Waiting (2018) for the ›Good Life‹ with Adriana Lozano

Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio (Cambridge)

»To inherit feminism can mean to inherit sadness«
Sara Ahmed

This essay looks at Waiting (2018) by Colombian Adriana Lozano Román, a comic (in the broadest sense of the term) that collects portraits of individuals, most of whom present as feminine, who seem sad. Lozano, together with other artists such as Powerpaola and Sofía La Watson, gave birth to the alternative feminist comics scene in Latin America, whose comics are known for their naive style and autobiographical subjects. Waiting is her first book of pencil-coloured portraits; it was published by Amsterdam’s Terry Bleu in 2018 and consists of 48 pages, riso printed in Arcoprint Milk 1.5 paper, using 3 colours. In a recent interview for the online website It’s Nice That, Lozano declared that it was a road trip through the south of the USA that inspired her collection. In this journey, she kept seeing people by themselves, subsumed by a »thrilling boredom« (Alagiah). Performing this hesitant boredom, her characters, of all ages and skin colours, seem to be waiting for something: one stares at the ›camera‹, waiting by the phone; one rests inside a heart shaped pool; another eats a burger meal from a tray, her eyes closed.

The lines that follow will discuss the aesthetic expressions of the practice of waiting in Lozano’s comic. My argument will be twofold and will be divided across five sections and a brief conclusion, where I will propose that the wait is articulated in two opposite directions. The first three sections (An Invisible Disturbance, Models of the â€ºGood Life‹ and Sadness as Public Feeling) will examine how the comic contests the act of waiting in its more common, optimistic meaning, that of waiting for better times to come. Following this, the last two sections (The Wandering Reader and Reclining Bodies) will consider how the comic also imagines the wait as revolutionary, encouraging the reader to see waiting as an action that can be fulfilling in itself and thereby renouncing the dynamics and requirements of the society.

Sara Ahmed’s concept of the ›good life‹ will be an important theoretical compass guiding these reflections. In her acclaimed monograph The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed defines the ›good life‹ as the normative models of family, community and sociality sustaining the hegemonic social order. According to her, individuals are required to orientate towards these structures for their lives to be considered worthy of happiness (Ahmed, 6). Following these ideas, this essay proposes that Lozano’s Waiting both articulates and shatters the ambivalent attachments which construct the ›good life‹ and its promises by rendering its inner workings within the comics surface. If for Ahmed, reading what happiness does and how it binds to orientations, objects and attachments implies »reading the grammar of this ambivalence« (Ahmed, 6), what follows looks into how the spatialisation of the wait as a site of contradictory affective investments organises Waiting’s unhappy archive.

An Invisible Disturbance

Before delving into the representations and criticisms that the comic makes of the ›good life‹, it is important to clarify what is understood by the spatialisation of the wait. To do so, first, one must consider that the action of waiting is above all a temporal concept which conceives time as slowing down. Yet waiting can also be pondered upon for its spatiality. As Harold Schweizer writes, for the waiter, space magnifies: »If technological acceleration increasingly compresses space, for the person who waits, space tediously expands and time slows down« (Schweizer, 8). The feeling of space wearingly expanding is more affective and embodied than factual, and as such is hard to pin down verbally. But, because comics as a medium tend to have a »spatial syntax« (Chute, 4), they are particularly adequate to evoke it. By this, I mean that comics use the flatness of the page to both temporalise and represent reality. Lozano’s Waiting is an example of a comic that presents the wait in its spatial dimensions, producing a feeling of mounting unease that does not resolve in any narrative outcome.

A close-up of an ashtray with some cigarette ends opens Waiting. The first few portraits that follow show women in resting positions, a few of them smoking (Figure 1). There are no texts or captions, other than the words these women have written as tattoos on their bodies. The drawings, each unframed and measuring 170 x 120 mm, fill the whole page, leaving no gutter or blank spaces. As seen in the portraits selected for Figure 1, taken by themselves or together, the scenes pictured do not add up to a narrative plot. Indeed, what story can we infer from a character with a blank stare leaning slightly on a counter? one can certainly intuit some details of their meanderings through their postures and gestures, or from the objects they have nearby, but in general, nothing seems to be happening, echoing comics scholar Greice Schneider’s book on comics and the everyday, What Happens when Nothing Happens. Despite the lack of plot, Waiting does produce some sort of atmospheric tension, a feeling supported by the characters’ immobility within the frames they inhabit. Lozano performs a sort of picture-writing »that tries to stick with something« of this lack of action, of this perpetual wait as it is »becoming atmospheric« (Stewart, 452).

It is also this »becoming atmospheric«, to use Kathleen Stewart’s words, that which prompts us to consider the wait in spatial terms. Cultural theorist Ben Anderson’s term of »affective atmospheres« might prove useful to explain this point. Anderson uses this expression to refer to collective affect which resists full capture by the recipient, and that seems to be held together by an inconclusive »relation of tension« (Anderson, 80). His formulation seems appropriate to refer to the practice of waiting, especially regarding how it has been read in scholarly definitions, that is, as affectively indeterminate. The wait, as Schweizer remarks, resists »description and analysis« (Schweizer, 1); it lacks a proper ›plot‹ and mostly offers repetition. Perhaps this explains why, as a social phenomenon, the practice has not received extensive academic attention, with a few studies mostly focusing on the relationship between the politics of waiting and the workings of the state, taking it as a »technology of governance« where »power is effectuated through its exercise over other people’s time« (Janeja and Bandak, 4).¹ Whereas this approach emphasises the temporal dimensions of the wait, to look at the practice through its affective atmospheres allows us to think it through spatial lenses.

Finally, Lozano’s Waiting manifests the spatialisation of the wait through the practice of repetition. While the situations shown might, for all that one knows, belong to different temporal/spatial moments, the repetition of the same stagnant atmosphere evokes an uncertain feeling of uncanniness. Here, I gesture towards Freud’s oft-cited notion that names the affect that emerges as the familiar becomes strange. As the reader encounters the same scene again and again – women who seem sad sitting down, some smoking; others staring blankly – what could be read as a banal situation begins to be tainted with a mounting sensation of unease, with no end in sight. The immeasurability of this feeling is exacerbated by the lack of gutters, the blank space we often find connecting panels in sequential comics. With no gutters, these are single panels that take up the entire page and that are instead connected in their boundlessness. The book’s blurb on the back cover confirms the presence of a sinister feeling engulfing Lozano’s subjects, writing that »all the characters in this series are related to a permanent uncomfortable field, as if [they] were under the effects of an invisible disturbance linked more than anything to the emotional dimension« (Lozano). As readers, it is the effect of this invisible disturbance that reaches us, like an affective atmosphere produced by a fragmented yet continuous stream of unbelonging. What one assumes the characters are doing – waiting, as the title suggests – begins to be delineated spatially by this invisible disturbance.

Models of the ›Good Life‹

In this context, as a reader, one also begins to wonder the reasons behind these characters’ sad wait. The comic does not offer the reader many clues regarding their backgrounds, with only a few scattered references creating a sort of realistic context for their lives. To give an example, shown in Figure 2 are a portrait which features a poster of Stephen King’s The Langoliers, a novella included in the author’s 1990 collection, and a second drawing which shows a character wearing a t-shirt that reads »Fire walk with me«, gesturing to David Lynch’s 1992 film that serves as prequel to his well-known cult show Twin Peaks (1990–1991). Finally, Figure 2 also displays the only portrait in the series featuring a masculine presenting character, with a poster hanging behind them, a huge cover of a playboy 2001 exemplar featuring American actress Pamela Anderson, famous for starring in the 90s show Baywatch, wearing a bikini and holding a gun. By using western pop culture references, specifically belonging to the united States, the comic places the protagonists somewhere between the 90s and early noughties, in relation to a western culture that at the time was largely imagined around the popularisation of media, the exposure of certain bodies and the commodity. As Frederic Jameson writes in his ground-breaking essay Postmodernism and Consumer Society, this was a time characterised by »the transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents« (Jameson, 20).

Taken in this manner, it seems that Lozano’s series – a set of snapshots of characters engaging in leisure activities mostly in domestic settings – could be parodying the genre of the woman’s magazines, as commercialised during the late twentieth century in the northern hemisphere. Though, because these characters are presented as sad, perhaps it would be more appropriate to use the term pastiche, a form of »parody that has lost its sense of humour« (Jameson, 5). As stated by Ros Ballaster, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer and Sandra Hebron in their study of the woman’s magazine in the uK, around 1988, the magazines had mostly abandoned building their discourses around »narrative fictions«, and rather consisted of lifestyle snapshots revolving around the display of the commodity (171). For these scholars, in the 90s, women’s magazines continued being »bearers of particular discourses of femininity (domesticity, glamour, maternity)« (130), and instituted »the hegemonic power of middle-class values and white femininity« (172).

Like the uK 90s magazines, Waiting eludes constructing a narrative fiction around its characters, and instead centres on the display of the body surrounded by commodities. An example can be found in Figure 3, which features a character wearing a Coors Light t-shirt, a beer brand that became popular around the late 70s, or one can even turn to the Pamela Anderson’s poster shown earlier (see Figure 2), where the actress’ semi naked body is aligned with the possession of a commodity (a gun, in this particular case). This picture is especially interesting because the gun does not offer the woman any particular power; instead, it is there to fit with the porn magazine’s expected audience and their misogynistic fantasies, where ›guns and girls‹ co-exist only to fulfil the desires of men.

The above contextualisation can begin to offer us some clues regarding the invisible disturbance haunting Lozano’s characters: these characters are not happy about the lives the media has assigned them to live. When viewed from this angle, the title given to the book – Waiting – gains a different nuance. To advance such a claim, it is worth revisiting Ahmed‘s theorisations. Ahmed uses the expression of ›the promise of happiness‹ to refer to the mechanism by which the ›good life‹ operates; she writes: »[the good life] is what makes some things promising, as if to share in things is to share in happiness« (Ahmed, 30). In her terms, one is on the right path to happiness as long as one orients without deviation towards the objects of the ›good life‹, which she also calls ›happy objects‹, these being a hegemonic identity or career path, the construction of a family or the idea of maternity, to give a few examples. In this formulation, happiness is articulated as direction, and its realisation is conditional on one being on the right track towards these normative objects or objectives.

So, it is here that the title becomes particularly illuminating. Although in the women’s magazine at the time the ideals of good living – heteronormative, white, middle-class – are shown as the key to happiness, in reality the image is only a projection that tells us that if we have all those things at hand then we will certainly be happy; in their discourse, the white bourgeois body and the commodity are the bearers of such a promise. The wait, and especially the repetitive and uncanny wait, then, is constructed as the other side of the promise of happiness: It reveals the disconnection between the objects of the good life and actual happiness. The title, Waiting, shows the illusory structure that sustains the ›good life‹, the lifestyle models promoted by the 90s women’s magazine, for example.

The portrait on page [31], shown on Figure 4, presents a scene that could be read as the stability of this promise graphically breaking down. The image plays with the scale and perspective of the objects as they gravitate around the character; the ashtray and the cigarettes shown previously in other portraits (see Figure 1) have been rescaled, highlighting their centrality, even their dominance as ›characters‹ within the frame. In a nightmarish affective atmosphere, subject and object seem to be subsumed into each other. The invisible disturbance, as materialised in this portrait’s uncertainty, is a step towards the recognition of the good life’s illusory wait and its perpetual present.

If naming her collection with the title of Waiting achieves such critique, there are other ways in which the comic defies the workings of the ›good life‹. As opposed to the characters populating the 90s women’s magazine, most of Lozano’s protagonists contest normative beauty and body standards, especially those that were held in the 90s; for instance, the characters explicitly lift their arms to show their armpit hair. Moreover, her selection does not discriminate according to age – naked portraits of older women are placed alongside those of younger ones –, or race.

The meta play with the frames carried out in some portraits is key to illustrate this point. Let’s take a look at Figure 5. Here, page [45] shows a black woman wearing a bikini sitting down, drinking. Behind her, there is a poster picturing a white woman mimicking the same sitting posture. Page [37] inverts this distribution: it shows a white woman sitting with a poster of a black woman behind. The comic suggests that subjectivity is moulded on the basis of images popularised by the media, hence the posters found behind many of these characters. These images challenge the white, heteronormative and young body by framing and reframing the characters interchangeably. If the frame inside the frame presents us with a model of identification, the play with positionality shows that any of them is worth of occupying such space. The images to which the characters look up, furthermore, contrast with the model of femininity promoted by the Playboy magazine cover explored earlier (see Figure 2), which targeted instead a masculine audience. In this manner, Waiting presents an intersectional take on feminist politics that is dissonant with the univocal ideal of femininity popularised by Western media during the 90s.

Sadness as Public Feeling

A further aesthetic expression used by Lozano to make an appraisal out of her representation of the wait is by making her protagonists look sad. At first glance, this may show how fed up the protagonists are of the idealised versions of femininity they are meant to inhabit. But their sadness seems to be more complex. Feminist scholar and affect theorist Ann Cvetkovich makes a case for the ways in which depression manifests in the public sphere in her book Depression: A Public Feeling. Cvetkovich reads depression as the discourse built around subjects that do not conform with the normative regulations of the good life. In her account, anyone who cannot keep up with the speed of capitalist culture is medicalised and therefore read as depressed (Cvetkovich, 12). This is one way in which the wait can be read in the comic, in the direction of »what gets called depression in the domestic sphere [...] one that often keeps people silent, weary, and too numb to really notice the sources of their unhappiness (or in a state of low-level chronic grief – or depression of another kind – if they do)« (12).

But as we have seen, even if Lozano does frame her characters within this narrative, she also presents us with bodies that challenge it. Just like the uncanny affective atmosphere that manifests spatially, we might begin reading an accumulated sadness as revelatory of something else, especially taking into account that here sadness is being shown publicly. Sadness is being exposed through a similar massive outlet to that used by the media discourses at the time, for instance via the 90s magazine. The comic, in this sense, highlights the relevance of »finding public forums for everyday feelings, including negative feelings that can seem [...] debilitating« (Cvetkovich, 2). As Ahmed notes, »we might want to reread melancholic subjects, the ones who refuse to let go of suffering, who are even prepared to kill some forms of joy, as an alternative model of the social good« (Ahmed, 50).

Lozano’s characters embody what Ahmed calls the feminist killjoy: those whose experiences threaten the ›good life’s‹ fictions. In The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed examines the figure of the killjoy alongside other characters whose mere existences defy the hegemonic: the unhappy queer, the angry black woman and the melancholic migrant. Amongst them, the killjoy are they who always ruin the mood of the party, so to speak, by killing joy with their feminist interventions, for instance by pointing out at the conventional family table that what someone just said is racist or sexist. If in Ahmed’s oft-cited table example one sees how the killjoy intervenes verbally, in Waiting, the killjoy affect rather manifests graphically.

For example, the portrait on page [33], as shown in Figure 6, shows a half-naked woman standing next to a table with a chandelier and a plate on top. She holds a glass of wine, which she is about to spill. She looks downhearted. It seems ambivalent that despite living within these bourgeois settings, happiness is not following. For all that we see »the promise of the feeling« in the objects that surround her, the actual feeling lags behind (Ahmed, 27). Here, it is the depiction of the body as off-the-norm (sad, semi-naked) that contrasts with what could be a woman at ease within a leisure space, and which irradiates to the contrary a feeling of overwhelming anxiety. Graphically, this manifests as a shape that takes over: the shape of the glass of wine the woman is holding is replicated in her body, in the form made between her vulva and the gap between her thighs, and it is also echoed upside down by the shape of her brassiere. It then comes up again in the three images hung in the wall. The presence of the body at the centre destabilises the drawing’s atmosphere: it seems to have been caught off guard. This produces a radically different effect to what the authors of Woman’s World point out about the women’s magazine during the 90s; they write: »the magazines’ representations of femininity are offered in a form which is, above all, easy to deal with, process, interpret« (Ballaster/Beetham/Frazer/Hebron, 132). Here, we get the opposite. The character evokes an unstable model of personhood that is difficult to identify with precisely because it leans onto an affective atmosphere of uncanniness and indeterminacy. As such, it challenges the »very specific model of subjectivity« on which the good life relies, »where one knows how one feels, and where the distinction between good and bad feeling is secure« (Ahmed, 6).

While the above example uses the figure of the sad killjoy to destabilise a hegemonic model of subjectivity, there are other ways in which Lozano points to the representation of sadness as a public and political feeling. An example can be found in Figure 7, which portrays a woman reading a book titled »the sexually free housewife« (Lozano, p. [14]). She is in her underwear, with her legs open and having a drink. In this drawing, the title of the book gestures explicitly to the liberation of the housewife within a patriarchal society. This object is especially key, for it offers a way to reread sadness in the rest of the portraits, wherein women are pictured within domestic spaces, and in which most of the feminine characters are not shown doing house chores, as it has already been noted, but instead, reading, resting and drinking.

The book in this character’s hands directs us away from the association of leisure with an uncritical happiness and moves us closer towards the reclaiming of housework as a feminist struggle. This object, to borrow Henry Jenkins’ terms from his monograph Comics and Stuff, is »not drawn by accident« (Jenkins, 17). Its inclusion adds nuance to the domestic settings featured in the comic. As Silvia Federici said in her 1975 seminal essay Wages against Housework, it is within these spaces, that »our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our oversexualization has left us completely desexualized« (Federici, 19). The book is on display to make the character into a feminist killjoy, who, on the one hand, reclaims leisure time as political work, and, on the other, criticises the hegemonic wait characteristic of the housewife lifestyle for its adherence to an unproblematised happiness narrative.

There is, however, an important issue that as readers we must address, especially considering the privileged surroundings in which these women are depicted. What other domestic labour might be concealed here? Shown drinking coffee, smoking, reading or just leaning, the women in Waiting seem to be bodies effortlessly ›housed‹ by the world. By this, I point to the material structures ›housing‹ their subjectivities, which here seem to be constituted by bourgeois attachments and desires. The recognition of their sadness, in this context, is especially key, for as Ahmed reminds us, it can be »hard labor to recognise sadness and disappointment when you are living a life that is meant to be happy but just isn’t, which is meant to be full, but feels empty« (Ahmed, 75). Even so, this same freedom to be feminist killjoys might be hiding, to borrow Ahmed’s words, »labor of other women, who might be required to take over the foaming dishpans« (Ahmed, 51). Read in this way, their sadness might be the start for a recognition that the liberation of some could also mean the oppression of others.

The Wandering Reader

Up to this point, this essay has proposed that the spatialisation of the wait as an affective atmosphere 1) challenges the promises, expectations, and bodies set by the ›good life‹ and 2) uses sadness as a public feeling to present an alternative model of subjectivity. There remains a key question to ask here: how does the reader fit into Waiting’s aesthetic expression of the wait?

Lozano’s comic encourages the reader to adopt a wandering gaze that is similar to that associated with the practice of waiting. First, the repetition of objects, scattered across the portraits, is one way in which the comic invites us to implement such gaze. For example, one can take a look at the roses that decorate the ashtray shown in Figure 1. These can then be spotted accompanying many of the characters featured in the book: as part of the artworks decorating their interior spaces, as a pattern in their clothes, tattooed on many of their bodies, et cetera.

The effect of this iconographic braiding is a reading practice that plays with the characteristics of the act of waiting itself. Schweizer’s annotations on how the waiter lets their gaze wander around aimlessly is useful to illuminate this point. In his treaty on the matter, the author draws on Walter Benjamin to make an analogy between the waiter’s gaze and the eye of the camera. He affirms that »like the camera, the waiter’s eye performs what Benjamin describes as ›lowerings and liftings ... interruptions and isolations ... extensions and accelerations ... enlargements and reductions‹ – except that, unlike the camera, the waiter’s gaze performs these functions compulsively, without a plan of action« (Schweizer, 31). Taking the gaze from one object to another, the waiter is able to mask the tedious passing of time: »the magazines in waiting rooms, the entertainment on television, the computer games, the snacks, the cigarettes« (Schweizer, 8). objects are meant to fill the wait, to help the waiter cope with inactivity.

The waiter’s gaze, as described by Schweizer, can be compared with what Jenkins, drawing on comics scholar Thierry Smolderen, calls an unmoored reader, one who scans in multiple directions the comics page and performs a dispersed mode of interpretation (Jenkins, 40). It has been said as well by many comics theorists: we read comics in a constellative way, making connections between elements that might be at different ends of the narrative, rarely in a linear manner. Comics scholar Thierry Groensteen, for instance, named the associative system by which comics work with the term »general arthrology«, foregrounding how comics are built through nonlinear relations »that are not simultaneously offered to the gaze« (39). Nick Sousanis makes a similar argument, suggesting that, as readers, we approach the comic page »fixing on a target before dashing off to seek another of interest«, so »our vision captures disconnected static snapshots, an incomplete picture riddled with gaps« (Sousanis, 90).

By using objects that repeat themselves throughout different scenes and that tempt the reader to move and make connections, Lozano makes this particularity of the medium explicit. Waiting’s reader therefore assumes the jumping gaze that Schweizer associates with the waiter. Notably, this has the effect of including the reader in the characters’ universe, making it part of their contradictory wait. In turn, it makes us consider the (sad) wait in its collective dimensions, not as a single action, but rather as a further step towards the recognition of the ›good life’s‹ broken promises and the importance of positing sadness as a public feeling.

Reclining Bodies

Even if mobile objects, in Lozano’s account, seem to be encouraging »issues of vicariousness, or of choreography« (Wilson, 5), especially in the unmoored reader, it is also through stillness that the comic frames the wait as revolutionary. Most, if not all, of the women in Waiting are pictured in reclining poses. Some seem to be resting, sitting down; others are just slightly leaning on something; some of them are naked; and just a few take a vertical upright position (see, for example, Figure 1, Figure 5 and Figure 7). I am drawn to their reclining postures, just like I am drawn to their sadness, for its collective manifestation. First, because rest, conceived in its public dimension, just like sadness, can be radical. The reclining posture can point to the same exhaustion remarked on earlier in reference to their sadness: to say these women recline because they want to is valid, yet to say that these women need to do so speaks, to borrow Lauren Berlant’s words, about the »conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world« as scenes where subjects are »worn out« (Berlant, 23). The importance of interpreting the resting wait as a product of sadness and to read their reclined bodies as exhaustion, here, unmasks the narrative of depression attributed to the percentage of the population that cannot keep up with the speed of »corporate culture and the market economy« (Cvetkovich, 12), and suggests that it might be the other way round. Here, rest, portrayed as a collective issue, performs a refusal to such temporality of progression and challenges the medicalisation of bodies that lie outside the norm. In its reclining poses, Lozano, to put it in Cvetkovich wise words, »explore[s] the feeling of remaining or resting in sadness without insisting that it be transformed or reconceived« (Cvetkovich, 14).

While this reading is crucial, the resting posture can also be interpreted otherwise. one can engage with the reclining body as an invitation to reconsider subjectivity within a larger web of relationality. Emma Wilson, in her book The Reclining Nude, examines contemporary visual media created by three women (Agnes Varda, Catherine Breillat and Nan Goldin) that picture other women »reclining«. She uses this concept making a wink to the classical nude portrait of a woman laying down, under the gaze, most commonly, of a male painter, yet she stretches »its meanings outwards, referring to all manner of situations of horizontality« (Wilson, 4). To do so, Wilson draws on Italian feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero and her theorisations on relationality in Relating Narratives, and on queer theorist Judith Butler’s ideas in Giving an Account of Oneself. Expanding on both, she proposes that the reclining nude of a woman painted by another is an example of the »narrative scene« that takes place between women when either of them is looking to give an account of themselves. Cavarero’s »narrative scene«, as understood by Wilson, refers to opening the stories we tell about ourselves to the tales others might have about us (Wilson, 4). Likewise, reclining, stretching outwards, for Wilson, implies recognising that the relational scene is always one of vulnerable exposure to the other.

Wilson’s interpretation is relevant to my reading of Waiting because Lozano, as mentioned, includes several portraits of women in positions of rest, and, amongst those, some reclining nudes, as shown in Figure 8. Following Wilson, one can observe how Lozano, by including these portraits in her collection, not only underlines the »alterity, respect for remoteness, and unknowing that the figure can conjure« (Wilson, 9), but she also prompts us to ask further questions: What changes when one represents a body reclining? What other ways of relating might be hinted at when we challenge verticality? These two questions speak about an alternative approach to the scene wherein women exist amongst each other. Reinforcing what I argued earlier, they challenge the idea that women rest because they share the same unhappiness caused by their inability to keep up; instead, they encourage us to read rest as a spatial, relational and embodied mode of thinking about women’s agency.

Many years after Relating Narratives, Cavarero published Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude. Therein, still reflecting on this same relational vulnerability, she echoes Hannah Arendt’s belief that »every inclination turns outward« to point out the liminal boundaries between self and world. For Arendt, the self opens onto the world, taking from it whatever affects them. Drawing on this reading, Cavarero defines an ›inclination‹ as that which reveals a »geometrical imaginary« that challenges the vertical, straight posture the ›I‹ has held historically in philosophical thought; inclinations »bend and dispossess« the self (Cavarero 2016, 5). She uses the example of maternal inclination as epitome, where the mother, conventionally thought only in terms of care, can be instead pictured as inclining in both directions, within a spectrum »between care and wound«. But she makes clear that the same happens with many of the »way[s] [in which] the feminine character is dramatised« (Cavarero 2016, 105). Historically, women have been fixed within certain symbolic roles, their idealised figures not admitting the possibilities of leaning on the other, and, in doing so, moving sideways, fidgeting, refusing.²

Perhaps most importantly, to read Lozano’s reclining nudes in this manner becomes a way of contesting other ways in which the media has thought about women’s nakedness.

Art critic John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, his famous BBC television series and then book of the same name, takes the nude as subject for some of his reflections. Berger elaborates and criticises how along history the idea of a woman’s nude has been the epitome of women being seen as objects by the male gaze. Consequently, he writes that »[for women] to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised [...]. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude« (54). Countering this take on the nude, when we read Lozano’s pictures via Wilson and Cavarero, the nakedness of their characters can indeed be read as nudes, without them being positioned as objects for the male gaze. Lozano’s nudes, instead, recognise the subjects’ presence and convey a relational form of embodiment in which women lean onto one another.

A further key aspect that reinforces this idea is illustrated by the characters’ shared tattoos, especially one many of them carry of the name LoLA, as displayed in Figure 9 (see also Figure 5). Even if we ignore each of their individual stories, or even who LoLA might be, Lozano creates a web of embodied alliance that unites them through these common inscriptions (Figure 9). Their tattoos, some hidden, some exposed, some imagined, emphasise the immeasurable nature of their intersubjectivity and are there to be braided together by the reader’s unmoored gaze. The tattoos are marks on the body that speak of the latter as one to be rewritten. As such, they foreground that, just like Wilson puts it drawing on Butler, »there is no full narrative, either of oneself or of an other, and this is precisely because the self is exposed to others, open to others, formed by others, in ways that remain unfathomable« (Wilson, 30).

The fact that the comic was riso printed adds another dimension to this last point. The technique of risography is very common amongst independent publishers, like Amsterdam’s Terry Bleu; it is also a cheaper and more ecological way for artists to print their work. As an unpredictable process, risography often produces small mistakes in the printing and the final product has a handmade texture and feeling. The result is a surface where layers do not always line up, a characteristic that brings forward the technique’s DIY aesthetics. Waiting is riso printed using a 3-colour palette, although the tones achieve varying intensities and brightness according to how they have been layered. If one looks closely (see Figure 9, for example), one can see the lines left by the printing process. Like Lozano’s unhappy archive itself, risography is a technique made of overlapping tones. Mirroring how riso printing is an embodied procedure that works with layering, the version of subjectivity encouraged by Waiting is one which displays the self ’s intersubjective, multiple and bodily composition.

Waiting’s last portrait, as seen in Figure 10, mimicking the opening one, does not show a body as centre piece, but a vase with flowers instead. A pair of hands holding a cutter is reaching towards the vase, about to cut-out a branch. The background cover that follows, shown in Figure 11, depicts a closed hand, featuring the LOLA tattoo on the wrist’s inside. I want to think of this hand as the hand cutting out the branch in the last portrait, and of this cut-out flower as one of the objects that connects the bodies collected here. This closing scene, like the technique of riso itself, visualises the process in the finished product. As such, it argues for the power of collectively cutting up and rewriting the oppressive temporalities of capitalism, amongst which ›to wait‹ for the ›good life‹ is a key one. What these women rewrite is the idea of the wait, and, in doing so, they undermine the power of the ›good life’s‹ promises. Lozano’s women are sad because they refuse to assemble over a fake happiness. But it is, perhaps, in this sadness, where they might find the origins of their resistance.

Conclusions

Along my meditations on Adriana Lozano’s Waiting, I have followed the aesthetic forms taken by the lingering wait, paying close attention to the ways in which the characters pictured attune to the spaces and relations that surround them. I have asked about the spatial dimensions of the wait, arguing that the comics form is one way to make expressive the ambivalent narratives and looming desires of its inner workings. As Nick Sousanis reminds us, comics, because they are flat and static, can hold together the ›unflat‹: the simultaneous and the non-simultaneous, the linear and the non-linear. In Lozano’s Waiting, wherein the scenes produce an uncanny affective atmosphere as we turn the pages, the progression of temporality seems to be paused, while space keeps stretching out, connecting the individual scenes through other means: the objects, the postures, the tattoos they share.

To summarise, I have proposed that Lozano’s Waiting represents the temporality of the wait as that which bears the attachments to the ›good life‹. To do so, the comic uses a pastiche representation of the 90s women’s magazine in the western hemisphere and proposes that these frames are instead inhabited by non-normative and rather unhappy bodies. Lozano’s characters foreground that while happiness is conventionally equated with certain ways of being and living, the actual possession of the latter does not necessarily guarantee that one will indeed be happy, but rather that one gets trapped in an endless and tedious wait. The representation of sadness as a collective issue highlights this last point and at the same time invites the reader to read the wait in another, more revolutionary direction. By including several nudes and reclining portraits in her series, Lozano also encourages us to read the wait for its revolutionary potential and invites us to interpret rest as an intersubjective and embodied mode of thinking about women’s agency.

All things considered, it remains to be said that Waiting is especially significant for it can be placed amongst a larger archive of women comics artists that use the collection of portraits as an aesthetic tool that pictures identity as spatial and relational. This is the case, for example, of Lynda Barry’s Naked Ladies!, a set of postcards featuring women from different backgrounds, and Vanessa Davis’ Make Me a Woman. Closer to home, in Latin America, we can mention Chicks I Know (2017) by Powerpaola (Colombia/Ecuador), in which the artist assembles 48 portraits of her women friends holding a dialogue on art and culture; Tengo unas flores con tu nombre (2018) by Jazmín Varela (Argentina), 20 portraits of women in their everyday lives speaking words of sorority; and Retratarlas (2020) by Jimena Salinas (Perú), another series of portraits that intertwines illustrations with written fragments on this generation’s frustrations, worries and struggles. In all these works, while one portrait might already give hints of its constitutive archive, it is when we focus our attention on the frames as they come together that their aesthetic and political force becomes more powerful.

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Bibliography

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<https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/adriana-lozano-illustration-181120>. 18 Nov. 2020. Accessed 19 Nov. 2020.
• Anderson, Ben: Affective Atmospheres. In: Emotion, Space and Society, 2 (2009), p. 77–81.
• Ballaster, Ros, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer and Sandra Hebron: Women’s Worlds. Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine. London: Macmillan, 1991.
• Berger, John: Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972.
• Berlant, Lauren: Cruel optimism. In Differences, 17,5 (2006), p. 21–36.
• Cavarero, Adriana: Inclinations. A Critique of Rectitude. Trans. Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016.
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• Jameson, Frederic: The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998. London: Verso, 1998.
• Janeja, Manpreet K. and Andreas Bandak: Ethnographies of Waiting. Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty. Ed. Manpreet K. Janeja and Andreas Bandak. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
• Jenkins, Henry: Comics and Stuff. New York: New York University Press, 2020.
• Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018.
• Schneider, Greice: What Happens When Nothing Happens. Boredom and Everyday Life in Contemporary Comics. Leuven: Leuven university Press, 2016.
• Schweizer, Harold: on Waiting. London: Routledge, 2008.
• Sousanis, Nick: unflattening. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2015.
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Table of Figures

• Fig. 1: Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018, p.[2], p.[3], p.[4], p.[7].
• Fig. 2: Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018, p.[26], p.[34], p.[12].
• Fig. 3: Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018, p. [17].
• Fig. 4: Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018, p. [31].
• Fig. 5: Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018, p. [37], p. [45].
• Fig. 6: Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018, p. [33].
• Fig. 7: Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018, p. [14].
• Fig. 8: Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018, p. [27], p. [41].
• Fig. 9: Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018, p. [5], p. [22].
• Fig. 10: Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018, p. [48].
• Fig. 11: Lozano Román, Adriana: Waiting. Amsterdam: Terry Bleu, 2018, back cover.

 

• 1]  On this topic, as stated by Manpreet K. Janeja and Andreas Bandak in their edited collection Ethnographies of Waiting, these are some important works on the social practice of waiting: Craig Jeffrey’s anthropological study Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India (2010), Javier Auyero’s sociological account Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina (2012), and Ghassan Hage’s interdisciplinary edited volume Waiting (2009) (Janeja and Bandak, 4).
• 2]  The concept of ›moving sideways‹ is inspired by Kathryn Bond Stockton’s ideas on the queer child. See Bond Stockton, Kathryn: The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke university Press, 2009.