Challenging Visual Boundaries Through Women's Agency, Objectification and Sexuality in Graphic Narratives

Women are underrepresented in the genre of graphic novels and comics. Misconstrued, sexualised, and treated as objects, the women of this genre are presented as marketable commodities. Even while many academics agree that these demeaning marketing methods should be addressed, very few have looked closely at how we represent the female body graphically. This paper focuses on the monetisation of women's bodies to address means of addressing the problem of female representation. This paper also investigates what makes a female character in a graphic book "strong." What is the appearance of this power? Does it work for all kinds of women? Do the people who receive these messages feel empowered as a result of this power? In the course of conducting some in-depth interviews with comic book readers, I drew on a collection of personal field notes and transcribed interviews. Many female readers of the graphic narratives feel marginalised and devalued because of the way women are portrayed and sexualized in popular culture. Overall, this study seeks to investigate ways in which graphic narratives consume, sell, and objectify women.