Femimutancia's Banzai

A Contribution to the Archive of Trauma or how Shame and Disorientation can enable Agency

Abstract

In recent years we are witnessing a resurgence of public cultures around sexual trauma that is not necessarily centered on medical diagnoses or innocent victims (Cvetkovich, 2018) rather, on the traces of trauma in everyday experience and the various ways in which they are dealt with. This critical study explores the graphic novel by the non-binary transfeminist cartoonist Femimutancia –pseudonym of Julia Inés Mamone or Jules– Banzai (2021). The purpose of such analysis is to find in this autofictional comic an affective and creative response to trauma depositary of an agency that does not disavow but is founded on pain and shame, affects that have historically given vitality to queer cultures (Cvetkovich, 2018). An argument will be made for the inherent fragility of this agency built on ruins. Furthermore, the article makes a point by exhibiting the practices surrounding the production and reception of this queer comic in its efforts to make public and generate a collective audience for trauma thus dissolving the boundary between intimate life, privatized affective response (Cvetkovich, 2018) and political life, bringing visceral political affects to the surface.