Mundane Intimacies and Everyday Violence in Contemporary Canada Comics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation argues that contemporary Canadian comics construct a sustained and critical gaze of the mundane and the everyday. Canadian artists are using the form of comics to reveal the structures of oppression and violence that are so familiar as to become mundane. My introduction lays out the theoretical framework of the everyday and argues that it is well-suited to the study of Canadian comics. The first chapter examines Kate Beaton’s webcomics, which reveal the environmental, cultural, and economic damage of Canada’s petroculture. I use Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence to argue that Beaton’s mundane gaze brings nuance to her personal experiences with Canada’s Tar Sands. In my second chapter, I read Emily Carroll’s horror comics, Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki’s graphic novel Skim, and the graphic novel Will I See? as examples of a new gothic girlhood graphic. Read together, these texts reveal that there is nothing mundane about girlhood. Everyday, girls are vulnerable to the intersecting violences of racism, colonialism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy. My third chapter takes up comics’ potential as a spatial form through two comics about access to space, Ting Chak’s graphic essay Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention and Eric Kostiuk Williams’s graphic novel Condo Heartbreak Disco. Both comics use the spatial dynamics of comics to trace oppression and resistance across what David Harvey conceptualizes as broad spatiotemporal scales. My fourth chapter argues that artist-activist Gord Hill produces comics that are pedagogical in content and form. I build on Dale Jacobson’s concept of multimodal literacy to argue for Hill’s attention to the imagery, rhetoric, and style of fascism and colonialism. Hill’s comics argue that one must be able to read these oppressive movements if one is to undo them. I conclude by recognizing that the everyday is far from boring, and that mundanity can serve as a cover for persistent violence and abuse of power. Comics serve as a powerful form, as they work to reveal these structures of oppression, invite solidarity, and imagine paths of resistance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".