Girls Who Love Girls and Boys Who Love Girlish Dresses
A Chat with Joana Estrela on the Importance of Transnational and Transmedial Encounters for De-Essentializing and Queering Girlhood in Comics
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Joana Estrela, born in Penafiel in 1990, is a Portuguese illustrator and comics artist whose short but rich career path intersects significantly with the concerns of girlhood and the dynamics of the transnational creation and circulation of graphic narratives. In 2013, she self-published the zine, Os vestidos do Tiago, which was later re-published by the independent Luso-Brazilian publisher Sapata Press in 2018 and is now available in English with the title James's Dresses (2019). The zine is a short immersion into the fictional, though quite realistic, world of Tiago, a boy who loves wearing feminine dresses and is not scared of experimenting with them. Despite having a boy as protagonist, Os vestidos do Tiago can be looked at as Estrela's first attempt at representing girlhood, given the presence, in the publication, of crucial aesthetic references to the realm of childhood and femininity.
Contributor Notes
Nicoletta Mandolini is a Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Foundation for Science and Technology) researcher at Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade (Center for the Study of Communication and Society), Universidade do Minho, where she works on the project “Sketch Her Story and Make it Popular. Using Graphic Narratives in Italian and Lusophone Feminist Activism against Gender-Based Violence.” Her monograph, Representations of Lethal Gender-Based Violence in Italy between Journalism and Literature, was published by Routledge in 2021.