DiMassa, Diane. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist.
--. The Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1999.
Diane DiMassa is an American cartoonist known for her alternative GLBTQ series Hothead Paisan that ran from 1991 through 1996. The entire series is collected in the 400+ page anthology The Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist published by Giant Ass Press.
Hothead Paisan has been described as rage therapy for the marginalized and disaffected. Readers are comprised of a spectrum of gender, sexuality, race, and class. This series began as a zine conceived when DiMassa entered drug and alcohol recovery.
In “Hothead Paisan: Clearing a Space for a Lesbian Feminist Folklore,” Dana Heller describes Hothead Paisan as keeping alive “many of the myths and symbols around which lesbian communities have constructed a culture and an identity” and that Hothead reclaims a folklore tradition transmitted from a post-Stonewall, post-feminist, post-modern generation” (27). The unnamed title character, Hothead, is visceral, violent, and unapologetic. Her sidekick, the cat named Chicken, provides a balance of spiritual wisdom and wit. Other reoccurring characters include a talking lamp, her friend Roz, and Hothead’s trans lover, Daphne.
In “Equally Queer?,” Katja Linke problematizes the term queer as more than an identity category that rejects gender-specific terms such as “gay” or “lesbian” (30). Linke asserts that Hothead’s “‘wrong’ performance of femaleness” exposes her to relentless sexism, which in turn “makes it strategically useful for her to deploy the term ‘lesbian’ in order to name and resist the gender-specific violence to which she is subjected” (34). B.J. Wray suggest that Hothead's brand of justice "allows women to find strength, humor, and solace in the outrageous acts of a cartoon character" (1). In, “Resistance, Representation, and the Subject of Violence,” Liana Scalettar adds that “Hothead has as much to say about the connections that exist among the media, violence against women, violence against lesbians and gay men, and potential for resistance in a wholly mass mediated society” (261).
Ultimately, Hothead complicates both the categories “woman” and “lesbian.” While Hothead seems to identify with the subject position “woman,” she never explicitly states herself to be a woman. In this way, Linke proclaims Hothead as a “gender takeover” (34). Linke further asserts that Hothead exhibits behavior that is stereotypically male, engaging in violence, and shows callousness towards her victims and that Hothead is constantly differentiated from straight women, whom she refers to as ‘spritzheads’ and fails to fulfill any other characteristics concerned with gender assignment in general (35-36). Linke employs Monique Wittig’s assertion that the lesbian can escape the category “woman” by refusing a relationship with a man (38). In this way, Hothead is an example of “strategic lesbianism” because she is read as a woman although she is rather gender-ambiguous (Linke, 38).
Hothead distances herself from essentialist lesbian feminism, deploying lesbianism as a conscious and strategic identity category that exists outside the heterosexual matrix (Linke, 40). Meanwhile, in “Theorizing Sexuality in Comics,” Joe Sanders situates Hothead Paisan as a response to the anti-misogynist movement, anticipating a new wave of alternative comics (159). For Sanders, DiMassa’s work is part of the dialectical history of American comics that lays bare sexuality divorced from heteronormative tradition (161). Meanwhile, for Scalettar, “Hothead has as much to say about the connections that exist among the media, violence against omen, violence against lesbians and gay men, and potential for resistance in a wholly mass mediated society” (261). Ultimately, Hothead is in dialogue with both the mainstream and the alternative press, through Hothead’s violent rage against mainstream, sexist, oppressive, hetero-patriarchal culture.
Hothead Paisan has been criticized for its violence and has been seized at the Canadian border, labeled as hate literature (Wray, 1). Hothead Paisan is illustrated in a black and white with a loose, cartoonish style, and tends to stick to standard 6- and 9-panel pages. The panels often have homogenous plain black line borders and gutters, though on occasion the panel borders are implied in the layout and use of space, instead of drawn.
Hothead Paisan is suitable for both public and academic libraries, and would well-serve women’s studies, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and general humanities.