No, You Can't Just Draw Cats: Drawing and Thinking About Gender-Diverse Human Bodies in Comics-Based Research

This comics-form paper details the process and problematics of writing and drawing an ethnographic comic about a group of transgender and other gender-diverse girls and their negotiation of self as they grow into and navigate childhood and experience puberty. This piece of comics-based research (CBR) is based on eight years of ethnographic study in the field. While the book is entirely hand-drawn and hand-lettered, comics are equal parts asset and problem: So much of how cisgender parents relate to gender-diverse daughters hinges on a question of “passing” and binarism and of a “girlhood” tied to archaic structures. A realistic assessment of these issues and the ethnographic imperative to disguise research participants raised the question of how artist-ethnographers can tell a graphic story about gender fluidity that is both critical and accommodating. We must ask how we truthfully represent other people's bodies and how we frame “girlhood” in the context of a representational act. Comics-based contortions are deliberately but sparingly used, and while they only partially “solve” the problem and promise of how we draw gender-diverse girlhoods, they are nonetheless an affordance of the medium that is not to be discounted. Discussion of the ethical considerations of the comic artist-as-researcher concludes the paper.