Josette Lorig - Gender and Sexuality Studies

Josette Lorig - "The Representation of Female Desire in Alan Moore's Lost Girls"

Abstract
This paper investigates the representation of female desire in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s pornographic comic, Lost Girls, reading it up against other pornographic comics, Japanese josei (“ladies comics”) and the graphic narratives of Phoebe Glockner and Kominskey-Krumb. The paper ultimately criticizes the way in which the text reinscribes this desire into a set of pornographic conventions that reaffirm male-identified viewers, crediting the latter texts for their willingness to construct a multifaceted depiction of women’s sexual lives that is not always ascetically ideal. Lost Girls is exemplary for the way in which it puts women into productive dialogue with other women, conceptualizes women as both sexual and sexualized, and refuses to imagine adolescent sexual experiences as only abusive and predatory. However, in focusing explicitly on the lost girls’ flash back sequences and the full size splash pages within them, this paper sets out to argue that Lost Girls is so deeply immersed in a world that appeals to fantasies of masculine power and the idealization of women’s bodies that any truths of women’s actual sexual lives or erotic pleasure are obscured. The comic ultimately undermines any attempts to create a fully fleshed out feminist text or a pornographic text for women. "


Presenter Bio "Josette Lorig is a Master's Student in Literary and Cultural Studies at Illinois State University. Her research interests are in 20th Century American Literature and Culture, Popular Culture and Counterculture, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Print Culture studies."

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