Unpacking the body. The voices of female authors in Spanish comics (Ediciones Marmotilla, 2024) is the book by cartoonist Marika Vila, which she presented this Thursday at the Francesc Pujols Library. An act framed within the program of the Day against Male Violence in Martorell.
In this book, Marika Vila does a necessary task of visualizing the contribution of authors to Spanish comics, from the pioneers to the young contemporary ones. Likewise, he criticizes the representation of women and their bodies, where a clear objectifying gaze was perpetuated.
The author explained that her book is “a journey through the discourse of Spanish comics from a gender perspective, analyzing why women’s voices have not had space and why it has been such a masculinized territory. At the same time, I have rescued the voice of the women who have been there, but who have been covered up”.
It is a “feminist genealogy of the voices that have worked within this space and have created their own discourse”, continued Vila. Young emerging authors are more visible now, but underneath, like an iceberg, they have the support of a long track record of women speaking out, which gives them a foundation. Tying them is what will make us run away from fashions. Now it’s fashionable for women to speak, but women have been speaking since the beginning.”
Marika Vila, dibuixant
It is an important contribution to the knowledge and analysis of Spanish comics and, more specifically, of the voices of the authors in it. Until recently, comics were an almost exclusively male world; you only had to read the names on the covers or walk through a specialized bookstore to realize that both authors and readers, in their vast majority, were men.
Through the book, he wants to “demonstrate how the male gaze has hijacked the female voice using women’s bodies, which have been the icon of male dialogues between authors, editors and readers. We were kicked out of this dialogue. This territory that is the body of women has silenced real women”. “Women, when they speak, vacate the body and deconstruct this stereotype by creating the diversity of women. Women are multiple and diverse, we are not one”.
Marika Vila, dibuixant
Likewise, Marika Vila carries out a lucid critique of the apparent rupture in this representation of women and their bodies that the comics of the seventies and eighties meant, which, in reality, perpetuated a reifying and reductive look towards these bodies and therefore towards women in general.
The artist writes Dispossess the body with the letter k because the objectification of the woman’s body “doesn’t just happen in the conservative patriarchal discourse, but the patriarchy drags this discourse to the left and to the transgression of the late 70s, which theoretically recovered freedom of expression. In this freedom, the woman is kidnapped again. It talks about the liberation of man and his traumas, through the body of the woman”. “It is necessary to vacate the conservative patriarchy, but also the transgressor and liberator of only part of the population”, he defended.
Marika Vila, dibuixant
The cartoonist and theorist Marika Vila (Barcelona, 1949) began publishing as an author in agencies that worked for the foreign market as Illustrated Selectionsand later became involved in authors’ collectives Pirate spaceship i Sausage team and began to contribute to publications such as Totem, Rambla, Thursday, Siesta i Interview.
The cartoonist has played all the roles of auca in the world of comics: illustrator, coordinator of Rambla magazine and even editorial technician for Planeta DeAgostini during the years of the first manga boom.
But above all she has stood out for her feminist militancy and as a researcher of the role of women in the world of comics. This was the subject of theoretical works like Iconikas (2010) and of his doctoral thesis, which he defended in 2017, The occupied body: iconographies of the female body as a space of male transgression in comics.
This year, Marika Vila has been awarded the Grand Prize of Honor of the Comic Book of Barcelona, the award for the most important career in the sector. She is also the curator of the traveling exhibition Bodies that speak. Representations of the body in comic book authors. 1910-2022which could be seen at the Muxart Espai d’Art de Martorell last October.
Source: martorelldigital.cat
