La alteridad en el primer comix feminista estadounidense

• Main Author: Elisa Seoane Dominguez
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla 2016-12-01
• Series: Ambigua
• Subjects: otherness; gender; feminism of difference; feminine mystique; comix; underground.
• Online Access: https://www.upo.es/revistas/index.php/ambigua/article/view/1960/1901

This paper focuses on the central story "Breaking Out" of It Ain ́t Me Babe(1970) comix, the first-known American all-women comics anthology. It is a parody of mainstream female comic book characters waking up to the Women’s Liberation Movement. “Breaking Out” deals with the collective process of self-consciousness and describes the awakening of self-awareness of women. Betty Freidan in her book The Feminine Mystique (2009) defines that process as an artificial idea of femininity. Both, story and comix are one of the counterculture icons of the second American feminist wave that reflect the most important alternative schools of thought currents in America of the 70s as the Freudian Left, Feminism of Difference and the introduction of the female language or parler-femme. “Breaking Out” and It Ain ́t Me Babe provide a new view of sex and sexuality and break out of the prevailing sexism in comixproduced by their male counterparts. Our approach involves the analysis of this story from the perspective of gender difference, following the proposal of Luce Irigaray, taking as a starting point overall, the category of the Other exposed in the existentialist essay The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir. Both perspectives provide an appropriate framework to combine sociological and historical approaches to theories of early feminism. We conclude that this comix is a collective claim act that marks the beginning of a new era in the American comix market in the early 1970s.