"When Sex Tourism Goes Graphic"
Dr. Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan will reflect on the process of adapting her ethnographic research on sex tourism in Brazil into graphic novel form. Informed by feminist and ethnographic engagements with visual research and methodologies, she will discuss the potential and limitations of this medium for knowledge production, and the kind of ethical-political conundrums it generates. She will also explore some of the affinities between ethnography and the graphic novel medium, and reflect on the capacity of graphic novels to generate multiple meanings, address complex and difficult subject matter, offer unique insights into the shifting and situated experiences of the protagonists, and render the experiences of the protagonists relatable and comprehensible. Graphic novels are in many ways unique in how they combine text/image to create meaningful stories – but the genre nonetheless poses challenges for processes of knowledge production and representation. Images may evoke, provoke and open our imagination; but, similar to words and text, they can reduce and dilute meanings as well. Finally, she will also engage with the ‘affective capacity’ of graphic novels, namely, their capacity to generate, mediate and organize particular affects – an aspect that becomes particularly salient in the context of my work, given that sex tourism is already mediated by visual affective politics.