Framing the Path to Conformity: Comics Strategies and Social Justice in Barbara Yelin’s <i>Irmina</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines Barbara Yelin’s 2014 graphic novel Irmina in order to investigate the visual narrative strategies employed by the cartoonist in revealing her protagonist’s path to conformity under National Socialism. Yelin thereby also seeks to raise awareness of social justice and personal responsibilities in the comic’s readership. I use Judith Butler’s conceptions of framing and precarious life from Frames of War (2009) as an interpretive lens to read the comics medium’s convention of panel frames and storytelling through individual panels separated by the space of the gutter. I demonstrate how the interplay of text and image in Irmina reveals the importance of visual framing in developing compassion and recognizing the lives of others as precarious. Through this narrative strategy essential to the comics form, Irmina’s decline to a Mitläufer underscores the role of visibility—or lack thereof—in the lives framed and recognized as precarious under the Third Reich.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".