Moments of Wonder and Armies of Care: Feminist attachments in Drawing the Line, Indian Women Fight Back!

This chapter looks at the way collective practices of comics creation and publication
can form feminist attachments, with a focus on the comics anthology
Drawing the Line, Indian Women Fight Back! (Kuriyan, Bertonasco, Bartscht, &
Burton 2015). Drawing the Line consists of fourteen short comics drawn by a
group of professional and amateur Indian women who reflect upon their experiences
of gendered violence and the broader structures of the patriarchal society. In this chapter, I look at this anthology with the help of Sara Ahmed’s notion
of feminist attachments that recognises pain and wonder as two points of
departure for feminist projects (Ahmed 2014). While maintaining a broad perspective
that includes the text and context of the book, I also do a close
reading of “Mumbai Local” by Diti Mistry, one of the short comics included in
the anthology that epitomises the intertwinements of everyday practice and
feminist attachments. My discussion, I propose, has broader implications for
comics as a medium that is well-adjusted for creating moments of wonder and
exemplifies how collective cultures of comics creation can function as dynamic
spaces for the formation of feminist attachments.