Need for Gender Neutrality in Cartooning Scholarship

Abstract

The person of a woman seems to continue to mean inability, weakness and perhaps, inexistence in especially the field of cartooning. Hypothetically, the cartooning scholarship basically presents cartooning studies with a mere mention of the female cartoonist in a ratio of about 1 to 80 studies done. This article presents a case in point where a female cartoonist had worked in a newspaper along with other male cartoonists and yet scholars mostly present their works as though female cartoonists do not exist. The article describes the depictions and draws comparisons to express that the female cartoonists work may have inspired some of the male cartoonists depictions. Some of the facial parts resemble each other against the backdrop of depictive influences between the works of the female and male cartoonists. Again, the stature of the characters of the first three male cartoonists is as short as those of the female cartoonist.

Key words: stereotype, ignominy and gender exclusion