WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

The dream of providing girls with the means to represent themselves has long animated multiple strands of feminist thought. Yet feminist inquiry into gendered childhood confronts an elusive subject: more often represented by others than self-representing, girls (in childhood and adolescence) are known primarily in relations of dependence in families and culture, their economic and legal vulnerability figured and materialized through their sexual precarity.¹ Girls are often represented visually and featured in narratives as “objects to be seen and rescued” (Hesford 2011, 130); in other words, their vulnerability permits the heroism of others while they remain stubbornly stuck in material conditions of danger as well as visual and narrative practices that habituate audiences to see this as their inevitable fate. For this reason, calls for a more transparent display of girls’ vulnerability miss how visual culture is invested in hiding the sexual precarity of girls in plain sight through techniques of omission and oblique references that groom audiences to overlook the social fact of sexual violence against girls.

As scholars of visual culture have noted, images are not neutral. They do not merely document; instead, they materialize in visual form the social fact of girlhood and violence. We offer a feminist analysis of how girls are depicted as sexually available to men, lacking control of their bodies and lives, dependent, and vulnerable through three visual techniques: (1) the use of scale to map and complicate gendered relations of power as well as shifting temporality (e.g. copresence of past and present images of the author); (2) the practice of “updating” canonical stories such as fairy tales to contemporary settings, which habituates audiences to seeing girls’ [End Page 95] endangerment as typical, and thus catalyzes closure rather than prompts critique; and (3) the feminist practice exemplified by comics artist Phoebe Gloeckner of refusing to hide rape in the gutter, and exposing its visual encoding as permissible as long as unseen.²

We compare two exemplary texts in order to demonstrate the difference between one mode of visual representation that subsumes sexual violence against girls by seeing it as an aspect of the greater danger of commodity culture and another that explicitly addresses the fact of sexual abuse within the home from a feminist perspective. The texts are The Girl in Red (Innocenti 2012), a contemporary picture book in comics form illustrated by Roberto Innocenti that remediates the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” and implies rather than visualizes sexual violence, and A Child’s Life and Other Stories (Gloeckner 2000), a “semiautobiographical” (Orenstein 2001) comic by Phoebe Gloeckner that challenges graphically the ideology linking not-seeing and not-knowing to the sexual precarity of girls and women. It is important to note that although Roberto Innocenti and Aaron Frisch’s The Girl in Red and Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories are steeped in different histories of production and reception, meaningful convergences enable us to chart the politically divergent work of their creators.³ Most obviously, the two texts are formally comparable in that they communicate “through the comics medium” (op de Beeck 2012, 470). Both have either alerted or eluded calls for censorship and each remediates fairy tales, as well as the material artifacts of childhood—the picture book and the comic.

By bringing these two texts together in a critical analysis, we underscore their representational politics within a cultural assemblage of childhood in which the actual precarity of the girl-child is constantly effaced by how she is represented in conditions of danger. This project extends our earlier work (Marshall and Gilmore 2010) on a history of feminist autobiographical representation focused on narratives of girlhood by adult women in verbal and visual texts. We compare how gendered meanings about girls, families, and sexual precarity are visually coded as taking place in the gutter in Innocenti’s illustrations and, hence, unseeable, in contrast to Gloeckner’s “devastatingly ‘realistic’” (Chute 2010, 6) drawings of sexual abuse in the panels. Finally, we consider how the gutter, the blank space that separates panels in comics, can become...