Girlhood Reimagined

Abstract I examine how Malaka Gharib's I Was Their American Dream and It Won't Always Be Like This frame, embody, and reimagine girlhood through a multicultural transnational lens. Born in California, Gharib grew up with Filipino and Egyptian heritage. Taking advantage of the formal properties of comics, her work situates her memories and experiences at the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and transnational encounters. I interrogate how these books visualize the connection between girlhood and mixed heritage through the artist-narrator's interactions with and observation of her Filipino mother and relatives in the United States and her father, stepmother, half-siblings, and neighbors in Egypt. I also examine how the multimodality of comics draws on tropes of girlhood to enable representation through the depiction and layering of different selves.