While I am fairly excited to write an experimental essay on Fun Home and the significance of book historical elements in the enhancement of thematic content and meaning, I am still tossing at least one more idea around in my head. I may want to change my proposal and write an ethnographic essay on the construction of race in cartoons and other types of graphic narratives.
If a cartoon is not depicting a well-known figure of a given ethnicity, then it could be said that the shading of skin tone is one of the easiest methods of constructing race in images. However, if that skin tone was taken away, along with any shading representing hair color, I wonder if people would still be able to identify race very easily. My hypothesis is that they would, for the most part, be able to make these identifications. I can only assume that stereotypes have worked their way into the eyes, noses, and mouths of race-based cartoons.
I feel a good method of going about collecting data for this ethnographic essay would be to type entires such as "African American Cartoon" and "Asian Cartoon" into an online database (maybe Google Images or something like it) and using the first five images from each search as a control. If these images were traced without any shading in skin and hair and placed in random order on a page, one could ask a number of people to identify the ethnicities of the individuals depicted in the images. One could then formulate an argument regarding the construction of race through elements other than skin and hair color.
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