7. What’s the Story? How Hybrid Comics Against Gender Violence Rework Narrative and Support Artivism

Comics and graphic narratives are clearly a predominantly visual medium (Groensteen, The System of Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2007, 2–3) with strong narrative potential linked to their preference for sequentiality. Graphic narratives have also been described as a porous medium, whose exposure to intermedial and transmedial exchanges, as well as their propensity to adapt to distribution through different platforms (Rippl and Etter, From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. De Gruyter, 2013), have historically exposed them to constant evolution and formal changes. These transformations, which include comics’ development into the graphic novel form and into digital comics, clearly modify comics’ narrative capacity, either diminishing, increasing or complicating it. Departing from these general observations, this chapter proposes the analysis of a corpus of comics-based but hybrid products employed in the context of Italian feminist activism against gender-based violence. These products, namely, the Luchadoras [Fighters] project by Lucha y Siesta [Struggle and Siesta] and Matrioske parlanti contro la violenza ostetrica [Speaking Matryoshkas against Obstetric Violence] by Freedom for Birth/Non Una Di Meno [Not one woman less], blend comics with street-art, collage, and illustration. Such a combination results in the disruption of the linearity of traditional sequence-based comics narrative and in the activation of a method that, despite lowering the level of narrativity, serves the needs of feminist movements to perform open, performative, and participatory storytelling.