Feminist Graphic Narratives: The Ongoing Game of Eluding Censorship

Abstract

Censorship today has been acquainted with the action of silencing, suppressing or even making unheard and unseen what is considered as culturally and socially unacceptable. Its omnipresent and widespread aspect made the concept touches upon all literary genres among which graphic narratives by women prove to be censorship’s target. The medium’s multimodality and ability to explore culturally, socially and religiously troubling spaces has categorized feminist graphic narratives as “soft weapons” endowed with a stylistic capacity and a system of grammar to subvert and to resist control. It is in this context that that this paper procures a theoretical definition of censorship by linking it history to that of comics and graphic narratives in order to shed light on the historical ties informing today’s conflictual relation between censorship and feminist graphic narratives. By taking the example of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Linda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, the study stresses the capacity of graphic narratives to elude the gaze of the censor through the adaptation of different evasive techniques.