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Amato and Priske examines the representations of critical friendship across a variety of texts and media. In their cowritten book Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman document the first decade of their friendship, with particular attention to how messy and challenging long-term and long-distance friendships can be. For them, friendship has been a support system for confiding in one another about the highs and lows of graduate school, while also being a space that pushes them both to grow in their own critical thinking and practice. Their friendship requires the safety to be themselves, while not erasing the ways their religious practices, sexuality, class, geographic upbringing, and age make their lived experiences different. They view these differences as strengths from which they can learn from each other. Additionally, their shared whiteness means they must carve out space in their friendship for understanding how race and gender impact the way they can even conceive of and enact a practice of critical friendship.

If being Canadian means being predisposed to niceness and caring, then being mixed-race Asian and female like Skim must entail an even larger, compounded burden, namely the need to care more because of gendered as well as racial expectations. In her survey of contemporary Canadian comics for youth, Naomi Hamer discerns a \"pedagogic agenda\" underlying the most acclaimed of these visual texts, with prevalent themes being formative events in national history, environmentalism, and an array of social justice concerns, including racism and homophobia (170). Social concerns like suicide, homophobia, bullying, body shaming, negative self-concept, and depression persist among teens decades after the books publication, testifying to Skims ongoing relevance and continued capacity to appeal to a broad range of readers.3 It is the suicide of a popular athlete rumoured to have been gay, John Reddear, from a neighbouring school that initiates Skims journey to self-awareness as a \"fat, goth, Wiccan-practicing, lesbian Asian girl who has been the project' of her school's anti-suicide, bullying prevention campaign\" (Froese and Greensmith 43). The all-girls' religious school, which Skim distrusts as a site of surveillance and suffocating conformity (a \"goldfish tank of stupid\" [47]), facilitates this coercive process of \"girling\" and the constant policing it entails.

This paper provides a study of vulnerability in Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki's Skim (2008), a graphic novel about Kimberly Keiko Cameron (known as Skim), a Japanese Canadian teenage girl interested in Wicca and struggling through high school. By analysing selected panels and scenes, I explore the multiple ways in which control is exerted over the othered individuals in this graphic novel, that ultimately leads to the production of vulnerability. My research draws on a selection of theoretical concepts by authors like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, such as linguistic injury or surveillance and disciplinary institutions, all of which are proven useful to the articulation of the strategies of representation favoured by Tamaki and Tamaki. I begin with an analysis of racial remarks in Skim in order to show how they work in (in)visible ways in the narrative. Secondly, I consider how Skim faces institutional control and oppression, as her high school operates as an institution of invisible surveillance that creates obedient subjects and that contributes to the further stigmatization of vulnerable characters. Thirdly, I research the mental illness of the protagonist, which is closely linked to surveillance and also works to stigmatize her. Lastly, I explore how the analysis of injurious language in Skim proves that language functions as a tool of hegemonic power to create valid subjects while silencing othered subjects that cannot fit in the domain of the speakable. Throughout, I argue that comics, as a hybrid medium composed by the visual and the verbal, have the capacity to represent the vulnerability of the non-normative subject.

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Kadeem saunters down the hall during summer school, his long legs in denim jeans with factory-made horizontal tears across each thigh (student names are pseudonyms). With each left footfall, he taps a graphic novel against his hip. It is almost musical, the swish of his basketball shooting jacket, the rhythm of his steps, the beat of his size 14s on the linoleum. The steady bump bump bump of the book against his leg. This feature is not going to talk about the reasons Kadeem quit reading (he had a missing-book fine from third grade, so for eight years he had not checked out a book from the library). Instead, it will focus on the reasons students choose to read. I have always been curious about the ways young people become interested in reading. To begin each school year in my Honors English 10 classes, I wondered how students might respond to that question, so I asked my students how they knew what to read. Where did they get their book recommendations?

Alone, Adam and Zayneb are playing roles for others, keeping their real thoughts locked away in journals. [...]their paths cross and a love story unfolds. KELLY DYER of Audreys Books, Edmonton, Alberta Bad Dog written and illustrated by Mike Boldt Doubleday Books for Young Readers, 2019 \"Look what I got for my birthday! A pet dog!\" says a little girl holding a. cat? Kings, Queens and In-Betweens written by Tanya Boteju Simon Pulse, 2019 Wounded by a crush's rejection and her mother's unexpected departure, nerdy and awkward Nima discovers the drag scene at her town's summer festival.

While feminisms have aimed to disengage women’s dependence on dyadic enmeshment with men, few have attended to the idea that friendship among women can also be unreasonably greedy. This article suggests Zadie Smith’s NW and Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim are good novels through which to ask if women’s friendship can accommodate more autonomy, and what that might look like. Foucault’s concept of “obligatory camaraderie” is helpful here for understanding taken for granted gendering in friendship occurring in both mainstream gender socialization and particular feminist communities. Obligatory camaraderie makes legible, in the case of women and girls, loyal subjugation of reason for the cause of friendship, or a lack of pleasure and investment in one’s own discernment. These novels ask girls and women to not invest quite so much in friendship as salvation, eschewing an ethics of obligation for one of consent. Absent outsized demands, and disappointments, the authors appear to suggest, we may come to like ourselves, and our friends, a little bit more.

What King reads as clear signs of pathological emotional experience-\"skipping class to smoke, sleeping during the day, suffering from insomnia at night, and feeling cut off from others\" (80)-I read, following Winnicott, as common, ordinary, and even healthful reactions to the difficult emotional terrain of adolescence.Because for Winnicott the conflicts of adolescence are often acted out in the form of clashes with authority-by acting out, the adolescent tests the environment set by the adult, and when she is confident in that environment can set herself to the work of forging an adult identity-and because so much of his work is addressed to the actual people-judges, teachers, and parents-who interact with young people, we can read the adult as occupying a difficult and important place in adolescent development.In adolescence, even normal adolescence, the youth needs no such failure of the environment to feel deprived.Because growing up involves taking the parents' place, and this involves a psychic murder (81), the adolescent experiences a rupture in environment, where \"things went well and then they did not go well enough\" (Winnicott, Home 91).Adolescents might resent the compromises they feel adults have made, as well as the compromises they feel that they must make to become adults themselves.[...]those things adults seem to have forgotten or seem never to have known (for example, the passions of young love) provide the adolescent with anxiety and with disappointment.According to Scott McCloud, in splash pages and bleeds (where the scene defies a border and runs off the page), time \"hemorrhages and escapes into timeless space ... such images can set the mood or a sense of place for whole scenes through their lingering timeless presence\" (103).