“Let’s Make a Home for You”: A Reparative Reading of Lunar Boy

Abstract

This paper examines Lunar Boy (2024) through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, analysing the graphic novel as a vital cultural text for the Indonesian queer community amid socio-political vulnerability. Rather than centring trauma, reparative reading highlights the cultivation of hope, joy, and care, offering marginalized readers affective resources for survival, flourishing, and fight for equality. The analysis highlights how Lunar Boy reimagines the understanding of gender and sexuality by centring Indu’s trans identity and his queer relationship, challenging rigid binaries that empowers a new vision of belonging. Moreover, the paper discusses the importance of queer visibility through its portrayal of community and family. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) concept of queer futurity focusing on the horizon of genuinely possible futures and affirming present identities, the paper highlights the normalizing of queer identities within the family, friendships, and community that models the future possibility of equality and recognition. Read reparatively, Lunar Boy empowers Indonesian queer readers to resist erasure, cultivate resilience, and imagine a future with acceptance. Ultimately, Lunar Boy exemplifies the power of graphic narratives to embody reparative practices, offering strength and hope to communities navigating systemic marginalization. This paper contributes to queer studies by expanding reparative reading into Southeast Asian contexts, and to graphic narrative studies by attending to how the visual grammar of Lunar Boy – its colour, panel structure, and embodied representation – enacts reparative possibilities that prose alone cannot achieve, addressing the gap in research that has largely focused on Western queer narratives.