Sexual Violence in Comics: The Ethics of Visualizing Trauma - Hardcover

Okan, Lee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1666929158 ISBN 13: 9781666929157

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026

Synopsis

An examination of how comics represent, confront, and sometimes perpetuate gendered violence. Lee Okan argues that comics, with their hybrid form of image and text, possess an ability to express the unspeakable dimensions of trauma while also raising ethical questions about spectatorship, representation, and storytelling. Through close analysis of contemporary and independent comics, as well as anthology collections, this book shows how artists navigate the tension between testimony and spectacle, visibility and exploitation. Rather than treating comics as an isolated medium, Okan situates these works within broader cultural and media discourses on sexual violence, arguing that comics shape and are shaped by feminist activism, visual culture, and reader response. Sexual Violence in Comics traces how creators reframe the terms of witness, challenge dominant narratives, and reclaim narrative authority, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement and beyond.

About this title

About the Author

Lee Okan is Assistant Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on comics and graphic narratives, visual autobiography, trauma studies, and feminist ethics of representation. In addition to her academic work, she is a fiction writer working across prose and visual forms. She is the author of the novella The Lives of Atoms (Nixes Mate Books, 2018), which explores love through the lens of quantum physics. She teaches creative writing, children’s literature, and composition courses with an emphasis on media studies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1666929158
• ISBN 13: 9781666929157
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 276