Qualitative Analysis of the Interviews
Perceived learning.
Participants answered the explicit question “Do you think you learned something about GBV reading the graphic novels?” with a clear positive answer given by 18 of them (9 girls and 9 boys).
Specifically, students affirmed they learned about types of violence that they did not necessarily associate to GBV, or simply did not know about. They also learned about victims’ experiences of gender-related violence and abuse, as well as about perpetrators’ behaviours. Moreover, they stated that reading contributed to reinforcing previous knowledge on GBV, and triggered further sensitization about the phenomenon.
Girls, in particular, tended to state that they learned about specific manifestations of gendered violence against women and girls that they did not previously classify as violence because they tend to be normalized. This is generally associated with a tendency for girls to identify themselves as part of a group or community (that of women and girls) that is particularly affected by misogynous disrespect, a widespread manifestation of GBV. For example, Matilde[4] admitted that she learned from reading the graphic novels “because sometimes, on a daily basis, we suffer from some forms of discrimination and [...] do not perceive them, because we are used to experiencing this everyday, and we do not have a lot of conscience that these classify as discriminations against the feminine gender”.
Moreover, participants of all genders noticed how the reading helped them recognize forms of abuse and violence that affect people who are socially positioned in different categories than they are, such as trans people, for cis girls, and non-cisgender men, for boys.
Students highlighted how the graphic novels (all of which adopted a victim-centric narrative approach) allowed them to widen their awareness and understanding of victims’ experiences. Clear differences can be recognized between boys and girls responses. The latter focused mostly on the ability of the graphic narratives to extend their conscience regarding the emotional distress and consequences that violence caused both in cis women/girls and trans victims. For example, Luisa said:
“I had no idea that this was so impactful. It is obvious that it has an impact on people’s lives, but I did not know it was like that, that impactful. Many of these people even think about shortening their lives after suffering such violences. And I think that the graphic novels stressed this point, in my opinion.”
Boys, instead, concentrated specifically on the emotional dimension and admitted that they learned about the way victims perceive violence/abuse as well as about how those most targeted by violence deal with the extent and risk of it. In some cases, like that of Martim, who mentions the graphic novel about women’s abuse in public spaces Manda mensagem quando chegares, this resulted in a learning process that permitted him to revise personal behaviours:
“Maybe I learned how to avoid these situations and how I should act with other people in order to prevent aggressive behaviours of mine, or inadequate ones. [...] I think it gave me a better understanding on how I can behave when talking [to girls], in order to be less intimidating.”
Both boys and girls declared themselves surprised by the variety of perpetrators’ behaviours represented in the graphic novels, and admitted they learned about the extreme forms that toxic masculinity and men’s violence against women can take. Interestingly enough, feminine perpetration, which was mostly represented by the character of the mother of the black girl in Em ti me vejo, went almost completely unnoticed or unmentioned. Only when questioned about the presence in the corpus of abusive behaviours carried out by feminine subjects, some students remembered about the character and labelled her a perpetrator.
Another relevant finding is the discursive obliteration of any form of institutional or structural violence. Despite being present and discussed in at least two graphic novels of the corpus (Filosofia do mamilo and Juízo), these violent deeds did not receive students’ attention or surprise, which was mostly dedicated to direct examples of either physical or psychological violence.
In order to now understand how participants learned, and how different learning strategies affected their knowledge of GBV, we now turn to the specific learning modes that we could identify from the analysis of the interviews.
Learning modes.
The learning mode we termed “affective resonant alignment” was the most common type showcased by participants during the interview process. It includes general empathetic responses to the vicissitudes of characters who are not perceived as part of the same social or identity group, as well as identification processes, and other manifestations of specific affects, such as enjoyment and happiness, shock, disgust or shame, rage, fun and sadness. The common minimum denominator of this learning mode is the engagement with the texts through an emotional response that triggered learning. That is, it allowed the students to understand, in the emotional plane, experiences of GBV and, in some cases, positively resonate with personal past experiences, anticipated futures, or specific emotional processes.
Empathetic responses allowed participants to put themselves in the shoes of characters who suffered forms of GBV specifically tied to gender identities or social positionings other than their own, that Keen labels as “ambassadorial strategic empathy” [97, pp. 486–487]. Girls’ capacity to empathize with the non-binary protagonist of Filosofia do mamilo for the institutional and social discriminations they suffered is the clearest example of how the graphic novels acted as spaces in which students could experience affectively charged encounters with forms of victimization that were previously unknown and perceived as distant. An emblematic example is that of Margarida:
“I liked a lot this graphic novel because I started reading without understanding much about the topic it addressed and for this reason I was learning and I found it interesting. I think that this is the one I liked the most. I thought that, I don’t know, I think that the drawing of the graphic novel was quite aligned with what the main character was feeling, because there were parts in which it was all dark and it was all scribbled, and I liked to feel the emotions of the character while I was reading.”
Other examples include girls’ (and, less commonly, boys’) declarations of empathy towards racialized black women and girls who are particularly affected, in light of intersecting discriminatory practices, by the cultural violence of beauty standards. This type of abuse was presented to students through the graphic novel Em ti me vejo. In this case, empathy is clearly entangled with the students’ ability to recognize themselves as different, though potentially subjectable, as individuals who were socialized as girls, to a similar type of violence, which corresponds to what Keen labels as “bounded strategic empathy” [97, p. 481]. Camila, for example, told us that “yes, maybe, I could put myself in her shoes and I think that if my mother, for example, I have a straighter type of hair, but if I had curlier hair and my mother forced me to straighten it, I think that I would not feel good with myself with that hair.”
Although less common, empathetic reactions by boys mostly coincided with compassion for the experiences of GBV against women represented in the graphic novels Manda mensagem quando chegares and Boy dodói. This is exemplified by Vicente’s statements, which labels a particular excerpt of the first text, in which the protagonist is portrayed while she tries to escape a man who masturbates in front of her, as “perturbing”. This is how he replied to the interviewers’ questions about the feeling that he had registered in the reading grid:
Interviewer: “So, did you feel the fear?”
Vicente: “Yes, for her. I tried to put myself in her situation in order to see how bad it would be, especially considering that she had roller-skates on, and she could not [easily escape].”
Girls, on the contrary, were effusive not only in relation to the frequency of their empathetic reactions but also about emotional responses stimulated by identification processes, which allowed them to feel what the character was feeling. It is through these responses, as well as by means of other cognitive processes that will be mentioned later, that some readers recognized themselves as belonging to the same social group (most of the times, that of keepers of the social burden of femininity) to which victims belonged, and the reason for the victimization. In this sense, emotional reactions linked to identification allowed young women participants to bridge their own reality and that of the portrayed characters, thus permitting to affectively understand that GBV was affecting their own lives.
Among the specific affective incentives that the graphic novels provided, a feeling repeatedly mentioned by girls was rage, which seemed to act as a crucial push for broader reflections about the injustices that affect other subordinated categories or, most commonly, categories with which the participants identify. Teresa’s comments, when questioned about her overall feelings and thoughts from the reading experience is emblematic in this sense:
Teresa: “Honestly, I got a bit angry.”
Interviewer: “Angry, okay …”
Teresa: “Because I think that when I saw this, I stopped and thought: ‘Wow, what an effort women need to make just to go out and buy some bread’. When it’s kind of getting dark outside, should I go, should I really go? And this is something a man would not think about!: ‘Ah, I want to buy bread, I will buy bread!’”
Rational cognitive discovery, a phrasing we use with the aim of identifying reactions involving specifically intellectual and analytical processes, were also heavily employed by participants according to their own accounts.
Rational dynamics showed up as constant consequences of the reading practice and seemed to play a fundamental role in the youngsters’ learning process about GBV. They tended to show up in connection with empathetic or emotional responses, though this association was not always automatic nor guaranteed.
Take David, who refers to Filosofia do mamilo as a “graphic novel that I did not understand well, but from which I learned how [non-binary people] think when they are in public and what they suffer on a daily basis.” Here, the participant admits that he could get in contact with the protagonists’ suffering, but could not fully understand their situation or the origins of their needs.
The reading experience pushed participants toward reflections that Hakemulder would call “ethical effects” [88, p. 4]. These reflections, in some cases, allowed participants to reinterpret past or recurring experiences and, in turn, to match affective reactions, thus opening the path towards the consolidation of an idea of in-group belonging and identification, especially for girls.
For Matilde, as already mentioned, this reinterpretation concerned mostly the re-evaluation of her personal experiences as experiences from a group of people - women. For her, reading of Manda mensagem quando chegares helped her recognize things that are generally normalized as manifestations of GBV, and that affect nearly all women and girls. For Margarida, reading and understanding a graphic novel like Juízo was crucial in retrospectively interpreting the reaction that her mother had when she communicated that she had gotten her first menstruation. It was through the reflection that the encounter with the text activated, and in particular with the protagonist’s expression of dread upon discovering her daughter’s menarche, that the participant came to understand her own mothers’ feelings of fear and to associate them with the intergenerational dangers (including unwanted pregnancy and the related difficulties in accessing abortion care) that being able to become pregnant entail.
Finally, for boys in particular, the reading led to learning things that had not even been imaginable to them before, as explained by David’s surprise in commenting the vicissitudes of Em ti me vejo: “I had never realized that someone could suffer in order to have their hair similar to that of others”.
Our research also shows how participants benefitted from collective or interpersonal discussions about the graphic novels in their understanding (and thus learning) process. This is mostly true for boys, who declared to have shared their doubts about the content of some texts with their girl classmates, so they could help them make sense of the narratives. This is the case of Xavier, who relied on fellow young girl participants to build part of his interpretation:
“I discussed a bit with my classmates after the reading, for example, since we had girls in our class, there were things that they understood better than us, and this helped a little, as a group dynamic. It is always simpler when we can count on each other to understand.”
In cases like this one, the intergender sharing dimension allowed girls to understand images and contexts that boys felt they had no lived context to adequately decode. Particularly significant is the case of Juízo, the graphic novel about lack of access to reproductive rights in which the abortion story is not explicitly addressed, being narratologically covered with the metaphor of a wisdom tooth extraction. The correct interpretation of the graphic novel (when present) was often facilitated by conversations that boys had with their girl peers, who had already identified the metaphorical comparison. In other cases, the discussion with the girls confirmed to boys that most of the manifestations of gendered violence against women portrayed in the narratives were realistic, and part of their colleagues’ lived experience, thus providing them with an enriching learning process on the dynamics and vastness of women’s victimization.
Learning facilitators and obstacles.
The learning modes listed above describe common approaches that participants showcased in relation to the texts, and how they expanded their knowledge about GBV, both affectively and encyclopedically. However, the analysis of the interviews also allowed us to identify what we termed “learning facilitators” and “learning obstacles”, depending on their characterization as either promoters or inhibitors of knowledge acquisition about GBV, by the participants.
Among the learning facilitators, the positive influence that the perception of the narrated stories as non-fictional was clear. Despite the presence of a fictional story in the corpus (Juízo), some participants collapsed the whole set of texts into the non-fictional category and claimed to be affected by this narrative feature in their processing and validating information about GBV and its dynamics.
Dinis, for example, commented on Manda mensagem quando chegares stating that
“the fact that the girls in the novel had really been pursued, ended up being not a shock, but something curious, because in the beginning I thought it was something imagined, something that was not real. But it ended up being true and maybe is the most common situation that women pass through, specifically in the street.”
Here, the assimilation of what was read as reliable knowledge was conditional to the veracity of the represented stories, which in turn permitted the student to overcome his doubts and recognize that these are abuses that women are constantly confronted with.
In some instances, participants highlighted the importance of autobiography, the most recurring non-fictional narrative form in the corpus, as an element that allowed them to better understand the experiences and feelings of the victims. Gender positioning affected the dependency of participants from non-fictionality for validation, with boys resorting to it much more than girls.
This was connected to another learning facilitator, namely the feeling of surprise that many participants revealed when recalling their reading experience, and the encounter with specific scenes of abuse that impacted them, not necessarily because of their explicitness, but for representing behaviours deemed unimaginable. The surprise enabled emotional engagement and thus memory fixation, while non-fictional perception prevented participants from discarding them as not realistic.
Learning obstacles identified in the study included the failure to understand the graphic novels due to perceived visual over-complexity. This was particularly evident in the case of Juízo, characterized by an indirect approach to the representation of systemic lack of access to reproductive rights, which many students failed to grasp, thereby impairing their capacity to develop knowledge on the topic.
Another obstacle to learning was rage, experienced by some girls who found the depiction of abusive and manipulative behaviour, especially in Boy Dodoi, so frustrating that it negatively impacted their willingness to continue reading.
Ability to define and employ respectful language.
At a quantitative level, results do not show a significant impact of the graphic novels’ reading in the students’ capacity to define GBV, as demonstrated by a comparison between the definitions provided by each student in the questionnaire and those verbalized during the interview, in relation to Pandea et al.’s2 definition, explored above.
Table 1, In some cases, there was even a seeming regression, which might be related, among other things, to different abilities to abstract and summarize when dealing with written (questionnaire) versus spoken (interview) language. This is suggested by the fact that some instances of setback display a frequent reliance on polarizing gender discourses stereotypes, perhaps associated with the informalities that characterize spoken language. Moreover, some of these are also connected to the difficulty in integrating different manifestations of GBV into a single definition. This is particularly relevant in relation to transphobia, a manifestation that one of the graphic novels (Filosofia do mamilo) addressed and that appeared to act as a totalizer, erasing from the definition references to more visible forms of GBV (such as gendered violence against cisgender women).
Table 1. Comparative definitional accuracy of GBV between pre-reading survey and post-reading interview.
| Def. accuracy | Respondents |
Gender breakdown |
|---|
| As accurate | 4 | (2B; 2G) |
| Less accurate | 7 | (5B; 2G) |
| More accurate | 8 | (3B; 5G) |
| Not provided | 1 | (0B; 1G) |
Therefore, we believe that this inability to systematize a definition does not coincide with lack of learning.
A parallel movement (i.e., expanding GBV beyond cisgender women) is also distinctive of some of the cases in which literacy about GBV increased, without then erasing cisgender women as victims of GBV. In these cases, the contact with the graphic novels resulted in a process of complexification and not reduction of the definition.
Transphobia is one of the most discussed forms of gender-based violence in the interviews (despite the presence of only one graphic novel out of five focusing on it) and trans subjects are often mentioned by students as principal victims of GBV. However, discussions on transphobia do not always adhere to trans-inclusive language (e.g., gender-appropriate pronouns), but are often associated with more or less accurate descriptive statements on how the victim is presented in the graphic novel.
This is clear in the case of the non-binary protagonist and narrator of Filosofia do Mamilo, who is rightly recognized as someone who does not fit the gender binary, despite several of them not knowing how to address such an identity. In many cases, students use the term non-binary and provide an accurate description of the character but fail to use correct pronouns. An example of that is Carlos:
Carlos: “The woman did not identify as a man nor as a woman.” [our emphasis]
Interviewer: “How do we term those who are like that?”
Even those who do not use “non-binary”, or who misgender the character, counterbalance it by accurately, and reflexively, addressing the crux of the issue as in the case of Dinis, who says that “He cannot change his gender because he is not trans enough, supposedly”, thus identifying the character as someone who does not fit the parameters of normative (and binary) transness by focusing on his own interpretation of the gender-of-centre, rather than on the sex assigned at birth, of the character.
Even though a minority of participants completely failed to identify the protagonist as a subject who rejects gender dichotomies, they tend to admit that they could not recognize them either a masculine or feminine being. Filipe, for example, said:
“I could not identify the character who wanted to do top surgery nor as a man nor as a woman. And I could not understand if it was to put [breasts], but I think it was to take the breast out. Maybe it was a transition to become a man.”
Both the scarcity of encouraging results regarding participants’ ability to define GBV and their demonstrated lack of linguistic awareness when it comes to accurate and respectful gender vocabulary testify to a weakness in abstracting and applying knowledge that, far from being absent, was (also) acquired during the reading process.
