Hansen 587
comics a higher aesthetic status than the normal mode of publication in the American context, where book sizes are smaller and colour is less frequent. As a consequence, the two settings provide different possibilities for identifying comics that engage with international relations. In general, the choice in the US context is more constrained and dichotomized, with comics magazines in the superhero tradition, on the one hand,
and the critically acclaimed, but commercially less successful, sub-genres of the graphic, including graphic novels, graphic memoir and graphic journalism, on the other.
Gabilliet (2010: 249) holds that, historically, comics carry the stigma of a low-ranking position
in the cultural hierarchy, regardless of the important works produced by these forms. Yet, there are temporal and spatial nuances. In the French and Belgian cases, a shift takes place in the s when the intelligentsia and the middle class almost simultaneously elevate comics from the subordinate cultural position that they had long occupied, whereas in the US, a comparable consecration of the medium has not taken place
(Gabilliet, 2010: 278). The difference in cultural legitimacy within the broader public sphere has also been mirrored in academic practice. In the context of France and Belgium, the academic study of comics has been firmly established since the s,
with Marxist, structuralist, psychoanalytical, semiotic and poststructuralist approaches all making contributions (Groensteen, 2007: 1–2). In the US, even within the study of popular culture, comics have received little attention and only very recently have key francophone books of comics scholarship been translated into English (Gabilliet, 2010: 297–299, 304–306). Given that IR is (still) afield dominated by anglophone texts and institutions, it is thus not surprising that comics have not yet been much addressed.
The Bourdieu-inspired cultural-sociological approach presented most explicitly by
Gabilliet provides a valuable starting point for studying comics as artefacts that can contribute to international relations. Yet, it also has limitations as it is concerned with the legitimacy of comics at a very general societal level. For example, in Gabilliet’s
analysis, the lower print-runs of graphic works become a testimony to the genre’s inability to overcome comics stigma. This approach provides limited room for identifying and studying comics and comics practitioners who challenge established genres and formats and who become capable of speaking with authority in public debates despite relatively low print-runs and/or sales. As noted earlier, IR scholars are concerned not only with the general status of a cultural form of expression, but also with particular instances that become publically recognized and/or provide critical accounts of international events and practices. To better account for the importance of such instances, we need to examine the publication, circulation and reception processes at the level of specific comics. Theoretically, this can be facilitated by introducing the poststructuralist-inspired understanding of practices as both general and specific (Hansen, b. The importance of general practices, that is, habits, routine performances
and institutionalized doings, have been brought out by scholars bringing Bourdieu and the practice turn into IR Adler and Pouliot, 2011; Adler-Nissen, 2008; Pouliot, 2008). Yet, there are also specific performances of practices that break with the habitual Even uncontested specific routine practices are crucial to the reproduction of general practices, and we should therefore keep the relationship between specific and general practices open and examine the potential) gap between them (Hansen, b 281). For example, drawing a comic book is a performance of a specific practice that either asserts itself as a routine general