Of monsters and women: Gender, sexual violence and the logic of familiarity in Drawing Power

This article examines Drawing Power , a collection of autobiographical comics about ‘sexual violence, harassment, and survival’, with contributions from more than sixty comics creators from a variety of racial, sexual, cultural and social backgrounds, edited by American underground cartoonist Diane Noomin and published by Abrams Comic Arts in 2019. I argue that the accumulation of stories from Drawing Power seems to rely on a logic of familiarity – as the attackers are familiar figures such as family members, friends, neighbours and co-workers, who assault women in familiar environments such as the home or the workplace in dishearteningly similar ways – that counters the potential risk of inadvertently suggesting that such acts are inevitable and unpreventable. Against this background, a few stories introduce self-representations of the survivors of sexual assault as monstrous figures, while perpetrators remain ordinary people whose deeds are often facilitated by either social complacency or complicity. This article examines the effects of the conjunction of the familiar and the monstrous in the context of several testimonies about sexual violence. For this purpose, I am in conversation with feminist scholarship on the gendering of violence and intimacy, with work on how perpetration is facilitated by ‘implicated subjects’, as well as scholarship on monstrosity and femininity.