COP3: Summative Statement

In creating work lesbian comic makers face many challenges. This project became an exploration of these challenges and the social forces that cause them, the main one being heteronormativity. Heteronormativity is the belief that society holds that heterosexuality is the prefered and default sexual orientation. In my dissertation I mostly examined the work of Alison Bechdel, creator of Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For and cross referenced her work with the comics of other LGBT women. All their autobiographical work shows how heteronormativity has affected their lives and some chose to use their work as a way of dissecting and bringing it to reader attention.

At the start of this project I wished to continue from my previous work in past context of practice modules, and I feel this has been successful and have a specialised area of academic knowledge under my belt. The end of this project has resulted three samples of single page autobiographical strips based upon real things and a proposal to continue the autobiographical comic strips as an ongoing and growing practice. I explored the idea of eventually collecting these strips into larger bound editions, and also archiving them online so new readers can catch up, although these explorations were more to explore the context the comics would sit in and not the main idea or aim of the project.

In the end my work reflects the current world of autobiographical strips, where they are published online to social media, in regular intervals, such as weekly, that keep followers interested in their lives and their struggles with being a minority.