Comics and Norm-Critical Pedagogy: Gender, Sexuality, and Cultural Identity explores how comics can challenge societal norms and serve as powerful tools for critical education.
This edited collection brings together essays examining how graphic narratives question dominant perspectives on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, mental health, and other intersecting identity categories. It highlights how comics not only reflect but also disrupt normative worldviews, offering a unique lens for norm-critical pedagogy. Each chapter concludes with reflections on the pedagogical implications of its analysis, bridging theory and classroom practice. The volume also introduces norm-critical perspectives to English-speaking comics scholarship, expanding the conversation around how visual storytelling can foster critical awareness and social change.
Comics and Norm-Critical Pedagogy: Gender, Sexuality, and Cultural Identity is ideal for graduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers in comics studies, education, gender and sexuality studies, and the broader social sciences.
Comics and Norm-Critical Pedagogy: Gender, Sexuality, and Cultural Identity explores how comics can challenge societal norms and serve as powerful tools for critical education. It is ideal for both students and researchers in comics studies, education, gender and sexuality studies, and the broader social sciences.
1. Introduction: Comics, Norms, and Pedagogy
2. The World Needs me!:
Comics as Norm-Critical Sex Education
3. The (Dis)comforts of Misogyny and
the Monstrosity of Reproduction in Jonathan and Joshua Lunas Girls
4. Defiance and Utopia: The Curational and Pedagogical Potential of a Queer
Comics Exhibition
5. Transmasculine Girlhood in Graphic Memoir
6. Swedish
Feminist Manga, Boys Love, and Comics Education
7. Criticizing the Norm in
the Pampas. Inodoro Pereyra, el renegau and the Myth of the Argentine Cowboy
8. Norms of Comics Production: Swedish-speaking women cartoonists in Finnish
comics history
9. Using Instagram-comics (in dialogue with walls) to educate
about and challenge norms, discrimination and privileges the cases of
Jamaica and Honduras
10. Young Adult Comics and Paradigm Shift
Robert Aman is a Senior Associate Professor in Education at Linköping University, Sweden. He primarily conducts research on ideology and the politics of representation in comics.
Lars Wallner is an Associate Professor at Linköping University, Sweden, working in the field of Pedagogic Practices. His research explores the use of comics, games and popular fiction, mainly regarding education and social interaction.