Read, Write and Think Gender History: Making Over the Comic Landscape

Abstract

Gender history, examining as it does the ways in which societies have defined femaleness and maleness, involves the study of used to define and perpetuate notions of gender. While evidence of these can be found in many parts of a culture, one especially useful area for study is that of illustration. Ear lier in this issue ofthe OAH Magazine of History, historian Kimberley Phillips discusses the importance of Mine Okubo's use of words and images to tell the story ofthe U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II (see pages 20-24). Though Okubo used illustra tions out of necessity, since cameras were not allowed in the camps, many artists either knowingly or unintentionally express their social and political views in their work. As Phillips also observes, even early car toons and comic strips had encoded ethnic and racial stereotypes (page 22). Indeed, cartoons and comic strips can be a useful tool for teachers trying to reach their students while teaching about gender and the past. Much as Mary Rech Rockwell notes in her lesson plan in this issue (pages 31 40) that advertisements can be a rich source for examining the parameters of gender in a culture, so too can the lowly comic strip be a useful tool for reaching students through a form with which they are familiar. For teachers looking for help in developing this perspective in some of their classes, a resource exists that is worth checking out. In Comic Makeovers: Examining Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Media, at , Traci Gardner asks students to examine in popular cartoons and comic strips as a means of getting students to think about the ways in which are a part of our daily lives. She writes: Stereotyped images create false ideals that real people can't hope to live up to, foster low self-esteem for those who don't fit in, and restrict people's ideas of what they are capable of. In this lesson, then, she encourages students and teachers to rethink and reform their ideas about what gender, race, class, and ethnicity mean and reformulate stereotypical images. Most interesting ly, the lesson plan culminates in a Comic Makeover Project in which students choose popular characters from comic strips to makeover into more realistic representations of society. While this lesson plan focuses on the present, it can be used as a jumping off point for study ing gender in comics in several past eras. Comic Makeovers is sponsored by ReadWriteThink , a Web site developed in partnership with the International Reading Association (IRA) , the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) , and the MarcoPolo Education Foundation . The partnership was established in April 2002 to provide teachers and students with access to