Courting the Gaze, Romancing the Margins: Queer Re-Orientation in Emiliana Kampilan's Komix

Abstract

This article focuses on the narratological strategies deployed by komix creator Emiliana Kampilan, whose multi-modal storytelling and editorial choices are grounded in Philippine feminist activism. By analyzing Kampilan's online sticker series, first graphic novel, and editorial work for a lesbian komix anthology, this article traces how Kampilan draws together the discourses of gender, sexuality, and political engagement. We attempt to ground this strategy in the local production context surrounding lesbian narratives, where the struggle between visibility and misrepresentation continues to require narrative innovation across media.
Deploying Sara Ahmed's (2006) notion of queer orientation to tie in the discussion of the formal aspect of the gaze in comics - the narratology that allows sexual identities of fictional characters to find expression on the page - and the politics of looking at and between these characters, we argue that Kampilan's project comprises a redirection of the gaze to the margins. Kampilan strategically romanticizes non-normative character representations and relations by re-orienting popular tropes: that is, selecting imagery already associated with traditional gender categories, she revises them to relay progressive and inclusive signification. Through close reading, we demonstrate how the confluence of subversive language and feminine-coded motifs, the collapse of historical time to simultaneously represent past and present politics, and the relegation of normative and patriarchal antagonism to the periphery, allow the creative work to challenge readers to relearn narrative cues and perhaps glimpse alternative horizons of a more inclusive Philippine society.