Villains and Lovers: Roles Whites Play in Young Adult Graphic Novels With Queer Protagonists of Color

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Seven
  In Roundtable Session: Leveraging Texts to Understand Complex Curricular Realities: (Re)Imagining Stories and Storytelling for Racial Equity (Table 1)

Abstract

Despite their popularity, white characters and animals still make up the bulk of character representation in graphic novels according to 2018-2022 data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC, 2022; Kim, 2022). While whiteness is often overrepresented in literature, there is a gap in the literature analyzing how white characters and BIPOC characters interact and the ways whiteness is portrayed within YAL (Groenke et. al, 2019; Schieble, 2012). This proposal examines the way whiteness operates and intersects within the storylines of queer characters of color in YA graphic novels.

Authors

• Arianna Banack, University of South Florida
  Presenting Author

• Rosa Nam, Colorado State University
  Presenting Author

• Abbey Bachmann, The University of Texas - Health Science Center at Houston
  Presenting Author

• Kristian Lenderman, Digital Promise
  Presenting Author