Talk by Tracy Chahwan

This talk investigates the evolving landscape of women and LGBTQ+ comics in Lebanon and the Arab world, focusing on how marginalized creators develop visual strategies to negotiate identity, censorship, and socio-political instability. Through autobiographical practice and case studies, including Samandal Comics, Restless by Joseph Kai, Dans le Taxi by Barrack Rima, and digital platforms like BeirutByDyke, this presentation explores comics as a hybrid feminist and queer archive that documents lived experience in contexts where official narratives erase or criminalize it. Special attention is given to digital circulation, alternative publishing infrastructures, and transnational networks, which enable forms of authorship, testimony, and community otherwise denied in public space. By centering artistic practice from within the region, rather than from a theoretical distance, this talk frames comics not only as cultural production, but as a methodology for survival, connection, and collective world-building.

Tracy Chahwan’s work first appeared on the walls of Beirut as street art and posters for local independent music venues like the Beirut Groove Collective and Metro al Madina. Later, she began working with the Lebanese experimental comics collective Samandal, publishing anthologies and experimental magazines, eventually publishing her graphic novel Beirut Bloody Beirut (Hachette, 2018). After relocating to the US in 2020, she turned to journalistic comics, collaborations, and created editorial work for major outlets, including The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. Tracy continues to travel between the US and the Levant, thinking, drawing, and doing her best to bear witness to the many strange madnesses unfolding all around us.