Disrupting the gaze: An interview with Anna F. Peppard

Dr Anna F. Peppard is an award-winning researcher and public scholar. Her work on representations of gender and sexuality in comics and pop culture is widely published in academic books and journals and on websites such as Shelfdust, Women Write about Comics and ComicsXF. She is the co-project lead of the social media research project ‘Sequential Scholars’, co-host of the podcast Oh Gosh, Oh Golly, Oh Wow! and editor of the anthology Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero, which won the 2021 Comics Studies Society Prize for Best Edited Collection. In this interview, Dr Peppard talks about her public scholarship, the sexiness (and sexism) of comics and the importance of disrupting the gaze. The conversation explores her thoughts on key themes relevant to this issue, including the presence of empathy in comics, the importance of fandom and public scholarship and the ethics of representation. Julia and Anna spoke on Zoom on Friday 15 March 2024; this transcript has been edited for length and clarity.