„Kauf dir mal ein Buch. Loser!“ Klasse, Körper und Kanon in Eva Müllers Scheiblettenkind (2023)
Sunday, June 02 2024
12:00 PM Venue: Kollegienhaus, KH 1.013
with Salon-Ticket – free admission!
The protagonist of the autofictional comic "Scheiblettenkind" (2023) by Eva Müller goes through various jobs and training until she finally decides on an art degree and a career as a comic artist. The comic, designed as a bildungsroman, questions the possibilities of social mobility and reveals central aspects of classism: a stereotypical and (internalized) demeaning perception of people from so-called lower classes and a social determinism based on birth/origin milieu. Class membership is personified, for example, by a serpent whispering self-doubt and malice to the protagonist, such as "You don't know what Entrecôte is? Ridiculous. Buy yourself a book. Loser!" or "You look like a farmer" (2023, 12, 237). In this way, Müller succeeds in physically/visually grasping classism. The bourgeois cryptic quote in the form of a bartender, inspired by the barmaid in Édouard Manet's painting "Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882), beyond stereotypical and potentially problematic visual attributions through clothing and other external identity markers, offers another innovative way of depicting class. Alluding to a specific, narrow cultural reference, they potentially catch the readers in understanding this privileged code. The symbolic value of the bourgeois reference system concerning body representations becomes the starting point for the analysis of class or classism in the comic, which has been rarely addressed in the German-speaking context, partly because its representation and readability face certain difficulties. In intersectional studies in the German-speaking region, the category 'class' is therefore often underrepresented or has only been increasingly addressed in recent years.
Moderator: Clemens Heydenreich
Presented by the Gesellschaft für Comicforschung (ComFor e. V.)