Oleszczuk, Anna

Since the very essence of queerness lies in its fluidity, vagueness, and instability of possibilities, identifying patterns common to all of its version seems impossible. However, one can certainly distinguish certain phenomena that keep recurring in various expressions of queerness: subverting identities based on the normative constructions of gender and disrupting heteronormative binaries in the process; breaking apart the presumed interrelationships between sex, gender, and (hetero)sexuality; and negotiating temporal and spatial spheres allowing for the embodied experiences of queerness.

Similarly to queerness itself and queer theory used to conceptualize and research it, since their very beginnings comics as a medium, as cultural texts, and as a culture have been breaking down the sociocultural binaries, exploring non-normative expressions of sexualities and gender, visualizing spaces of dissonances and fluid understandings, and defying normative ties, temporalities, and experiences.

Thus, it stands to reason that comics in general, and speculative comics in particular, would provide visual and narrative encodings of queerness that can contribute to a dynamic and self-reflective discourse challenging the traditional binary boundaries of genders and sexualities. This paper discusses them by focusing especially on the speculative texts that develop or establish their own queer discourses by relying on constant and repetitive acts of bodily transformations. This is accomplished by illustrating their diversity and contextualizing them using selected examples from comics history. The final part of the paper relates the theories and practices of queerness to the visualities from post-2000 speculative comics.

Anna Oleszczuk is a doctoral candidate at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland. Her research seeks to examine how the potential of speculative comics to conceptualize the deviations from the heteronormative cultural standard has been realized in modern texts and how it can be utilized to explore queer gender and sexualities. She has presented her work at numerous conferences and published articles on both comics and speculative fiction. She is currently working on a chapter on “Comics and Gender” for The Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives to be published by De Gruyter in early 2021 and on a chapter on “Taking a Walk on the Queer Side: Speculative Comics (De)Constructing Queer Identity” for The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Culture to be published by Routledge in late 2021. She plans to explore her research interests further by writing a dissertation on queer gender and sexuality in speculative comics.

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