Chicks Attack! Making feminist comics in Latin America

Abstract

This article aims to provide insight, through the voices of the participants, on the current state of female comic artists in Argentina. We start with a brief historical overview: what was it like to be a minority in the Argentine comics industry? Historically, female comic creators have occupied a subordinate and even anonymous position in comparison to their male counterparts. However, since the 1980s, the Argentine comics industry has seen a change. This decade saw the appearance of several important women cartoonists in tune with the growing and expansive feminist movement of the 1970s. The tendency of female cartoonists moving to the forefront has grown exponentially over the years and in the last 25 years the number of female cartoonists in Argentina has increased significantly. The years 2015-2019 have seen a huge growth of such discussions and perspectives, coinciding with the birth of the massive Ni Una Menos (‘Not One Less’) feminist movement, which denounces femicides, and with the near-approval of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy law in 2018. This latter process sparked activist collectives such as Línea Verde (‘Green Line’) and Femiñetas (‘Femignettes’) which took upon themselves to raise awareness of the necessity of the IVE (the acronym for Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy in Spanish), among other issues.