Girlhood Studies

In recent years, the scope of girlhood studies has included the investigation of a wide range of cultural artifacts and media that shape, reflect, and challenge society's prescriptive notions of girlhood. These artifacts include podcasts, girlfestos, fan fiction and, as this special issue highlights, comics. As Nicoletta Mandolini, Lisa Maya Quaianni Manuzzato, and Eva Van de Wiele, the guest editors of this special issue demonstrate, comics have emerged as a particularly rich and multifaceted medium in which to explore the complexities of girl culture, identity formation, and representation. In this special issue of Girlhood Studies Mel Gibson from the United Kingdom focuses on New Zealand, Lan Dong from the United States considers the work of a first-generation Filipino Egyptian American, Italian Simona di Martino looks at an Italian franchise while American Brianna Anderson focuses on Vietnamese graphic novels and Katlin Sweeney Romero from the United States considers the work of a Latina born in America. Then Charlotte Fabricius from Denmark looks at Danish publishing while Italian Nicoletta Mandolini interviews a Portuguese author. Also from Portugal, Ana Matilde Sousa focuses on girls in general in her visual essay while Eva Van de Wiele from Belgium considers the work of a German comics author.

As the guest editors of this special issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal we invited comics and media scholars to discuss girlhood from the perspective of transnational and/or transmedia practices. These investigations avoid the trap Anita Harris warned us about in All about the Girl (2004) since they approach girlhood as a “constantly shifting” category, to use the words of Kristine Moruzi (2012: 191) rather than as a natural fixed state of being. Neither do they repeat the earlier tendency to conflate girlhood with womanhood (as can be seen, for instance, in Trina Robbins's From Girls to Grrlz (1999) and in Mike Madrid's The Supergirls (2009)). This special issue aligns with the work of scholars who study comics and girlhood with a focus on different publication formats (Gibson 2023), an international approach (Marshall 2018), and a transmedia interest (Hains 2012). The authors represented here consider girlhood as produced and negotiated; they recognize that girlhood implies a multiplicity of ages, social classes, ethnicities, and religions (as did, for instance, Marla Jaksch, Catherine Cymone Fourshey, and Relebohile Moletsane (2023) who edited Girlhood Studies 16:1: Reframing African Girlhood and Salsabel Almanssori and Muna Saleh whose Hijabi Girlhood in the Intersections: Violence, Resistance, Reclamation appeared later in 2023).

In this article, I explore the significance of transmedia to contemporary independent comics through analyzing aspects of production, engagement, and content in a small-scale fantasy-based franchise, The Tea Dragon Society, that celebrates diversity and interconnectedness. This transmedia franchise centers predominantly on girl characters and is aimed mainly at 8–12-year-olds. The depiction of girlhood in the storyworld can be seen to be linked to how the overall franchise works and I argue that both can be seen as being in flux and potentially boundless, yet also bounded. The franchise also intertwines girlhood and craft cultures in the storyworld, modeling activity with which the creator hopes the target audience will engage in the real world and reflecting the franchise itself as it, too, represents crafting.

I examine how Malaka Gharib's I Was Their American Dream and It Won't Always Be Like This frame, embody, and reimagine girlhood through a multicultural transnational lens. Born in California, Gharib grew up with Filipino and Egyptian heritage. Taking advantage of the formal properties of comics, her work situates her memories and experiences at the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and transnational encounters. I interrogate how these books visualize the connection between girlhood and mixed heritage through the artist-narrator's interactions with and observation of her Filipino mother and relatives in the United States and her father, stepmother, half-siblings, and neighbors in Egypt. I also examine how the multimodality of comics draws on tropes of girlhood to enable representation through the depiction and layering of different selves.

The Italian-made comics series W.I.T.C.H. and the homonymous magazine enjoyed global success. The series tells the story of five girls who discover they have magical powers and are called on to save the universe from evil forces. I investigate this transnational and transmedia series and explore how girls’ empowerment is pursued through the trope of the teenage witch in the comics’ storyline, revealing the hybridization of manga, European, and Disney graphic styles and themes, and in the magazine itself where the editors use techniques of engagement with readers (surveys and quizzes, problem pages and letters from readers, DIY pieces, and diary-like pages). This analysis involves scholarship on Girlhood and Cultural Studies and serves as a springboard for further investigation.

Girl activism takes center stage in Trang Nguyễn and Jeet Zdung's comics Saving Sorya: Chang and the Sun Bear and Saving H'Non: Chang and the Elephant. The narratives follow Chang, a young conservationist, as she rehabilitates an orphaned sun bear and an abused elephant. The series diverts from conventional depictions of exceptional girl eco-heroes by emphasizing the importance of collaboration, grassroots initiatives, and environmental education. Moreover, the comics promote ecofeminist perspectives by highlighting the connections between environmental degradation, gendered violence, and social inequities. I explore how Nguyễn and Zdung use the multimodal comics form to promote ecofeminist values and educate young readers about global environmental issues. I also analyze how the comics invite readers to engage in transnational advocacy by modeling youth activism and providing resources.

Latinx comics creators publish on social media to connect with a global audience and perform digital self-mediation that enhances the self-reflexive themes in their work. Among these creators is Chicana artist, Daisy Ruiz, known as Draizys, whose auto-bio comic Gordita: Built Like This showcases this approach. Its narrative contents, publication trajectory, and digital promotion exemplify how Ruiz as protagonist and author uses digital tools to produce and share her creative work. Her depictions of adolescent internet use, along with the behind-the-scenes content she posts to Instagram and TikTok, underscore how she uses medium-specific affordances to produce sequential autobiographical narratives in her comics and social media posts that, in both content and form, nuance how Latinas are mediated to the public.

In this article I investigate the transformation of transnational girlhood in a recent imprint of comics for young readers published by Danish comics publisher Forlaget Cobolt. Launched in 2021, the imprint encompasses a range of mostly translated comics, including Anglophone graphic novels, a number of Francophone series, and comics from other Scandinavian countries. Many of the titles seem to target an audience of girl readers. However, based on interviews conducted with the acquisitions editor responsible for the line and two translators, I demonstrate that the work of bringing the titles to a Danish audience was guided by attempts to provide quality reading for a range of genders. In this process, transnational girlhood is imagined as non-gender-specific, reflecting contemporary discussions of gender politics and comics reading.

Joana Estrela, born in Penafiel in 1990, is a Portuguese illustrator and comics artist whose short but rich career path intersects significantly with the concerns of girlhood and the dynamics of the transnational creation and circulation of graphic narratives. In 2013, she self-published the zine, Os vestidos do Tiago, which was later re-published by the independent Luso-Brazilian publisher Sapata Press in 2018 and is now available in English with the title James's Dresses (2019). The zine is a short immersion into the fictional, though quite realistic, world of Tiago, a boy who loves wearing feminine dresses and is not scared of experimenting with them. Despite having a boy as protagonist, Os vestidos do Tiago can be looked at as Estrela's first attempt at representing girlhood, given the presence, in the publication, of crucial aesthetic references to the realm of childhood and femininity.

Schrödinger's Grrrl

By Hetamoé

‘Girlhood’ Exists in A Quantum State.

She Possesses Different Atributes or Identities

Until Observed or Interacted with.

Thomas Wellmann. 2017. Nika, Lotte, Mangold! Kassel: Rotopol.

Thomas Wellmann. 2021. Nika, Lotte, Mangold! Weiter geht's. Kassel: Rotopol.

Thomas Wellmann. 2023. Nika, Lotte, Mangold! Immer was los! Kassel: Rotopol.