Seeing Indian Women : Comics, Graphic Novels and Transmedia Illustrations (South Asian Literature in Focus)

Although, for years, women were portrayed as one-dimensional beings, Indian graphic novels have come a long way from solely idealizing the Hindu/Vedic past to contemporary digital comics with augmented reality, where individual stories of women are shared and politicized. Drawing on a decade of women’s mis/representation across comics, graphic novels, and digital comics, the book would masterfully examine how iconography materializes the intersections between gender and culture in a multiplicity of context including spatial, artistic, historical, and commercial. Within the domain of popular culture, the genre of comics and graphic novels has become a booming publishing industry that has increasingly become more pronounced and arguably a promising avenue for exploring myriad concerns. Centering the correlation between the aesthetics of gender representation and consumer-material practices that has shaped this literature’s new, enduring, and potent form, this book demonstrates how this new aesthetics entail a simultaneous cultural and political retooling of the visual in the context of gender politics. It draws on a wide range of comics scholarship—including graphic fiction, non-fiction, digital and web comics—to illustrate how femininity and masculinity are produced, represented, and received. Thus, this book investigates the graphic parables produced by women creators which has set-in motion a range of debates concerning the ongoing exchange between gender and the politics of representation, production, and consumption. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and language studies, gender studies, comics studies, visual arts, and South Asia Studies.