This panel is part of a series of panels that explore the representation of trauma in German-language graphic narratives. Recent decades have seen an increase in graphic narratives that deal with traumatic experiences. Indeed, some scholars have argued that graphic narratives are particularly well-suited to portraying traumatic experiences through the lens of individual memories. Chute, for example, has suggested that the “fragmentary and condensed form” of comics panels corresponds to the fragmentary and condensed nature of traumatic memories. Because graphic memoirs both show and tell, they push “on conceptions of the unrepresentable” and capture what might otherwise be considered “unsayable.” Similarly, Gillian Whitlock states that comics “may be partly adept at finding room to maneuver amid spaces of contradiction and extreme states of violent contestation.” This panel focuses on trauma related to gender, sex, and sexuality, in particular sexism and domestic violence.

Burdock's paper analyzes the work of the German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943). Salomon recorded her short life in a series of over 1,000 works on paper, while in exile in France over a period of two years. She overlaid 330 paintings with hand-lettered narratives on tracing paper, while she painted text directly onto some of the later pieces. This collection remained relatively obscure for decades and was often categorized as Holocaust art (Salomon was murdered at Auschwitz). But, while Salomon reveals the effects of social and political violence on herself and her family in a handful of paintings and texts, the artist’s focus is on her primary relationships and love interests, and on the impact of her mother’s, aunt’s, and grandmother’s suicides. Depression among the women in her family may have been related to domestic abuse. Through a close reading of several of Salomon’s images and corresponding texts, I want to show why it is important to receive her testimony as one of the first graphic memoirs, as prototype to contemporary confessional comics. I argue that Salomon's work is especially relevant now, within the context of the #MeToo movement. It is insufficient to view Salomon’s suffering as a German Jew without taking into account her oppression as a subject of an overwhelmingly sexist culture with its constant reinforcement of the fallacy that women are inferior intellectually and creatively.

Sterling focuses on the Austrian artist Ulli Lust, who is widely recognized as a leading voice in German-language graphic narratives of the twenty-first century. Since the publication of her critically-acclaimed Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens in 2009, Lust has established herself as a bold practitioner of autobiographic work in the medium. In Wie ich versuchte, ein guter Mensch zu sein (2017), she provides stark, but complex depictions of sexuality and trauma in the space between sexual violence against women and unabashed celebration of female desire. In reference to comics autobiographies by women artists, Hillary Chute refers to the “risk of representation”: There is the danger of being disbelieved, of having one’s experiences downplayed or discounted, as well as the threat of judgment, reprisal, or even censorship. This talk analyzes how Lust’s comics navigate the so-called risk of representation in graphic trauma narratives, with particular attention to the nuanced and fraught role played by sex and sexuality and to experiences of sexual objectification, harassment, and rape.

Kraenzle explores comics’ suitability as a medium of testimony and witness in the context of gender and trauma. As a platform for narratives of trauma, the visual medium of comics raises thorny questions about the ethics of spectacle and spectatorship, which are particularly difficult to navigate in the case of events that are deemed unrepresentable. Yet, Chute argues that the medium’s strength lies in its ability to “intervene against a culture of invisibility by taking [...] the risk of representation” (5). I argue that the multimodality and architecture of comics, along with their freedom from the fetters of realism, afford unique tools to pose self-reflexive questions about the ethics and politics of representation. How do recent comics render visible events and memories in ways that resist exploitation, spectacle, and objectification. How can they position the reader not simply as spectator or voyeur, but as a witness implicated in larger networks of marginalization, oppression or violence. Possible comics of interest include works that probe cumulative or more structural forms of traumatic experience resulting from sexual or domestic violence, racism and other forms of discrimination, e.g., Reiche’s Kiesgrubennacht; Weyhe’s Madgermanes and German Calendar No December; Lust’s Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens; or the recent issue of Spring, “Gespenster.”