Comic Art and Latinidad: Visualizing the Latino Body and Its Lived Experience

VISUALIZING THE SELF IN FLUX October 25-26, 2019. University Park Campus. Conference Proceeding Vol. 1

Panel Title: Comic art and Latinidad: Visualizing the Latino Body and its Lived Experience

Panel Description

In this panel we discussed how latino bodies and subjectivities are represented in the medium of comics, and how the medium demands certain considerations by virtue of it being visual and fragmentary at the same time. The first paper: “Negotiations of Latinidad” pays attention to racial phenotypical difference as managed by different authors in A Latinx Comics Anthology. The second paper is also interested in how artists try to solve the issue of representing the Latina body, except in comics of massive circulation such as Batman and in the multimedia environments that emerge out of their animated series adaptations. The paper looks at the visual and verbal codes employed to convey Renee Montoya’s ethnicity in a transmedia ecology. Finally, the third paper takes the issue of latino representation to the experiential level by analyzing the nonsequential narrative pockets in the story of Isabel, a Chicana subject situated at the U.S.- Mexico border. Our panel aligns well with the subject of the conference as it explores latinidad in a way that does not assume a stability in its representation. We hope to discuss how latinidad tasks the comics artist with visualizing fluid traits that lie in the body but also in the way that the body is perceived in the world.

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VISUALIZING THE SELF IN FLUX October 25-26, 2019. University Park Campus. Conference Proceeding Vol. 1 Presentation Title: Negotiations of Latinidad: Ethnic and Racial difference in Tales from La Vida.

Author: Constanza Contreras

Affiliation: University of Michigan, English Language and Literature

Abstract

What does it mean to be Latino, and how do Latinx authors reckon with racial difference when the medium they choose to take up is a highly visual one, such as comics? In this paper, I want to unpack the complexities that the medium of comics brings about in the narrating and negotiating of Latinidad, by means of highlighting the role in which phenotypical and racial difference might or might not be visually represented in the personal narratives compiled in Tales From La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama. More specifically, I will be close reading the first section of the collection, “Tongues Untied”, to highlight the possible connections between Latin American culturalist understandings of race and mestizaje, and the way in which Latinx subjectivity is conformed as an imperial extension of these. In doing so, my aim is to explore what purchase might the medium allow for complicating understandings of Latinidad than, especially in already canonical narrative fiction, seem to rely heavily on culturalist understanding of race that erase both indigenous and African difference and heritage.

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This is an unpublished piece by the author(s) listed on this cover page. No commercial or non- commercial reproduction or modification permitted unless authorized by the author(s).

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VISUALIZING THE SELF IN FLUX October 25-26, 2019. University Park Campus. Conference Proceeding Vol. 1 Presentation Title: The Importance of Being Montoya: Latina’s Portrayal in Batman’s Supporting Character Renee Montoya

Author: Moisés Hassan

Affiliation: Stony Brook University, Hispanic Languages and Literature

Abstract

In March 1992, Renee Montoya made her first appearance in Batman 475 as a police woman from Gotham City Police Department. Later that year she gained a moderate popularity as a recurring character in Batman: The Animated Series. It wasn’t until the arc No Man’s Land, when Montoya developed a proper identity by herself separated from her colleagues, thanks to author Greg Rucka, who took her as a cornerstone of Gotham City. Ever since her creation, several writers and artists have been struggling with the proper way to characterize a Latina woman. Without a clear pattern, they stablished her Latinidad. In this paper I analyze the different elements that comic creators have to define ethnicity and how they were applied to Montoya throughout her major comic book appearances. To do so, I look into both written and visual techniques such as the name, background history, language, skin color, physical features among other characteristics.

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This is an unpublished piece by the author(s) listed on this cover page. No commercial or non- commercial reproduction or modification permitted unless authorized by the author(s).

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VISUALIZING THE SELF IN FLUX October 25-26, 2019. University Park Campus. Conference Proceeding Vol. 1 Presentation Title: Aesthetic, aesthesis, freedom, and the Chicana Heart in Jaime Hernández’s Love and Rockets

Author: Camila Paz Gutiérrez

Affiliation: The Pennsylvania State University, Comparative Literature and Visual Studies

Abstract

In this paper I analyze how the Hernández Brothers’ Love and Rockets uses the language of comics to convey alternative and even conflicting forms of knowledge and lived experience of Chicana subjects. I work mainly with Mah y Busch’s theorization of the Chicana Heart as a site of epistemological production. I am interested especially in how these alternative explanations of lived experience have an impact on the development of aesthetics and aisthesis: where aesthetics used to be related to perception they are now related to judgment of beauty, aisthesis reclaims the ground of perceived experience and a-logical knowledge within the aesthetic. Other discourses that intersect in theorizing the differential Chicana experience, and which I discuss through the presentation include María Lugones’ Loving Perception, Chela Sandoval’s Differential Consciousness, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s spectrum of conocimiento/desconocimiento and nepantlera knowledge. I use these in a nuanced way, to avoid essentializing. The story of Isabel’s abortion in “Flies on the Ceiling” demands a careful reading of the fluctuating, sometimes unstable epistemologies of the Chicana subject.

This is an unpublished piece by the author(s) listed on this cover page. No commercial or non- commercial reproduction or modification permitted unless authorized by the author(s).

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