Karen Healey

Karen Healey is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. She is a New Zealander living in Australia writing a dissertation on the fan culture of American superhero comics, which people sometimes find confusing. Occasionally, this is because it seems too much like fun to be real work.

Before this, she taught English in Japan for two years, where she learned a lot about how to improvise a lesson plan in four minutes, how to pretend she knew what the dance moves were at the local festival and how much her heart could grow (three sizes, metric). Her Japanese got a little better, but her repertoire of amusing gestures increased exponentially.

Karen has a BA (First Class Hons) in English and Classics and an MA (Distinction) in English, both from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her Master’s thesis is entitled “‘Empowered Erotica?’: Objectification and Subjectivity in the Personal Online Journals of the Suicide Girls”. It examines the apparent contradictions embodied in the alternative pin-up pornography site SuicideGirls.com as the model’s journals negotiate between the concepts of culture and commerce, subject and object, and art, erotica and pornography. Her mother liked it.

Karen is proud to be part of the admin team at Girl-Wonder.org, a site dedicated to improving the status of women in mainstream comics. She writes a weekly column, Girls Read Comics (And They’re Pissed), where she points the finger at comics and superhero products that get it wrong and loves dearly those that get it right.

Karen likes chocolate with honeycomb bits, staying up too late on school nights and stories about plucky teenagers triumphing over adversity. She would like to be a professional academic, a professional fiction writer, and a part-time zeppelin pirate.