TY - CHAP

T1 - Graphic Entanglements

T2 - Images of Women, Nature and Brittany in Contemporary Comics

AU - Blin-Rolland, Armelle

PY - 2023/4/1

Y1 - 2023/4/1

N2 - This chapter develops an ecofeminist analysis of the dynamic link between gender and the environment, through a dual focus on the medium of comics and the locus of Brittany, a stateless culture shaped by unequal power relations with France, and one whose imageries and imaginaries have drawn on and redrawn women and nature in shifting ways. It develops the notion of ‘graphic entanglements’, which puts into dialogue feminist, environmental and comics theorizations of relationality. I explore entanglements of gender and nature, and the human and the nonhuman in three recent, women-authored or co-authored Breton comics that centre on different environments and female figures: Brigande! [Bandit!] (2019), by Laëtitia Rouxel and Roland Michon; Plogoff (2013), by Delphine Le Lay and Alexis Horellou; and Christelle Le Guen’s Anjela (2018). I consider key feminist and environmental questions of landscape, bodies, performativity, toxicity and agency and how these are (re-)articulated through interactions between words, lines, colors and frames, and across panels and pages. The chapter argues that as graphic spaces of potentially multiple perspectives, comics may de- and re-assemble gender-nature and human-nonhuman configurations, offer (Breton women) images beyond stereotypes, and suggest modes of becoming that interweave rather than demarcate nature and culture.

AB - This chapter develops an ecofeminist analysis of the dynamic link between gender and the environment, through a dual focus on the medium of comics and the locus of Brittany, a stateless culture shaped by unequal power relations with France, and one whose imageries and imaginaries have drawn on and redrawn women and nature in shifting ways. It develops the notion of ‘graphic entanglements’, which puts into dialogue feminist, environmental and comics theorizations of relationality. I explore entanglements of gender and nature, and the human and the nonhuman in three recent, women-authored or co-authored Breton comics that centre on different environments and female figures: Brigande! [Bandit!] (2019), by Laëtitia Rouxel and Roland Michon; Plogoff (2013), by Delphine Le Lay and Alexis Horellou; and Christelle Le Guen’s Anjela (2018). I consider key feminist and environmental questions of landscape, bodies, performativity, toxicity and agency and how these are (re-)articulated through interactions between words, lines, colors and frames, and across panels and pages. The chapter argues that as graphic spaces of potentially multiple perspectives, comics may de- and re-assemble gender-nature and human-nonhuman configurations, offer (Breton women) images beyond stereotypes, and suggest modes of becoming that interweave rather than demarcate nature and culture.

M3 - Chapter

BT - Drawing (in) the Feminine: Women and Bande Dessinée

A2 - Flinn, Margaret C.

PB - The Ohio State University Press

ER -