Rethinking Panel Culture: Resistance and Subversion in Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back

This paper sets out to interrogate an interesting dimension of a popular form—the graphic novel—and its use as a mode of social activism. Illustrating clearly the myriad manifestations of sexuality in modern Indian urban spaces through 14 graphic narratives, Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back (2015) is a bold attempt by Priya Kuriyan, Larissa Bertonasco and Ludmilla Bartscht in documenting the predicament of young women in our society in a rather refreshing manner. I focus on the performative aspect of gender by analysing the graphic texts where an effort is made to subvert the power structure by appealing to social conscience. Here, the authors have tried to rethink femininity in the contemporary Indian context by developing a counter-hegemonic narrative which challenges the aggressive nature of dominant masculinity and by opening up the possibility of constructing a ‘counter-space’ (Lefebvre). Intersection between verbal and visual representation in the graphic stories is studied with theoretical inputs from W. J. T. Mitchell, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.