Bound By Law: Bitch Planet Comics Studies Round Table (part two)<\/p>\n
Qiana Whitted\u00a0\/\u00a08 March 2018<\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s Note: This is the second of an exciting three-part series here on\u00a0The Middle Spaces\u2014organized and co-edited by Qiana Whitted\u2014a round table of nine different scholars discussing Image Comics\u2019\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0series, by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De\u00a0Landro. Full bios for all our contributors can be found on the\u00a0Guest Writers\u00a0page.<\/p>\n
Our round table continues today with three more scholars asking vital questions about Image Comics\u2019\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro.\u00a0 As co-editor Qiana Whitted wrote in her introduction in part one: \u201cSpeculation drives these short pieces; we are posing questions and making observations that are designed to prompt further discussion about the critical intersections that\u00a0Bitch\u00a0Planet\u00a0inspires.\u201d\u00a0Click here to see part one: \u201cCaged and Enraged: Bitch Planet Comics Studies Round Table.\u201d<\/p>\n
How Does\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0Deconstruct the Stereotypes of Black Women in Prison?<\/p>\n
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams,\u00a0Associate Professor in the Gender, Women\u2019s and Sexuality Studies Department and in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa.<\/p>\n
Black women are often presented in popular culture as characters with finite possibilities\u2013as mammies, Jezebels, welfare queens, the all powerful matriarch, the Hottentot Venus, gold diggers, soul queens, gangsta bitches, prude church ladies, and sista\u2019 saviors.\u00a0These stereotypes threaten to crowd out accurate representations of black women seeking to build authentic selves and liberation from tiny cultural pigeonholes.\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro from Image Comics is one of the few successful comics, deeply influenced by popular culture, in which characters who are black women are shown as multidimensional human beings with wants, needs, desires, and authentic lives.<\/p>\n
One complication is that the women of color in\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0are incarcerated. More specifically, Black women in real life and in popular culture, who are incarcerated, are often mythologized and conflated with deviance, hyper sexuality, violence, and even compared to beasts, who must be confined.\u00a0In her 2003 book,\u00a0Are Prisons Obsolete?,\u00a0Angela Davis wrote \u201cJails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo\u2014obedient to our keepers but dangerous to each other\u201d (23). \u00a0Black women experience sexualized white supremacy through intense, traumatic, and invasive macro and microaggressions everyday; this does not change because they go to prison. We see this echoed in\u00a0Bitch Planet.<\/p>\n
Kam confronts the peeping tom prison guard and forces him to help her (from Bitch Planet #4) [Click to Enlarge Image]<\/p>\n
The prison shower seems to be a pivotal place in the carceral geography of\u00a0Bitch Planet; especially for black women. It is the location in Bitch Planet where the stereotypes of the Blaxploitation films that inspired DeConnick and De Landro are turned on their heads. Their tongue in cheek naming of the chapter, \u201cThe Obligatory Shower Scene\u201d\u00a0in issue #4 is a nod to many of the pop culture influences of the series. In the chapter, Kamu (nicknamed \u201cKam\u201d), a former athlete, framed for murder, is trying to negotiate prison culture, while recruiting women to play in a blood sport game called Megaton. The art within the entire book, but this set of panels in particular, lovingly portrays the bodies of realistic looking women of all shapes, colors, and sizes. The women allow a male guard, Rick Weldon, to engage his peeping Tom fantasies\u00a0by watching them shower through a tiny jagged hole; in exchange he agrees not to report their clandestine activities and conversations. \u00a0Later, Kamu baits him by playing at deliciously masturbating, ultimately she pulls him through the wall and nearly kills him with a shower pipe. She reverses his exploitation by threatening to rat him and his \u201ctiny freckled penis\u201d out for perversion. His fear of exposure is so great that he agrees to help her get information\u00a0and\u00a0find her sister.<\/p>\n
In issue #7, \u201cPresident Bitch: Part One\u201d, we see Kam in the showers with Penny who is sitting on the floor under a soft spray of water. We see Kam squat next to Penny and try to talk her out of the guilt she is feeling for the death of another inmate and friend named Meiko. Penny silently acknowledges Kam\u2019s kindness through a moment of hand holding. Once she rises again she assumes the mantle of Penny Rolle, a proudly fat black woman raised to be strong by her grandmother, before the disciplining Fathers of the Auxiliary Compliance Outpost, known as Bitch Planet, intervened.<\/p>\n
Kam comforts Penny in the shower (from Bitch Planet #7).<\/p>\n
On the next page Kam is featured in seven out of eight panels. She also has resumed her mantle of athletic bad-ass, uses a muscled arm to knock on the shower tiles with her fist summoning her rat-guard, and tells him to get her a map, a finger in his face. Then she turns her back on him and walks away. The essay by Angelica Jade Bastien, at the end of this issue, complicates an oversimplified reading of Penny\u2019s and Kam\u2019s inner and outer strength by explaining how harmful the stereotype of the strong black woman can be.<\/p>\n
Deconnick and De Landro draw on reader\u2019s knowledge of these stereotypes, but then deconstruct them in key moments, like the shower scene mentioned above. The women in\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0must use aspects of stereotypes for self-preservation against the patriarchy and their captors, but in the process, work hard not to lose their humanity.<\/p>\n
[For more about these ideas read,\u00a0Sister Citizen\u00a0by Melissa V. Harris Perry,\u00a0Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment\u00a0\u00a0by Patricia Hill Collins,\u00a0and\u00a0Citizen\u00a0by Claudia Rankine]<\/p>\n
Where Does\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0Fit Into Scholarly Conversations About Trans Representation in Comics?<\/p>\n
Nicholas E. Miller,\u00a0Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Hollins University.<\/p>\n
This question operates on a complicated assumption: that substantive scholarly conversations about trans representation\u00a0are\u00a0happening in comics studies. A quick search of peer-reviewed publications produces few entries on trans identities in comics prior to 2015, with many of those pointing to the first trans panel at San Diego Comic-Con as a watershed moment. There\u00a0is, of course, exceptional work being done by comics scholars right now, yet we remain woefully behind non-academic writers and activists in our field when it comes to writing about trans representation seriously.\u00a0\u00a0(You might begin, for example, with\u00a0the following conversation in\u00a0Cinema Journal, facilitated by Suzanne Scott and Ellen Fitzpatrick. I also highly recommend\u00a0Nami Hatfield\u2019s essay on trans webcomics and library spaces, published by in the\u00a0Queer Cats Journal of LGBTQ Studies, and Thomas J. Billard\u2019s and \u00a0Brian L. MacAuley\u2019s chapter in\u00a0Heroes, Heroines, and Everything in Between, which examines transgender characters in Marvel, DC, and Image comics.)<\/p>\n
Bitch Planet, the Image Comics series by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro, offers us one opportunity to do more of that work. This text merits our scholarly attention, in part, because it sits at the intersection of independent and mainstream comics. The trans characters who are visible in comics today still appear primarily in independent and self-published titles, making the publication of\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0with Image significant. This series also provides us with a number of paratexts that might help us to analyze examples of trans representation that primarily have been made visible by non-trans creators. Comics scholars would be remiss to ignore the back matter included with individual issues, the dialogue between DeConnick and De Landro in the trade paperback (Book Two), or\u00a0the writings of trans consultants like Emma Houxbois.<\/p>\n
Even as consultants like Houxbois speak highly of the work done in\u00a0Bitch Planet, they also note that \u201cconsultants are not a substitute for hiring actual transgender creators nor are we a substitute for doing the work.\u201d In suggesting that\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0might serve as a productive site for examining trans representation in comics, then, I do not want to suggest that the work here should supplant a study of comics like Magdalene Visaggio\u2019s and Eva Cabrera\u2019s\u00a0Kim & Kim\u00a0or the excellent work by trans creators on independent comics. Instead, I propose that the complex narrative of representing trans characters in\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0offers a unique opportunity to think about these questions through its distinctive paratextual framework.<\/p>\n
(from Bitch Planet #8)<\/p>\n
This is, perhaps, most evident in the first panel to\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0#8, where we first see the \u201cNon-Compliants\u201d in Facility One. The narrative caption informs us that trans women were the first to be detained and sent to the Auxiliary Compliance Outpost. In that image, we get a sense of how DeConnick and De Landro approach the presentation of anatomy with trans characters. From DeConnick\u2019s notes to De Landro\u2014part of the back matter from the trade paperback in Book Two of\u00a0Bitch Planet\u2014we learn that: \u201cMany of these women, if not most, will have penises. That is a fact we want to show without fetishizing\u2014no close-ups, no centering of the penises in this frame.\u201d Their goal here is to normalize trans anatomy and avoid passing judgment on bodies.<\/p>\n
(from Bitch Planet #8)<\/p>\n
What I find most striking in these paratextual notes, however, is how the representation of hair for these characters was actually the place where DeConnick found herself \u201cprojecting a bit.\u201d What we, as scholars, would not have known from these panels is that DeConnick initially was operating under the assumption that most trans women would want to grow their hair out. As a result, one of the trans characters\u2014Morowa\u2014was originally written to have long hair. This assumption, however, was checked by one of the consultants who told DeConnick that: \u201cQueers gonna queer.\u201d The final choice to make Morowa\u2019s hair short in\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0was thus a direct response to consultants, and one that undermined DeConnick\u2019s own generalized assumptions about trans aesthetics and experiences.<\/p>\n
I bring this up not to establish the importance of \u201cauthorial intent\u201d when it comes to our scholarly work on trans representation, but instead to highlight how creator transparency, consultant writings, and the paratexts attached to\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0open up additional interpretive possibilities. As a text that features many trans women\u2014not just a single character carrying the entire weight of representation\u2014these notes, along with reflections by consultants, might help us to locate and interrogate our own assumptions as scholars looking to be more attentive to trans experiences. As Houxbois writes, \u201cthere\u2019s little to no context or framework within comics criticism to examine transgender representation or aesthetics beyond the superficial.\u201d This is something that\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0nicely highlights, and it gives us an opportunity to do better.<\/p>\n
With that, let me open this post up to readers. If you are visiting this round table, you are likely familiar with\u00a0Bitch Planet. How many of you also read Visaggio\u2019s\u00a0Kim & Kim\u00a0or other comics with trans characters\/creators? How do you think\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0compares with those comics in terms of trans representation? Or, on a different note, how many of you have read trans scholarship coming out of other disciplines? How might the ways trans representation is studied in other fields be useful to us as comics scholars? Finally, what scholarship on trans representation in comics might you recommend to me and to other readers?<\/p>\n
How Do Advertising Parodies Trace the Policing of Women\u2019s Bodies in\u00a0Bitch Planet?<\/p>\n
Nicole Pizarro,\u00a0PhD student in English at The Ohio State University.<\/p>\n
The first issue of Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro\u2019s\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0begins with a woman making her way through a city. Her face is hard to make out in the sea of bodies walking around her. What\u00a0is\u00a0noticeable, however, is the amount of advertising that takes up most of the panels depicting her walk. The ads show messages like \u201cEat less, Poop More,\u201d \u201cNo more pores,\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re fat,\u201d and \u201cObey.\u201d\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0is about the women who fail to comply in a world where patriarchal control over women and their bodies is the standard. These women are found to be unfit for society and are sent to the Auxiliary Compliance Post know as Bitch Planet. The women on Earth are bullied into fulfilling society\u2019s standards, whereas the women on Bitch Planet are forced to comply or die.<\/p>\n
Ad from Photoplay (January 1916)<\/p>\n
The advertisements that appear throughout the story are invested in women losing weight and ensuring that their (male) partners are satisfied. Every issue of\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0ends with a page of advertisements. Aesthetically, the ads are reminiscent of those in magazines from the early 1900\u2019s. In\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0the ads are arguably geared towards women, although all the advertisement pages from issues 1 through 5 of\u00a0BP\u00a0have a header that reads \u201cHey kids, patriarchy!\u201d which suggests a cynical nod to the comic-reading audience. Most importantly, however, is that closer inspection of these ads shows that they rhetorically trace the narrative in the story. As the story progresses, the messages found in the ads become less about compliance and more about revolt.<\/p>\n
As the series progresses, the ads transform. \u00a0In the second issue of\u00a0Bitch Planet, there is an ad for a \u201c3-D Gyno-coin,\u201d with which one can hypnotize a man into being repulsed by women he likes. The back cover of\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0#3, which features Penny Rolle\u2019s backstory regarding her imprisonment for accepting her own fat body, features many such ads including one that at first seems to be about weight loss via body parasites. However, a close look at the ad text reveals its subversive message that \u00a0women should refuse to harm their bodies to fit an outsider\u2019s standards of beauty. The message in the ads in the early issues of\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0are about shaming women into changing their personalities or bodies to appeal to men. As the women\u2019s resolve to escape solidifies, the ads change.\u00a0An ad in the seventh issue\u00a0of\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0is reminiscent of those in the 90\u2019s or the early 2000\u2019s. Whereas the ads earlier in the story didn\u2019t have any pictures of people and were all cartoonish, this ad is the first to include the picture of a woman. The ad is about destroying the patriarchy through makeup, such as \u201cEvil Eyeliner,\u201d \u201cMale Tears Moisturizer\u201d and \u201cPoisonous Polish.\u201d<\/p>\n
Satirical ads on the back of Bitch Planet #1 [Click to Enlarge]<\/p>\n
In\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0#6, \u00a0an ad is rendered to appear vandalized, claiming that \u201cEleanor Lives!\u201d Eleanor, the leader of the resistance, was believed to be dead, but turns out to be incarcerated on Bitch Planet. Her introduction in the story prompts a revolution inside the Bitch Planet correctional facility. The vandalized ad marks an in-world response to the content of the ads.<\/p>\n
In\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0#10 (the most recent issue), the High Father\u2014the Head of State\u2014is killed by the Father of Media\u2019s daughter, Kylie. Through the issue, Kylie communicates through a digital wristband with a woman who fires shots in the middle of a social gathering and proclaims\u2014along with four other women\u2014that they are \u201cthe children of Eleanor Doane\u201d and that they \u201cremember.\u201d As panic ensues in the party, Kylie is revealed to be a supporter of President Eleanor. The last panel shows her pointing a gun at the High Father and pulling the trigger. Kylie\u2019s status as the daughter of the Father of Media and being involved in the attack suggests she might have been involved with the rhetoric of revolt embedded in the ads in the later issues of\u00a0BP. If this is the case, we are left on a sour note, as issue #10 ends with ads missing that resistant rhetoric. What does the return to the compliant tone suggest? These ads are in an odd paratextual space, as they exist both in and outside the story world. As such, the intended audience is arguably doubled. They are attempts to police women\u2019s bodies \u00a0within the world of\u00a0Bitch Planet, but how do these ads impact the reader outside of the story world? \u00a0<\/p>\n
Thank you again to our three contributors and come back next Tuesday for part three of our\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0\u00a0round table.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bound By Law: Bitch Planet Comics Studies Round Table (part two) Qiana Whitted\u00a0\/\u00a08 March 2018 Editor\u2019s Note: This is the second of an exciting three-part series here on\u00a0The Middle Spaces\u2014organized and co-edited by Qiana Whitted\u2014a round table of nine different scholars discussing Image Comics\u2019\u00a0Bitch Planet\u00a0series, by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De\u00a0Landro. Full bios for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-107445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-paper-writing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}