surveys ways children regulate what it means to be a boy or girl. Many scholars contend that gender, rather than a set of determined traits or a binary, is a process children agentively perform and disrupt through interactions with a variety of texts and contexts (Crisp & Hiller, 2011; Messner, 2000). This paper reports on a group of urban children’s transactions with comics, and explores the affordances of a multimodal medium for inviting young readers and artists to critically engage issues of “gender/sex/uality” (Blaise, 2014).

Frameworks:
Research on gender and comics has focused primarily on cartoonists (e.g., Chute, 2010; Robbins, 1999) and gender representations within professionally produced comics (e.g., Brown, 1999; Madrid, 2009). Relatively few studies have explored young readers and writers/artists engaging with gender/sex/uality through their transactions with comics (see Danziger-Russell, 2013; Marsh, 2000). This paper investigates how comics function as a platform for critical inquiry around issues of gender (Moeller, 2011). Research on multimodality indicates that reading and writing across semiotic modes provides additional spaces for reflection, critique, and identity performance (Author 1, 2012; Author 2, 2012; Whitin & Whitin, 2012). This paper describes children employing comics’ interlocking symbol systems to critically negotiate understandings of gender roles and processes.

Methods/Data Sources:
This paper draws from a larger study examining how children engage in critical inquiry with comics. Ethnographic data were collected over three years in a 15-student club within an urban grade school as part of a practitioner research project (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). Data were analyzed through various frameworks, such as critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995) and multimodal analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006).

Findings:
Through their reading, authoring, and discussion of comics, students both challenged and re-instantiated gender roles and processes. These events took the form of:
1. Discussing how characters are depicted in comics (i.e. arguing that males are typically portrayed as stronger than females).
2. Making connections between comics and their own gendered experiences.
3. Discussing the semiotic features of comics (i.e. color palettes and styles that suggest masculinity or femininity).
4. Performing ‘borderwork’ around the types of graphic novels a boy or girl should read.
5. Selecting books which decenter traditional gender roles (e.g., Drama, Ms. Marvel).
6. Creating characters and stories which challenge traditional gender roles (i.e. a student-made comic book whose protagonist says she doesn’t want a boyfriend and thinks homophobia is ridiculous).

Scholarly Significance:
Comics is a medium that children frequently use to open up spaces for inquiry and critique. This paper argues that, when brought into educational settings, comics should be explicitly employed in the service of critical inquiry; for example, around issues of gender. If gender is understood as a process both maintained and contested by children, then comics offers an ideal multimodal medium for students to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct their understandings of gender/sex/uality.

Author

• David Eric Low, California State University - Fresno