Portrayals of WOMEN

One of the cre­ative spaces in which women have seen the great­est ex­pres­sion of their strug­gle, their vi­sion of the world and their feel­ings in re­la­tion­ships with oth­ers, es­pe­cially in re­la­tion to crit­i­cism of the dom­i­nant male model, has been the il­lus­trated book, a genre found along­side comics and texts with im­ages. Tra­di­tion­ally, the world of women’s il­lus­tra­tion has been an­chored in the genre of chil­dren’s books, and only in a few cases has it ap­peared in more adult themes. One of the few women to have nav­i­gated her way through the Cata­lan un­der­ground is Laura Pérez Ver­netti, win­ner of last year’s Grand Prize at the Saló del Còmic and an artist the now re­bap­tised Barcelona Comic Fair is to ded­i­cate an ex­hi­bi­tion to. But it was the boom of the graphic novel at the be­gin­ning of the nineties, led by names like Iran­ian Mar­jane Satrapi, that opened a path of many forks. Au­thors such as Mod­erna del Pueblo, Agustina Guer­rero, Sarah An­der­sen, Mar Guixé and Raquel Riba Rossy, among many oth­ers, have made each of their vi­gnettes a re­flec­tion of fe­male re­al­ity with great irony and hu­mour, far from the se­ri­ous­ness of the re­flec­tions made by men when they speak about them­selves.

Part of this il­lus­trated lit­er­a­ture is strongly in­flu­enced by pop­u­lar hu­mor­ous news pro­grammes. Cata­lan jour­nal­ist San­dra Sabatés, from La Sexta’s El In­ter­me­dio, is the au­thor of the texts Pelea como una chica (Fight like a girl) (Plan­eta), which are ded­i­cated to great women and has il­lus­tra­tions by a fa­mous fe­male artist: Va­len­cian Ana Juan. The prox­im­ity be­tween March 8 and Sant Jordi’s Day has meant an avalanche of pub­li­ca­tions that use il­lus­tra­tion as a ve­hi­cle to ad­dress dif­fer­ent as­pects re­lated to women.

Pen­guin Ran­dom House Bruguera has pub­lished a book with a title seen on ban­ners held aloft at many of the lat­est fem­i­nist ral­lies: Somos ni­etas de las bru­jas que no pud­is­teis que­mar (We are grand­chil­dren of the witches you could not burn), by Ame Soler, in which she ac­com­pa­nies texts with an in­ti­mate tone and po­etic tex­ture with brief il­lus­tra­tions, but at the same time eas­ily iden­ti­fi­able con­tent.

The same pub­lish­ers has re­leased: ¡Así es la vida!... o al menos así la veo yo, (That’s life! ... or at least that’s how I see it), by Colom­bian Daniella Martí, with the main char­ac­ter a very free woman en­ter­ing old age but liv­ing and feel­ing as if she were a young rebel.

Under the title Archivos Cómicos, the pub­lisher Astiberri has re­leased a col­lec­tion of vi­gnettes by Gat Perich prize win­ner, Flavita Ba­nana. This Barcelona-born au­thor is part of the group of women il­lus­tra­tors who have turned to paper after first pub­lish­ing on the web, as is the case with the Barcelona-born Elisa Riera, whose El fu­turo es bril­lante (The fu­ture is shiny) has also been pub­lished by Astiberri, an ex­tended ver­sion of the first story she posted on In­sta­gram (@el­fu­tur­oes­bril­lante). It fea­tures a 30-year-old woman who has to make de­ci­sions amid a sea of doubts about what her life should be like.

An­other graphic but not il­lus­trated book is Barcelona fem­i­nista 1975-1988, by Is­abel Se­gura So­ri­ano, which is pub­lished by Barcelona City Coun­cil. It con­tains pho­to­graphic im­ages and ad­dresses the fem­i­nist up­ris­ing dur­ing years of change that made the women’s fight vis­i­ble on a large scale for the first time. The cre­ation of fe­male vocal groups in neigh­bour­hood as­so­ci­a­tions, de­bates, the first fem­i­nist demon­stra­tions. It de­picts an age when the path of strug­gle could be re­sumed that many women had fol­lowed and Fran­co­ism had de­stroyed.

Fi­nally, pub­lisher Co­mane­gra is com­mit­ted to con­tin­u­ing a for­mula it ap­plied to the Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence process: fo­cus­ing on the graphic image. Now it is doing the same with the fem­i­nist fight in Lila. Història gràfica (Lila. Graphic his­tory) by Toni Galmés and M. Àngels Cabré, with a pro­logue by il­lus­tra­tor Paula Bonet.

books fea­ture