Books
How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?
“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press, 2016)
Read Excerpts
Book excerpt published in The Comics Journal, March 11, 2016
Book excerpt published in Lilith Magazine, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 2016): 44.
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Columbia University Press: Enter code OKSHOW for 30% discount
Reviews
“A careful and nuanced exploration of the complexities of identity and identification, “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?” is an excellent and ground-breaking work, invaluable to scholars of Jewish studies, comics studies, and women’s studies. ”
As a cartoonist who is a woman and who happens to be a non-Jew, I love this book, and completely identify with Oksman's theories of the deep intersectionality of these issues. She examines the beauty of how cartoons and graphic narrative can uncover difficult, personal ideas so masterfully. Oksman helps the reader see the art and struggles of a group of talented women as they search for honest identity and a place to call home. — Liza Donnelly, cartoonist, author of When Do They Serve the Wine?: The Folly, Flexibility, and Fun of Being a Woman
“Oksman is superb at interpreting visual and narrative details, and she provides elegant links back and forth between the cartoonists.”
An original study that charts how three indisputably fascinating subjects—feminism, Judaism, and comics—intersect today. In Oksman's analysis, the word-and-image form, comics, and the identities it presents on its pages are connected: they both resist overdetermination, refiguring traditional categories and taxonomic pressures. A unique and compelling addition to several different fields. — Hillary L. Chute, University of Chicago, author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics
“A brilliant analysis. Oksman’s readings are as nuanced and inventive as the artists she describes. ”
Tahneer Oksman's study "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?": Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirsis a welcome reminder that, in comics that appear on the page as well as comics who get up on stage, Jewish women are insisting we reckon with their bawdy bodies. — Ari Brostoff, The Forward
“Tahneer Oksman’s ”How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?” offers a new way to think about Jewish identity in America. ”
Oksman's work helps illuminate the ways in which Jewish women artists in particular have negotiated, subverted, reclaimed or straight-out rejected stereotypical expectations of what being 'American', 'Jewish' and 'female' means in twentieth and twenty-first century society and culture. — F. K. Clementi, Life Writing
“An insightful... generously illustrated volume, brimming with startling and provocative images. ”
Detailed and insightful. . . . [Oksman's] excellent analysis of the combination of text and art in each of the works reveals the suitability and uniqueness of the graphic format for memoirs as well as fiction. Overall, Oksman's is a worthwhile book, highly recommended for all libraries with or without graphic narrative collections. — Stephen E. Tabachnick, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
“Oksman challenges readers to transform their understanding of the comic format - to see the serious exploration that underlies the cartoonist’s work. I certainly will never look at a graphic novel or memoir in quite the same way again.”
"How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?" makes an essential contribution to scholarship on American Jewish literature and the Jewish graphic novel. In bringing together questions of gender and Jewishness to discuss these contemporary comics, Oksman expands the terms of analysis for discussing not just graphic narratives but, more broadly, Jewish literature and culture in a visual age. — Melissa Weininger, American Jewish History
“This volume is unique in its exploration of how the medium itself comes to play an important role in determining how identity emerges . . . It is rare to find a text that so smoothly bridges close reading with contextualized analysis.”
[An] insightful book that might function best as a map for making sense of a highly diffuse and dispersed genre in which the central (dare I say canonical?) texts are already complex acts of representation. Oksman's guide to them adds another layer of representation and reflection that deepens our understanding of the books and the complex of identities that they already represent. — Ari Y. Kelman, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
“With the explosion of graphic novels and other graphic works, this is a fascinating look at a new form of memoir, but also of how to analyze and critique this format. . . . Highly recommended.”
Oksman has produced a valuable and long overdue volume that will add immeasurably to the field of contemporary Jewish cultural studies. . . . This book will be of use to anyone who seeks to write or think about Jewish American identity in the twenty-first century, as Oksman has done such yeoman’s work in compiling and synthesizing the theoretical contributions to that conversation. And her forward-looking assessment of where contemporary graphic memoirs are now will prove generative for scholars for years to come. It is difficult to imagine any future scholarship on graphic memoirs or Jewish graphic novels that wouldn’t cite this book. — Jennifer Caplan, AJS Review
“Oksman succeeds in unraveling the ambivalent positionality of secular Jewish women in American society, showing how comics open up new spaces for creative transformation. ”
I highly recommend [this book]...In addition to revealing the ways that Jewish artistic women can challenge conventional assumptions and stereotypes (e.g. the JAP, the smothering Jewish mother), Oksman also makes the reader aware of the deficiencies of representations of Jewish women in the mass media (as produced primarily by men). — Women in Judaism
“An impressive book.”
Links to full reviews
“Why Only Jewish Boys Get to Keep Their Noses,” by Ari Brostoff in The Forward, June 19, 2016.
Review by F.K. Clementi in Life Writing, 2016
Graphic review by Rachel Gordon and Josh Edelglass in Contemporary Jewry
Review by Sheryl Stahl, Association for Jewish Libraries Newsletter, 2016
Review by Stephen E. Tabachnik in Tulsa Studies, 2016
Review by Candida Rifkind in Contemporary Women’s Writing, 2016
Review by Melissa Weininger in American Jewish History, 2017
Review by Ari Y. Kelman in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2017
Review by Jenny Caplan in AJS Review, 2017
Review by Ranen Omer-Sherman in Journal of Jewish Identities, 2017
Review by Steven Bergson in Women in Judaism, 2017
Review by Margaret Galvan in INKS: The Journal of The Comics Studies Society, 2017
Review by Zanne Domoney-Lyttle in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2018
Review by Charlotte F. Werbe in H-Net Reviews, 2018
Review by Maya Barzilai in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2018
Review by Roberta Mock in Biography, 2018
Podcasts and Videos
New Books in Jewish Studies podcast, March 24, 2016
Interview with Karen Rile at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, October 31, 2016
Talk with cartoonist Liana Finck at the American Jewish Historical Society from the Center for Jewish History, New York, NY, October 26, 2016
Personal essay about writing the book
“On Writing a Jewish Book,” Lilith Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter 2015-2016): 43.
The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself
The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself, edited by Tahneer Oksman and Seamus O’Malley (University Press of Mississippi, 2019)
Winner, 2020 Comics Studies Society (CSS) Prize for Edited Book Collection
Read Excerpts
Read the book’s introduction, “A Shared Space.”
View excerpts on Amazon.
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Synopsis
In a self-reflexive way, Julie Doucet’s and Gabrielle Bell’s comics, though often autobiographical, defy easy categorization. In this volume, editors Tahneer Oksman and Seamus O’Malley regard Doucet’s and Bell’s art as actively feminist, not only because they offer women’s perspectives, but because they do so by provocatively bringing up the complicated, multivalent frameworks of such engagements. While each artist has a unique perspective, style, and worldview, the essays in this book investigate their shared investments in formal innovation and experimentation, and in playing with questions of the autobiographical, the fantastic, and the spaces in between.
Doucet is a Canadian underground cartoonist, known for her autobiographical works such as Dirty Plotteand My New York Diary. Meanwhile, Bell is a British American cartoonist best known for her intensely introspective semiautobiographical comics and graphic memoirs, such as the Lucky series and Cecil and Jordan in New York. By pairing Doucet alongside Bell, the book recognizes the significance of female networks, and the social and cultural connections, associations, and conditions that shape every work of art.
In addition to original essays, this volume republishes interviews with the artists. By reading Doucet’s and Bell’s comics together in this volume housed in a series devoted to single-creator studies, the book shows how, despite the importance of finding “a place inside yourself” to create, this space seems always for better or worse a shared space culled from and subject to surrounding lives, experiences, and subjectivities.
Contributions by Kylie Cardell, Aaron Cometbus, Margaret Galvan, Sarah Hildebrand, Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Tahneer Oksman, Seamus O’Malley, Annie Mok, Dan Nadel, Natalie Pendergast, Sarah Richardson, Jessica Stark, and James Yeh.
Links to full reviews
Review by Martha Kuhlman in Biography, 2020
Related Events
Printed Matter, Tahneer Oksman introduces Seamus O’Malley and Gabrielle Bell in conversation, New York, NY, May 23, 2019
Panel at the Graduate Center at CUNY, “Women in Comics: The State of the Scholarship and Opportunities for Professionalization,” April 5, 2019