The more things change, the more they stay the same. This probably explains why so many people have continued, over the past year, to try and define feminism. As a movement, academics believe the school of thought had its moment in the Seventies. And yet, every decade since has brought forth new voices, some questioning, others haranguing, depending on whose opinion you subscribe to. Artistes continue to run the idea of feminism through their personal prisms, while graphic novelists have created a number of interesting politically charged responses of their own.

Take Monstress, for instance, a relatively new title by Taiwanese-American writer Marjorie Liu and Japanese artist Sana Takeda. In a recent interview, Liu mentioned that the most important theme of her Hugo Award-winning book was women. She clarified this, saying she wasn’t talking about a gender as much sisterhood. Set in a matriarchal society, the series removes its protagonists from traditional gender-defined roles. Maika, the lead character, is a teenager with a monster living inside her, which is interesting given the trope about monstrous women that has always existed in art and literature. She is also a mixed-race character, allowing her creator to explore the idea of identity.

Other writers and illustrators turn to the past, using a contemporary lens to look through, and skewer, attitudes and ideas that no longer have currency. Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton does this marvellously with her comic strip Hark! A Vagrant, which was published as a book in 2011. To get a sense of what she does, consider a strip from the collection called “This Week On Sexy Tudors”, where a character called Lord Burghley must strike a seductive pose in order to please his queen. Or an encounter between Hamlet and Oedipus, with the former guessing what the latter is reading, assuming it must be “some book about wanting to bang your mother”. What makes these tiny tales so hilarious is Beaton’s knack of puncturing the hypocrisy of everyone from royals and revolutionaries to writers and superheroes. She takes on Batman, Jane Eyre, Queen Elizabeth I and Macbeth, not just examining their real or fictional lives and times, but holding a mirror to how men have always viewed women through the ages. It makes for a kind of history lesson that more children ought to be exposed to.

On the other side of the spectrum is what some theorists refer to as the feminist exploitation genre, and what a marketing department has reportedly described as “Margaret Atwood-meets-Inglourious Basterds.” It’s a comic series called Bitch Planet, which is set in a dystopian reality called the Auxiliary Compliance Outpost, where all kinds of women who are “non-compliant” are sent to live under the constant watch of monitors and unfriendly guards. Created by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro, the series adopts an unabashedly feminist tone, with its creator drawing parallels between her sympathies and the superhero genre, pointing out that these are both worlds about fairness, where standing up for the little guy and equality of opportunity matter. The women inhabiting Bitch Planet come from all races and backgrounds, which makes it possible for DeConnick to not just riff on ideas of physical beauty and propriety but to run down rabbit holes related to sexuality, power and religion. It makes for a heady, entertaining cocktail, and the medium allows for a no-holds-barred approach that a television show like Orange Is The New Black (also about women in prison) simply can’t adopt.

What makes the feminist label so divisive is how open it is to misinterpretation. It’s why Margaret Atwood was compelled to defend herself earlier this year when accused of not being supportive of the #MeToo campaign, and why artistes who take a work out of context to create something new often lose the point of the exercise altogether. The film Blue Is The Warmest Colour is a good example. It won critical acclaim, but reduced the graphic novel it was based on to a titillating sideshow. Created by French writer and illustrator Julie Maroh, this is a coming-of-age story starring two young lesbians that shows how uncomfortable the idea of female sexuality still is, even in a country as supposedly permissive as France. Clementine and Emma are in love, but that isn’t enough. When the tale was turned into a film by the male film-maker Abdellatif Kechiche though, Maroh was compelled to criticise it, referring to its portrayal of lesbian sex as uninformed and pornographic. Everything the graphic novel had been trying to say was overshadowed by the visuals of the two nude women.

Some feminist tales are also about reclaiming something, be it a space, an idea or even the body, like the American writer Jennifer Hayden does with her book The Story Of My Tits. A memoir of her battle with breast cancer, it reveals early on the idea all women come to terms with rather quickly: “The world was going to expect big things of my body.” From her father’s collection of Playboys to the tyranny of her first bra, Hayden speaks of her struggle to embrace one of the most fetishised parts of the female form. This isn’t to say it’s a gloomy, strident tale at all. On the contrary, it celebrates every aspect of womanhood, on not just taking the casual misogyny that stifles women the world over, but also addressing universal themes of love and death with humour and great sensitivity.

As more women in entertainment, finance, the media and governance speak up about the sexism that affects every aspect of their lives, writers continue to ask their own questions. The idea of what is or isn’t a truly feminist work may change drastically with time, but the fight for equality that underlies all these tales, irrespective of the medium, is something a lot of women believe is worth taking on.

Lindsay Pereira is currently based in Canada. Follow him on Twitter @lindsaypereira

Edited by Shikha Sethi

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