Graphic Sex:

Queerness, Comics, & Moral Panic

As its title suggests, my second project examines the links between comic books, stigmatized sexualities, and censorship movements in the contemporary US. According to a recent PEN America report, there were 1,586 public school book censorship cases between July 2021 and last April, a sharp increase from years previous. According to that same recent PEN America study, of the books banned or challenged in a nine- month period, 41% have “protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color,” 22% directly address issues of race and racism; 33% explicitly address LGBTQ+ themes or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who are LGBTQ+; and 25% contain sexual content of varying kinds. Graphic Sex connects this current (and alarmingly familiar) trend to earlier moments of moral panic in U.S. history, arguing that these numbers hint at a powerful link between graphic narrative and stigmatized sexuality. Rather than denounce this link, my project embraces the queer negativity that I argue is inherent to the medium of comics. Positioned as a metaphorical “seducer” of innocent children, comics stand in for other sexualized stereotypes of the historical American imagination. For this reason, graphic literature is perhaps uniquely positioned as a case study in the links between of histories of racism, homophobia, censorship, and moral panic. In the US, comic books are a medium that is marked by classist, ageist, ethnic, and sexual stigma. Insofar as we understand “queer” to mean marked by sexual stigma, we can call comics a “queer” medium— that is, a medium whose form, content, and audience is marginal, vilified, or anti-normative.

While I have begun work on several sections of this book, it remains in organizational nascency. As it stands, I have working drafts of four chapters, including 1) “Color Me Gay,” an essay on the early history of gay liberation coloring books of the 1960s; 2) “The Stuttered Body,” an exploration of disability and queerness in Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) and David M’s graphic memoir Epileptic (2006); 3) “We Don’t Need The Nakedness and All That Stuff,” a piece on Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus (1991) in connection with recent book bans over its “sexually explicit” content; and 4) “Thwarting Repair,” an exploration of representations of psychoanalysis in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2013). The fourth chapter will focus on Jeff Smith’s children’s series Bone, which has been the subject of recent bans for racist content and for depicting smoking. The fifth chapter addresses the most banned book of 2022, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, a graphic memoir about coming out as nonbinary. This chapter will more explicitly theorize the ways in which the current moral panic over graphic literature abets other more material and legal attacks on queer bodies and lives in the 21st century.