Kate Charlesworth’s Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide (2019) is a comic about the LGBTQI+ movement, culture, and life in the United Kingdom from 1950 to 2020. It celebrates the achievements of the movement, reminding those who do not know how much the freedoms enjoyed today are the result of its struggles, and cautions against taking these freedoms for granted. The various narrative strands in the comic are drawn in different styles, which represent Charlesworth’s diverse background as an illustrator, cartoonist, and comics artist.  

In this event, Charlesworth will tell the story of how the idea of a massive comics-form history of LGBTQI+ Britain progressed from a mind-mountain of facts, memories, and rabbit holes filled with real people, books, and piles of ephemera to become something tangible – a personal memoir reflecting a collective history (and still something smaller than a brick).  

The presentation will be introduced by Vasiliki Belia and will be followed by Q&A. The event will be rounded up with a short exercise in making comics, led by Charlesworth.  

The event is organized by Amsterdam Comics (www.amsterdamcomics.com) with support from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, the University of Amsterdam, and Maastricht University. 

About the Speakers 

Kate Charlesworth is a cartoonist, graphic novelist, and illustrator living and working in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work has appeared in the Manchester Evening News, Sappho, Gay News, and The Guardian. She is also the author of Plain Tales from the Bars (1987-1989) and Naughty Little Monkeys (1992-1994), which both appeared in the Pink Paper, and is co-creator of Sally Heathcote: Suffragette (2014). She is currently at work on a new lesbian-oriented graphic novel that, like Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide (2019), has also been funded by Creative Scotland. 

Vasiliki Belia is a PhD candidate at the Department of Literature and Art, Maastricht University. In her research, Vasiliki studies contemporary comics that remember the history of feminism and negotiate its meaning as a collective frame of action in the present.

Registration: Vasso Belia - v.belia@maastrichtuniversity.nl