Ugly Differences by Howard Yetta;

Author:Howard, Yetta;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2018-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 16. Cursive and print switching in Lap Dancing for Mommy (1997). Copyright Erika Lopez, courtesy of Seal Press.

As I have been showing, Lap Dancing’s visual details that serve as markers of ethnic difference vary significantly from traditional comics aesthetics. Despite its displacement of words and images Lopez’s word-images call up a central issue in comics: depicting a gender- and ethnically specific face. Turning to McCloud’s influential Understanding Comics is important here. In discussing what facial details communicate, he writes, “the more cartoony a face is … the more people it could be said to describe” (31; bold in original). In other words, the more generic and less realistic facial features a comic book character has, the more likely that character will correspond with universal characterizations and identifications. Yet this explanation does not consider that a nonspecific face also reflects the neutrality that whiteness and maleness have in not being specified as the universal. As easy as it is to see two dots and a line as eyes and a mouth, it is considerably more difficult to imagine that face as encompassing ethnic, gender, and sexual differences. In contrast, Lap Dancing’s story “Waiting for Self-Esteem + Financial Independence” presents the specificity of its minority experience with a “face” that only appears as an excess of words that defy generic textual and comic lettering. When the narrator wonders what her options are for the future, all that is left to consider is the im/possibility of being reincarnated. She writes, “I could be … a gay man! > My lover + I would make more money than 7 Puerto Rican families + we could write books about being discriminated against for being gay” (82). The words, in their unevenness, come through as ugly textual and bodily features that call out the uneven material conditions associated with ethnic and sexual differences.

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