(Re)Conceptualizing Gender Through Comics: The Inquiring, Boundary-Drawing, and Empowering Discussions of Young Readers

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Youth Media, Culture, and Texts: Studying Critical Reading Practices

Abstract

Why look to comics and fan culture as an avenue for interrogating young people’s conceptions of gender/sex/uality? Joined by the voices of six seventh-grade comics readers, we consider how gender and sexuality are represented, challenged, and normalized through comics and related media-texts. Drawing on data from a yearlong qualitative study focusing on a group of students reading and studying comics in a ‘second classroom,’ we consider how comics became resources for discussion. Comics invited other popular media into conversations around gender/sex/uality, resulting in young readers’ critical inquiry (which was both disruptive and reifying) of norms in their texts and worlds.

Authors

• Ashley Kaye Dallacqua, The University of New Mexico

• David Eric Low, California State University - Fresno