The Women behind the Woman behind the Man Women: Drawing Plural Collective Voices onto the Page in Emilie Plateau’s Noire

The present paper focuses on how Plateau’s Noire adapts Tania de Montaigne’s original piece with the possibilities of comics, foregrounding small acts and slow and collective change via original visual comics strategies. This graphic novel not only moves away from the epic monologic idea of emancipation centered on one individual and radical change but engages with slow and collective change initiated by several women, who have often been made invisible in male-centered historiographies. I first consider how the creative piece employs several multimodal strategies to address the role but also the limitations of female actors in this collective struggle. More specifically, I examine the visual possibilities explored by Plateau in Noire. I first tackle the ambivalence of the brown color the artist plays with to question racial discrimination and absurdity. Taking from Szép’s study of comics’ engagement with vulnerability (Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability), I analyze how Plateau’s small characters as well as backgrounds foster empathy with the vulnerability of the protesters’ bodies. The figurative minimalism (close to children’s literature/drawings) of the vulnerable body enables both an individual and collective identification. A third section addresses the symbolic image of the seat, which is explored to highlight how women have occupied seats/space or tried to in a larger context of the Civil Rights Movement. A new collective memory is here created, one that is made possible beyond the gutter. New cognitive and visual gaps allow Plateau to address racism and intersectionality in oblique ways.