Files
Download lecture (869.9 MB)
Loading...
Description
“Out of the Gutters:” Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics October 20, 2026 Dr. Jorge Santos (Department of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, Holy Cross) and Dr. Pat Lawrence (Department of English, University of South Carolina Lancaster) discussed their recently published edited volume Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics. In their work, Dr. Santos and Dr. Lawrence explore the history of comics and graphic novels, focusing on the ways obscenity has been defined, monitored, and censored throughout the history of the medium. In addition, they shared examples of how comic artists and writers pushed back at censorship and shifted the landscape of comic and graphic novel publishing to gain back their freedom of expression.
Date
10-20-2026
Keywords
comics, graphic novels, censorship, obscenity, freedom of expression
Recommended Citation
Santos, Jorge Jr. and Lawrence, Patrick S., "Authors on the Hill presents: Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics" (2026). Authors on the Hill. 26.
https://crossworks.holycross.edu/aoth/26
Comments
Dr. Jorge Santos (He/Him/El)
Serves as an associate professor of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States at the College of the Holy Cross and is a co-founder of the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. His work has appeared in MELUS, College Literature, and Image/Text, as well as in a number of different edited collections. His first academic monograph, Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History with Comics, was published by the University of Texas Press in May of 2019 and was the recipient of the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society and was a CHOICE library selection. He also served as co-editor on Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics, an anthology of anticensorship essays. He is also working on his second solo project, Visualizing the Vietnam War: The Comics of American Postmemory, due out next year. His next big project will bring together educators from multiple disciplines and school levels, from elementary to collegiate, to explore the use of Dungeons and Dragons as a pedagogical tool.
Pat Lawrence (he|him)
Patrick S. Lawrence is a Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Lancaster. His research addresses censorship controversies and American political and social movements. He is co-editor of a collection of essays about the impact of obscenity discourses on comics history and theory called Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics (University of Texas Press, 2025). His book Obscene Gestures: Counter-Narratives of Sex and Race in the Twentieth Century (Fordham 2022) reconsiders the divergent afterlives of twentieth-century texts that depict taboo subjects based on different narratives of racial, sexual, and gendered possibility. His current project, Moral State of the People, explores how moralism and nationalism collude in discourses of exclusion and belonging, and his previous work appears in American Literature, Inks, Mosaic, Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, and Intertexts and in collections from Cambridge University Press, University Press of Mississippi, and Utah University Press.