Drawing Girls Together: An AutobioGRAPHICal Anthology

Since my childhood, I have always drawn “girls” as a means to think through and with my identity and social placement. As kids, my cousins and I would gather paper, pencils and pens and sit around a table deliberating the different features, outfits, and lives we wanted our hand-drawn girls to have. How I drew myself then is much different from how I draw myself now, and even today I am aware that my incessantly evolving identity continually evades any sort of answer to who I am. Yet, each image captures something, and the sequential practice of drawing girls has an active role in producing my identity even as it also contains the questions, contradictions, constraints, and ruptures of my lived experience.

On March 2, 2016 in Burlington, Iowa, police discovered the body of Kedarie “Kandicee” Johnson, a 16-year-old gender-fluid teen. Processing this death on my own that year, I made two art pieces in response all that I could learn about Kandicee, the first, a chapbook entitled Hold the Phone and the other, a watercolor drawing entitled Uplift which was published in the print special issue of SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Culture, Politics, and Society in (see pg. 1 of the PDF attached Hold the Phone and pg. 2 for Uplift). Then, on June 18, 2017, Seattle police shot and killed Charleena Lyles, a 30-year-old pregnant mother of four children while in her home after she called for their services. In response to Charleena’s death, I turned my COM 500 final assignment into a comic that is set against the online new reports of her murder juxtaposed with some of my own diary entries (see pg. 3-5). Most tragically put, these are the stakes of my work. While people like me are being killed, I myself am tucked away in the ivory tower, never fully safe from injustice, but privileged with access to resources that afford a false sense of comfort.

As a critical communication scholar who looks at representations of difference and identity in the media, I seek to elucidate the space between form and materiality and the implications of this severance as it is strictly bound to the black body. Both in my theoretical and methodological ventures as well as arts practice, I grapple with the ways in which the repeated death of Black womxn like Kandicee and Charleena serve as the dominant representation of my own social position. In both veins of my work as a scholar-practitioner, I turn to the multi-modal to ask: How are Black women represented in society and how does this representation inform and perform the state’s grammars of violence manifested in the continual death, torture, rape, and oppression of Black people? Focusing in on comics or what some call sequential art, I seek to understand the ways in which the Black woman’s body is repeatedly closed upon, while surfacing the survival strategies and poetics for resisting such formal and material constriction. Overall, my dissertation is a theoretical and methodological exploration of two ontologically operative lines that converge at a particular point for the queer Black femme in order to see the connection between black form and black materiality. For the purposes of this summer fellowship, I focus in on a specific chapter wherein I map my theoretical understandings onto various publics by drawing on individual and shared experiences as a sort of litmus test all the while simultaneously demonstrating the public utility of the methodology I use throughout the dissertation. In addition to thinking about the chapter on comix and publics, I hope to meta-theorize the form of the entire dissertation, a text to be included as part of my bookmaking practice, and to meta-critique the accessibility and feasibility of any work that I may do within the academy.

Although widely interested in visual culture, my research specifically looks at comix, which Deborah E. Whaley describes as “socially relevant underground, and independent forms of comics” in her book Black Women in Sequence (2017). I theorize the form of comix panels primarily through Stuart Hall’s understanding of Cultural Identity and the Diaspora, which he describes as “two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture” (1998, 226). Comix are formed by diverging and converging planes or panels that create images contained by all of that which they are not. From still pictures, to political cartoons, to teen zines, mainstream comics, music videos, and even performance art like Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being from the 1970s and Shawné Michaelain Thomas’ The Chamber Series (2017) – these objects are always both bounded and boundless. They demonstrate through form, the construction of identity and the liminal times and spaces that defy such fixed constructions while surreptitiously containing them. As Hall explains, “meaning continues to unfold… beyond the arbitrary closure which makes it” (1998, 230). Thus, in comix, there is always both the object and subject simultaneously enveloped in one another, as is the form and materiality of blackness.

As it currently stands, I envision my final dissertation as a bifurcated project that entails book writing as well as book making. Beyond writing for the dissertation, I find it important to apply the theories I am working with to various art practices including drawing, painting, bookmaking, curating, and performing as a form of critical cultural praxis. To that end, this project allows me to think about public art by making, teaching, and curating comix with people. Knowing that my final doctoral deliverables will include some sort of an exhibition, either in a gallery or online, the more immediate project, Drawing Girls Together, carves out space and time to collaboratively curate a set of artifacts that I can write about as well as use in the exhibition. The goal is to both solicit art from folks and to further develop my own creative practice alongside them, culminating in a carefully curated comix anthology. The objective is to draw together, as in: find those to draw girls with, draw the various girls together into a book, all the while drawing connections between form and materiality, my dissertation and the public.

Drawing Girls Together: An AutobioGRAPHICal Anthology is an application of the methodology I am currently developing which I call, “auto-ethno-bio-mytho-graphic.” The black female body specifically in relation to the archive has historically been rendered invisible and largely unwritten. I propose that current methods such as autoethnography and biomythography, upon revision and combination, afford an intervention to this problem. Performing auto-ethno-bio-mytho-graphic research proposes a new genre for engaging the archive, adding to it in a way that deconstructs. For Janinka Greenwood within arts-based research, the “ambiguities, diverging connections and unresolved tensions remind us that so called facts are only deliberately spotlit items in the rich and complex web of human knowing” (2012, 17-18). Regardless of content, archives tend to say more about the researcher than the subject or objects of study. Archives are “incomplete” and “have their own biases on the basis of inclusion, omissions, and point of view,” and thus cause harm and erasure. Susan J. Douglas proposes that the archives we should be creating “should be, a counterbalance to the ones created by” power (2010, 6). I propose the auto-ethno-bio-mytho-graphic is a genre capable of telling the black woman’s story in such a way that it not only opens up endless possibility within the space of the archive, countering the incessant closure presently faced but, it also frees those subjects who have been foreclosed on by the objectification of historiographic fiction. Such fictions are maintained by and created in maintenance of the current academic archive of communication science and art practices. Pairing autoethnography and biomythography with the politics of visuality weaves together a methodology for forging new epistemologies to match Sylvia Wynters’ theorization of different ontologies, or what she calls, “genres of being” and who Alexander Weheliye calls Habeas Viscus (1984; 2014). My project questions the bifurcation of our present methodologies, limited to “discovery versus invention, objective versus subjective, fact versus manufacture” and instead looks at the co-constitutive nature of the subject/object position through self-made representation (Daston 2000, 4). In the public comix dissertation chapter, I bridge more traditional social science community-engaged scholarship methods with arts-based research methods as well as critical textual reading methods to collaboratively produce something with a community for that community.

The design of this project has several branches that depart from the trunk of my dissertation. This summer and upcoming year I must hone in on the design of the entire project, finding areas I can consolidate and figuring out how exactly to root the project as I propose and defend my dissertation prospectus. I must continue to expand and engage the community from which I draw on and draw with, continue my personal arts practice, and document the research. As a co-founder of the Mixed Comix Collective, we will be continuing to meet regularly and move forward on our group objectives, mainly building out our comics library and finding its home in partnership with the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity as well as attending comic cons, reviewing comics, and working on creating our own comix (see pg. 6-17 for the group’s powerpoint presentation at the 2018 Race & Media Conference). I am currently establishing a reciprocal volunteer relationship with the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, where I will be interviewing artists from their Black and Indigenous POC Writer and Artist Summer Residency program in order to write their online biographies in mid to late August. I will also begin hosting a meetup group for BIPOC artists starting in October (although the frequency and focus of this is yet to be determined). Additionally, I will continue to attend academic comic studies conferences like the International Comic Arts Forum and the Comic Studies Society annual conferences as well as attend local and distant underground comix festivals such as the Short Run Comix & Art Festival in Seattle, Exterminator City by Push/Pull in Ballard, and the Black Comic Book Festival hosted by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. I also plan to continue visiting the UW special collections library once a week to look at black artist books as well as local comic shops to catch a “beat” of what’s going on in the comic and geek/nerd world. While developing my comix network, it is imperative that I refine the curriculum which will guide the project design for Drawing Girls Together to be carried out in the upcoming academic year. I will do this by revising both the lower level and upper level undergraduate course syllabi and paring them down into a workshop (See pg. 18-29 for the final collaborative zine produced from a trial-run of the lower level undergraduate course; See pg. 30-38 for the upper level undergraduate course mock syllabus). To digest my doctoral exam responses into a series of hand-drawn RSAnimate videoclips, I am also working in collaboration with Allain Daigle, a recent Ph.D. graduate. The goal is by the end of the summer to have produced at least one of three public-facing videos that can be used in the classroom, as part of Drawing Girls Together, and in my final dissertation exhibition. Finally, this summer I am focusing on figure drawing and artist book making skills and will be taking classes through Short Run, Push/Pull, and the Seattle Artist League. More on the back-end of things, by the end of the summer I would also like to have an IRB proposal in for Drawing Girls Together to be carried out over the academic year.

Beyond the financial support and community that the Simpson Center Offers, I am hoping as a group we can think about these several things together with regards to refining my project:

• How do I find balance between graphic essay / graphic criticism and how do I overcome the obstacles and risks of doing unconventional work (re: methodology, pedagogy and teaching in the classroom, and the dissertation final product)?

• How do I balance and/or prioritize the various directional pulls of the project and audiences, for example: community-engaged scholarship on the data collection end and public scholarship on the results/analysis end.

• What are the ethical and methodological stakes of studying the self through, in, and for the public? How do I avoid pitfalls? Who exemplifies this?

• How do I maximize the resources available to me while avoiding major time debts? Where can I consolidate?

• How might I better align the scope and scale of the project with my timeline for graduating and first book?

• How might I taxonomize my objects for archival purposes as well as for dissertation chapter? How and where do I merge print materials with digital materials?

• Which relationships do I prioritize? How might I organize my networks such that they optimally function for my project flows? How might I organize and track these relationships?

References

Daston, Lorraine and Lorraine Daston. 2000. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago: Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

Douglas, Susan J. 2010. "Writing from the Archive: Creating Your Own." The Communication Review 13 (1): 5-14. doi:10.1080/10714420903558613.

Greenwood, Janinka. 2012. "Arts-Based Research : Weaving Magic and Meaning." International

Journal of Education and the Arts 13.

Hall, Stuart. 1998. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Edited by Jonathan Rutherford.

London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus : Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Durham : Duke University Press.

Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth. 2016. Black Women in Sequence : Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 1984. "The Ceremony must be found: After Humanism." Boundary 2 12/13: 19-70. doi:10.2307/302808.