Drawn and written by Latin American women: the autocomic as a space of both questioning and denunciation

Abstract

Graphic novels have become surprisingly popular. This is evidenced in the quality, quantity, and relevance of year-to-year publications, all of which develop interesting narrative and discursive proposals. In the case of Latin America, the production of the last decade has been focused on rescuing, promoting, and developing the autobiographical story genre. Going beyond staples such as Hadashi no Gen, Maus and Persepolis, the local production visualises a number of themes, techniques, and discursive frameworks. All of these contribute to the formation of a text and image-nurtured canvas, driven by the necessity to encapsulate the memory of the individual in an every-day context. This allows the critical (de)construction of the social framework of our continent. The present paper explores the world of autocomics by means of three contemporary authors: Power Paola (Virus tropical, 2011), Agustina Guerrero (Diario de una volátil, 2015) and Marcela Trujillo (Ídolo, una historia casi real, 2017). An analysis of the corpus will show how the stories’ narrators-enunciators unveil —and rebel against— the informing patriarchal framework whose hegemony permeates both the narrated world and the traditional androcentrism of the comic-book industry as a whole.