Jules Mamone, known as Femimutancia, is one of South America’s most original graphic artists. A transfeminist non-binary Argentine artist, Mamone’s work emerged during the wave of LGBTIQ+ activism that swept South America in the last decade, illustrating diversity, introducing social commentary, and promoting equal rights within the Latin American comic scene. Their 2018 work Alienígena follows a non-binary comic artist who engages with a strange androgynous alien. La Madriguera (2022) is a twisted retelling of Alice in Wonderland where a cat messenger leads to a world ruled by lockdown and pandemic.
Femimutancia also recently published a retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Their graphic novels subvert traditional gender roles and feature voluptuous figures marked by imperfections and rich corporeal beauty. Often gigantic with skins of various colors, these figures inhabit panels constructing a diverse world where eroticism intertwines with mysticism. Monstrous features (extra eyes, multiple breasts, horns, wings) invite us into an uncanny space that challenges hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, and the body.
Femimutancia’s only book featuring illustrations readily available in the U.S. is Queer Latin American Voices, an anthology of literary texts by LGBTQIA+ Latin American writers edited by scholars Alberto Quintero and Romina Wainberg. Each text includes a response by queer scholars, written in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. The book crosses borders in content and form, resembling Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Femimutancia’s illustrations serve as a bridge that amplifies the literary works.
Femimutancia and I met via Zoom on April 1, 2024, to discuss their work, focusing on monstrosity and non-hegemonic bodies in contemporary Latin American graphic narratives. We also addressed queer visual activism in Argentina’s current political climate under Javier Milei’s far-right government. This interview has been translated, condensed, and edited for clarity.
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Paul Noguerol: How did you create the illustrations for Queer Latin American Voices?
Jules Mamone: In 2022, Romina Wainberg invited me to participate. I created the cover and illustrations inspired by texts in the book. One was inspired by Ioshua, a gay Argentine poet who passed away in 2015. I depicted a soccer match transforming into a sexual encounter, with players wearing jerseys, their bodies entwined like genderless specters.
Another illustration is based on the poem masa by Manuel Tzoc Bucup, a Maya K’iche’ poet from Guatemala. The corn cob appears as an erotic symbol of reconnecting with the land and memory of Latin American peoples. I placed it in an oneiric, Renaissance-like scene, with the phallic corn cob recontextualized and re-signified.
I also illustrated The Golden Boy by gay Argentine poet Mariano Blatt, a story of missed love connections that takes on a mystical quality. The final illustration shows two ominous figures embracing a third who stares ahead, with eyes on her breasts. This accompanies Oriana Seccia’s text on travesti writer Camila Sosa Villada’s work about gender identity.
I read other texts I didn’t illustrate, like La Edwin by Luis Negrón, which denounced homophobia within revolutionary movements, a theme explored in Agustina Comedi’s film Silence Is a Falling Body. Those contradictions fascinate me. When working on anthologies, I read everything I can to find the direction for my illustrations.
PN: How did you develop these distinctive bodies in your work? There’s a clear break with hegemonies, proposing other ways of understanding the body. How did that come about?
JM: It was a convergence of factors. When I started drawing around 2016–2017, Argentina was experiencing a strong wave of transfeminism. From President Macri’s administration to the pre-pandemic months of 2020, feminist and LGBTIQ+ activism exploded, fueled by the #NiUnaMenos campaign against misogynist violence and the Green Wave reproductive rights movement. These movements bolstered efforts to protect the Equal Marriage Law (2010) and Gender Identity Law (2012). It was a period of intense social struggle across South America, with Argentina’s protests being strictly feminist and queer.
I come from a hetero-cis norm where I’d internalized much violence. I was never comfortable with my assigned gender. Then transfeminism came along, and I realized I was non-binary; that’s why I’d always felt uncomfortable being a woman. I started exploring my bisexuality while attending comic workshops.
In a scriptwriting class where I was the only non-man, the instructor gave an example of a classic hero narrative: hero saves town from zombies, town offers him food, drink, and women. I thought, “I’m an object.” I realized I was learning to tell stories from a place that didn’t represent me. Looking back at my scripts, I was writing as if I were a straight man. As I began understanding my identity, I discovered I had other stories to tell.
I started questioning the bodies I was drawing to accompany those stories. At a feminist transnational gathering in Chaco, one of poorest provinces of Argentina, which is close to Paraguay, I attended a talk on fat activism. There, I discovered the work of photographers like Inmensidades (@Inmensidadesfotografia), who photographs nude fat non-hegemonic women’s bodies, and Muluk (@mulukfotografiax), who does shoots with erotic and fetish elements using non-binary bodies, crafting an eroticism from a different place. They portrayed other kinds of bodies and did so from a place of desire, which I thought was incredibly important.
I started observing actual bodies on the street, freeing myself from drawing the typical hourglass figure designed for heterosexual male consumption. If I was telling stories from my identity, the bodies in those stories had to come from a different place, too.
PN: Your work often features monstrous, dark, and fantastical elements, sometimes borrowing from fairy tale iconography, other times resonating with weird or horror fiction. How did the monstrous and the uncanny find its place in your artistic language?
JM: From ages six to thirteen, I lived in a rural area with no television, so I read constantly. Authors like Horacio Quiroga [Argentine author, pioneer of horror fiction in the region] had a raw relationship with nature’s darkness; horror stories blurring rational and irrational. With nothing else to do, I’d draw or talk to trees.
My family relationship was complicated, so I took refuge in the fantastic and mysterious. Living in Río Gallegos [a small town in Argentina’s Patagonia], with extreme cold, constant wind, and few daylight hours, created isolation since there weren’t many places to socialize.
PN: Could that fascination with the fantastical come from living in marginal spaces? In remote South American areas where Indigenous cultures persist, there’s a magic often associated with strangeness, a way of relating to reality different from “civilized” spaces.
JM: Yes, class plays a part too. I come from a low-income background. By 15 or 16, I was cleaning houses to help support my family. This made connecting with other kids at school difficult, their tastes and conversations were different. I had to find my own space, which connected me to the identity of where I lived.
PN: You’re shaping your identity as a person and artist simultaneously, in a context where a new kind of comic is emerging that resembles neither mainstream American nor European avant-garde traditions. Is there a symbiosis between your art and identity?
JM: Yes, my path to comics was unusual. I don’t know my biological father, but he liked comics, so I initially rejected them due to that association. Yet in childhood, I found Carlos Trillo and Eduardo Risso’s Red Moon incredible. I felt anger toward comics linked to a part of my identity I disliked, while sensing something magical about the medium.
Living in isolated Patagonia made access to comics difficult. Those that reached us normalized violence, like Jorge Lucas’ El Cazador, where the hero kills gay people at a Pride rally, presented as provocative humor. I also discovered Witchblade by Silvestri and Turner, which portrayed women in extremely sexist ways.
I loved drawing but rejected these styles. Being perceived as a woman, everyone suggested children’s illustration. I started attending comic workshops with Salvador Sanz and later Quique Alcatena [both Argentine comics artists, renowned in Europe and the United States] who showed me incredible books and helped me realize that comics were my language. Writing with words alone didn’t work for me. My path differed from most comic creators. I wanted to make comics that would challenge people, and therefore I couldn’t fully adapt to the conventional tools I had learned. I was always experimenting, telling overlooked stories, doing my own kind of activism through comics.
PN: What’s your relationship with activism now, considering Argentina’s far-right government and its campaigns against sexual diversity?
JM: Comics aren’t profitable in Argentina unless you work for mainstream U.S. or European industry. Our publishing houses are small, and without state support, it’s difficult. We make comics because we love it, finding resources where we can, but without economic stability, it’s impossible. Those committed to comics activism are often nonbinary or from marginalized communities, who typically get paid less across all sectors. Economic crisis makes sustaining activism a major effort.
After the pandemic, with deepening crisis, fewer authors do activist work because it’s financially unsustainable. Making comics takes many unpaid hours, affecting production and the potential for social commentary.
PN: How was then the reception to your work during intense activism years, and how has it changed under President Javier Milei’s administration? Did people identify with your work?
JM: When I started, I aimed to break structures, expressing my identity through images and addressing gender violence, domestic violence, and substance abuse. This resonated with many people. Now, reception has changed along with my artistic process. With the far right rising, I feel powerless to effect change. Many festivals are gone (Vamos Las Pibas, Dibujades) and spaces for comics activism no longer exist. Still, there are opportunities. I’m organizing an event in La Plata with LGBT activist and artist Patricio Oliver, funded by the provincial government; and a mobile library called Viñeta Torcida, creating a retrospective of LGBTQ+ representation in Argentine comics history.
Argentina had a strong 20th-century comics industry, but LGBTQ+ figures were erased. My fellow cartoonists and I carry out small acts of resistance whenever possible. I’m also continuing the Nosotras Contamos archive, which documents women comic artists throughout Argentine visual history. This project was initiated by Mariela Acevedo, one of the most important Latin American editors, scholars, and feminist voices in comics research. Her work centered on gender, representation, and the politics of visual culture in Argentina. Sadly, she passed away in January. I’m now co-leading the archive with editor and scriptwriter Dani Ruggeri. Under the current presidency, funding for activist projects has been eliminated, but we continue resisting however we can.
PN: What are you currently working on artistically? Where is your artistic journey headed?
JM: I’m working on a project for publication in Spain about abortion and the choice to become a mother. It has a fantasy element—a coven of witches in a dystopian world—with one-part playful fantasy and another more militant, more hard-boiled activism. The right wing is concerned about declining birth rates, with marches calling to repeal the 2020 abortion law. I wonder how we’re debating this again. Recently I read Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch about capitalism’s rationalization of social reproduction, and it encouraged me to create art about this topic even more.
I’m also starting a project on police violence in Argentina. My adoptive father was killed by police when I was seven in a case of gatillo fácil [“trigger-happy” police violence]. I recently accessed the official case file, which reads like a Law and Order episode in three parts. The first claims he was armed and robbing kids when police shot him. The second shows this was impossible as he was nearly in an alcoholic coma. The gun found had no fingerprints or gunpowder residue. The third part introduces a lawyer from Correpi (Coordinator Against Police Repression) who found a witness (a waste collector) who said police killed my father and another person in cold blood. The cops had targeted my dad.
With police brutality prevalent now in Argentina, I feel compelled to make this book. When I accessed the file, Milei hadn’t won yet, and I thought, “At least this doesn’t happen as often.” But now, police repression at protests is brutal, you can be arrested or killed just for showing up. I want to tell this story, though I lack funding to publish it.
PN: Regarding the importance of funding, I’ve noticed you’ve been exploring the mainstream superhero tradition lately. Your bodies started looking different, in a more hegemonic way, but still making it your own. Are you interested in working for the American mainstream comic market?
JM: Yes, the girls have started taking Ozempic (laughs). Having a personal style is great, but finding work is hard. I’ve been lucky to have my work recognized. I did several talks in Spain, I did commissions for several books and last year I was invited to talk at Cornell University, but I still have financial problems. I’m the only person responsible for my young sister, so I’ve adapted my aesthetics to be more commercially viable.
I wish I could enjoy this new approach more. I had this illusion that creating different ways of representing bodies in visual art might open paths to real change, but now the world seems closed to change. It’s painful; an uphill battle economically and emotionally. After facing pushback when first publishing, I wonder what it was all for now that there’s a far-right government hostile to sexual diversity.
But I’ve also started reading superhero comics. My path was reversed: I made comics first, then started reading them. My friend Luciano Vecchio works in the U.S. market, as does my partner, and another friend loves X-Men. They’ve introduced me to comics I find interesting, like Zatanna: Bring Down the House by Mariko Tamaki and Javier Rodríguez, which I loved. Superhero comics are just a small part of my influences. Authors like Ian Bertram, Tommi Parrish, and Lee Lai are hugely inspiring.
Unexpectedly, the U.S. comic market has responded positively to my work. At Crack Bang Boom [one of the most important Comic Book conventions in South America], I met Geoff Johns who liked La Madriguera. Later, Chris Bachalo bought some of my work, leading to commissions and conventional jobs with good reception.
PN: You’ve shown you can adapt to other styles without losing your identity. I’m glad the mainstream is noticing.
JM: I’m interested in that world mainly to fund my own projects about topics I truly care about and want to draw.
PN: I hope you will find funding and money to keep giving us these works that inspire non-hegemonic identities and reflect contemporary issues. Thank you so much for the interview.
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Paul Noguerol