Everybody’s Graphic Protest Novel
Everybody’s Graphic Protest Novel
Stuck Rubber Baby and the Anxieties of Racial Difference
Stuck Rubber Baby is a 1995 graphic novel by Howard Cruse that broke new ground, particularly with the way it combined genre and content. In his book, Cruse, a gay cartoonist, explores a set of tensions surrounding the racial and sexual politics of the Deep South in the 1960s. This chapter examines the manner in which race and sexual identity intersect in Stuck Rubber Baby by framing the book through the conventions of the white-authored “coming-out novel” and the “white southern racial conversion narrative.” It discusses not only the coming-out novel’s general silence about racial bias and privilege, but also the racial conversion narrative’s general silence about sexuality and homosexuality. Finally, the chapter considers how Cruse’s graphic protest novel, within its specific context of the Freedom Summer of 1964, cedes only limited freedom to African Americans.
Keywords: graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby, Howard Cruse, Deep South, race, sexual identity, coming-out novel, racial conversion narrative, homosexuality, African Americans
University Press of Mississippi requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
