Week 3 Questions

1. What gaps are there in Hergé’s representations of women?

In The Adventures of Tintin, it is clear that much has been addressed and corrected on the issue of representations of race. Still, not much has been addressed on the topic of representations of women. Hergé explains why women are not expressed by saying that “Women have nothing to do in a world like Tintin’s. I like women far too much to caricature them. And, besides, pretty or not, young or not, women are rarely comic characters” (Mountfort , 2020). But this lack of representations of women causes problems as it is read to many public.

 First of all, in every adventure series, the woman faces come out almost invisible. Unlike men, women not only don’t get a chance to speak, but they are just used as a background. Women, for example, are visually behind the status of simple figures in the crowd in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Also, in Tintin in America, women remain background figures, limiting women’s agency by being divided into the domain of someone’s guardian and mother.

 Women are also divided into the realm of labour. Housekeepers, housewives and mothers are mostly portrayed as characters representing female labor. Furthermore, “Wives may or may not double as housekeepers, depending on their station, but they are depicted almost exclusively as homemakers, care-givers or otherwise domiciled”(Mountfort,2020). It limits the role of women in families and prevents women from entering the daily lives of a wide variety of men. Of course, it does not rule out women in providing them with career options, but by limiting the jobs they can have to nurses, flight attendants and assistants, this is also feminized labor. These factors, when viewed in the context of the times, were understandable in that the status of women was low, but were sufficient to create a reactionary and wave of feminism in modern times.

Reference

Mountfort, P. (2020). Tintin, gender and desire. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. https://doi-org.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/10.1080/21504857.2020.1729829