Dr Rhiannon McGlade gives the 2024 Joanot Martorell Lecture on Catalan Feminist Comic Art
The 2024 Joanot Martorell Lecture, organised by the Centre for Catalan Studies in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes London, took place at QMUL. On this occasion, we had the pleasure of being joined by Dr Rhiannon McGlade, former Director of the Centre for Catalan Studies. The title of her lecture was “Irascible Ink: Satire & Subversion in Catalan Feminist Comic Art”.
Rhiannon focused on the contributions of pioneering female cartoonists during the Spanish Transition, especially in Catalonia, given that it was a space for radical social criticism and collective action, as well as an established tradition of satirical caricature and subversive print cultures. Although female cartoonists were often marginalized or erased from mainstream narratives of dissent, the lecture offered a visual and visible platform to the work of Catalan women cartoonists and activists, revealing the importance of feminist visual print media, along with other events, in understanding this transformative chapter in Catalan and Spanish history.
In the Q&A, Rhiannon replied to the attendees’ enquiries about the choice of language in the aforementioned feminist visual print media, the notion of solidarity in these feminist publications, and the role of censorship during this period.