Stripped to the Bone: Sequencing Queerness in the Comic Strip Work of Joe Brainard and David Wojnarowicz
At first glance, any generative relationship between queerness and the comic strip may seem untenable: if queerness can be understood as formless—that is, a kind of open-ended social force that captures the vast range of intimacies, attachments, and relationships that break from the linear movement...
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| Published in: | ASAP journal 2017-05, Vol.2 (2), p.335-367 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | At first glance, any generative relationship between queerness and the comic strip may seem untenable: if queerness can be understood as formless—that is, a kind of open-ended social force that captures the vast range of intimacies, attachments, and relationships that break from the linear movement of heteronormativity (with its attendant sequence of monogamy, marriage, and reproduction)—then comic strip form's seemingly rigid sequential organization and delimited frames arranged into narratives would appear antithetical to the amorphous and malleable qualities of queer sexuality.4 Against this perceived dichotomy, I interpret the sequential character of the comic strip medium—its formal organization into series of panels arranged in space to denote the movement of time—as a serialized unfolding of indefinite, open-ended possibilities. Both artists made their own comic strips (whether hand drawn or produced out of mixed-media materials); both used comic strip materials cut out from newsprint and bound comic books in their collage and assemblage work; and both deployed some of the central formal elements of sequential comics—including seriality, visually disjointed panels, and the combination of text and image—across the range of their painting, collage, and mixed-media installations. Little more than a decade later, in David Wojnarowicz's graphic memoir 7 Miles a Second (1988–93 [published 1996]), the artist and his collaborators James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook used the visual disjoint between comic strip panels formally to dramatize the experience of social alienation and physical pain associated with being a queer person with AIDS. A number of scholars have shown how independent comics in the 1970s and 1980s, including Underground, Wimmen's, and Gay Comix, took advantage of the medium's social marginalization as trash culture to express radical political views and fantasies of sexual liberation that would have been more readily censored or condemned in more "respectable" popular mediums of the time.7 I want to suggest that Brainard's and Wojnarowicz's peripheral relation to these countercultural and independent comics endeavors allows us to see something more |
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| ISSN: | 2381-4705 2381-4721 2381-4721 |