Young Women and Disgust in Contemporary Norwegian Comics: A Close Reading of Ane Barstad Solvang's Frykt & medlidenhet

Abstract

The figure of the young woman who leaks bodily wastes, struggles mentally, and behaves in ways that disgust and provoke is recurrent in Norwegian comics drawn and written by women in the late 2010s (e.g., Neverdahl 2017; Øverbye 2018; Solvang 2018; Tegnehanne 2019). There are several reasons why women cartoonists’ preoccupation with young female characters and disgust is worthy of critical attention. On the one hand, Norwegian comics have had a spectacular development in the last decade, gaining critical acclaim and popularity (Birkeland, Risa, and Vold 2018), becoming more inclusive and diverse once several women cartoonists made their debut in a medium traditionally dominated by male creators. On the other hand, while Norway has an international reputation as one of the most gender equal countries in the world (see, for example, the United Nation's “Gender Inequality Index”2), national studies paint a more somber picture when it comes to the situation of young women in Norway. For example, recent surveys in Norway suggest that the number of young women with mental illness is on the rise (Ungdata 2020), in addition to the fact that young women continue to be at a significantly higher risk to be sexually abused in comparison to young boys (Mossige and Stefansen 2016). Against this background, it is relevant to ask why and how women cartoonists from Norway resort to disgust and provocation as strategies to depict young women who struggle.In this article, I seek to answer these questions by pointing attention to Ane Barstad Solvang's graphic novel Frykt & medlidenhet (2018; Fear & Pity) about Lotte, a woman in her early twenties with precarious health. My analysis fleshes out formal and ideological aspects pertaining to Solvang's novel and is theoretically anchored in interdisciplinary scholarship about the limits and opportunities of disgust, which I account for in the beginning of the article. Reviewing Frykt & medlidenhet for Norway's largest student newspaper, Universitas, Frida Fliflet warns the reader already in the subtitle: “Ikke spis mens du leser denne boken” (2018, 22) [Don't eat while reading this book] and opens with the following statement: “La det være sagt: Frykt & medlidenhet er en ekkel bok. Ærlig, sår, ja, men herregud så ekkel” (2018, 22) [Let it be said: Frykt & medlidenhet is a disgusting book. Honest, sore, yes, but gosh how disgusting]. The overall thesis of my article is that Solvang mobilizes disgust in order to bring awareness to young women like Lotte, whose struggles are often under-communicated and even belittled in public debates in Norway.In the context of mainstream comics, Solvang's disgusting representations of the female body are the more striking if we keep in mind the long history of objectified and idealized portrayals of femininity that have primarily been tailored to male readers (Gibson 2016). In superhero comics, there is a long tradition of portraying scantily clad women with large breasts, wasp waists, curvy buttocks, long legs, and long hair posing in sexualized and sometimes physically impossible positions (Cocca 2014). In contrast, Solvang completely deglamorizes the female body and presents it in unflattering, embarrassing, but also natural situations, thus drawing on the legacy of underground women comics artists from the United States, such as Aline Kominsky-Crumb (Chute 2010, 20–7), and third-wave feminists who use humor and irony to critique the objectification of women in comics (Cocca 2014, 421). Starting from a close analysis of nine panels showing Lotte during a gynecological examination, my article shows how Frykt & medlidenhet combines disgust with humor in order to generate a tactile excess that pulls the reader closer to Lotte and her problems. It also demonstrates, with reference to other key scenes in Solvang's graphic novel, how disgust becomes a platform to launch a critique of distorted body ideals and the pressure of reproduction experienced by young women in Norway. In this respect, Solvang's comics partake in important contemporary feminist debates of relevance to Norwegian and international audiences.Disgust is a messy feeling, literally and conceptually speaking. Common sources of disgust are bodily wastes and secretions (feces, urine, menstrual blood, sperm, saliva, snot, vomit, sweat, and pus), spoiled foods, corpses, and living animals that are perceived to be slimy, creepy, and/or infectious (worms, cockroaches, rats). Moreover, when in disgust, the subject experiences nausea, shivers, has trouble breathing normally, and starts vomiting. The messy objects of disgust together with the messy responses disgust engenders (viscera turned inside out) also make academics recoil from it, including scholars of literature and the arts.As cultural theorist Sianne Ngai remarks, disgust has received little attention in literary criticism and cultural studies: “Disgust has no keywords associated with it and has largely remained outside the range of any organized critical practice or school” (Ngai 2005, 332). French-Bulgarian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection in Powers of Horror is commonly cited in cultural studies of disgust (Ahmed 2004; Creed 1993a; 1993b; Stacey 1997). Yet, as Ngai points out, Kristeva herself ends up stirring away from the literal messiness of disgust and instead focuses on desire and jouissance (Ngai 2005). In fact, even in Ngai's book on ugly feelings, disgust is given a mere afterword and not a chapter, although Ngai admits that disgust is an ugly feeling par excellence (Ngai 2005, 334). This is because disgust does not easily fit the theoretical model Ngai develops in her book when she analyzes amoral, intentionally weak, non-cathartic, and politically ambiguous feelings like irritation, envy, and paranoia. In contrast to such feelings, “disgust is never ambivalent about its object . . . never prone to producing the confusions between subject and object that are integral to most of the feelings discussed in this [Ngai's] book” (Ngai 2005, 335).A philosopher who has given disgust significant attention is Martha Nussbaum, in her book Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law from 2004. Nussbaum's philosophical excursus—which activates an impressive amount of psychological, psychoanalytical, historical, and legal accounts of disgust—is a complete dismissal of disgust on moral and political grounds. Nussbaum acknowledges that disgust is a necessary human reaction that has played an important role in evolution by steering us away from dangerous objects (Nussbaum 2004, 72, 121). She is also in agreement with those historians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts who have underlined that disgust is interwoven in complex ways with attraction (Nussbaum 2004, 95, 121). Moreover, Nussbaum recognizes that disgust is a deeply human reaction: asking one not to shrink away from decay would be “other than, possibly even less than, human” (Nussbaum 2004, 121). Yet Nussbaum finds disgust to be so morally suspect that she ends up taking a very strong line against it. Let's take a closer look at how Nussbaum motivates this total rejection.Nussbaum points out that although disgust appears to be especially visceral, it has a clear cognitive content. Referring to studies conducted by psychologists such as Paul Rozin, Nussbaum underlines that disgust is motivated by the subject's conception of the object of disgust as contaminant rather than the sensory properties of the object itself: “Disgusting items remain disgusting, however, even when all danger is removed. People refuse to eat sterilized cockroaches; many object even to swallowing a cockroach inside an indigestible plastic capsule that would emerge undigested in the subjects’ feces” (Nussbaum 2004, 88). Following Rozin and historian William Ian Miller, Nussbaum further argues that the primary objects of disgust (bodily wastes) are perceived as contaminants because they are seen as reminders of our animal vulnerability and mortality (Nussbaum 2004, 93–4). Nussbaum subsumes the ideational content of disgust under the term “magical thinking,” that is, a thinking that is not necessarily based on real harm and danger but rather uses the magical thoughts of contagion and similarity to extend disgust from one object to another. She also points out that disgust is highly socially malleable, giving examples of how objects of disgust can vary from one society to another, from culture to culture, from person to person, from one historical period to another.Finally, Nussbaum shows that dominant members of the community have often projected disgust onto vulnerable people and groups and used disgust as an argument to justify discrimination and oppression. Misogynistic disgust is one of the examples Nussbaum gives, in addition to homophobic and anti-Semitic disgust. By imagining the female body as disgusting (sticky, menstruating, giving birth), male loathers can easily distance themselves from aspects of animal vulnerability and mortality that appall them and justify oppressive policy and violent behavior toward women (Nussbaum 2004, 111–3). For Nussbaum, misogynistic disgust, like other types of group-directed projective disgust, is ultimately a mechanism to ward off that which the dominant members of the community do not wish to confront (2004, 122). For this reason, but also because disgust is socially malleable and bound up with magical thinking, Nussbaum categorically rejects disgust as good guidance for political and legal purposes.Ngai agrees with Nussbaum that disgust has a terrible political past, yet she is not prepared to recoil from it in the way that Nussbaum does. Ngai begins by pointing out how the disgusting does not only repulse, but it can also allure (Ngai 2005, 332–3). She then argues that disgust is not inherently immoral, as it was regarded in Nussbaum's discussion, but amoral (Ngai 2005, 340). It would be hard to claim, explains Ngai, that disgust at feces or rotting meat is morally suspect in itself: the repulsion of such objects of disgust is so urgent and immediate that the subject barely has time to make judgments about right and wrong, good and bad behavior (Ngai 2005, 340). It is precisely because disgust is amoral that moralists can fill it with moral content that fits their own political projects, as Nussbaum's examples of misogynistic, homophobic, and anti-Semitic disgust so well illustrate.Moreover, Ngai asserts that disgust can be successfully mobilized to interrupt the kind of indifferent tolerance that pervades our commodified societies and that English philosopher Thomas Hobbes theorized under the term “contempt” and historian William Ian Miller called “social disattendability.” Both the Hobbesian contempt and the Millerian social disattendability construct their object as “too weak or insignificant to pose any sort of danger” (Ngai 2005, 336), “so unthreatening in its inferiority as to be barely perceptible at all” (Ngai 2005, 349). Disgust interrupts contempt and social disattendability because it refuses to make its object indifferently tolerable. One of the examples Ngai uses to support her argument is taken from Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” from 1853. In Melville's short story, the Lawyer finds Bartleby secretly repulsive, yet he manages his repulsion by showing “charity” and ignoring Bartleby's preference not to work, move, eat, or desire anything at all. The more passive Bartleby becomes, the more intolerable he makes himself, which in turn undermines the Lawyer's initial contempt of Bartleby as “safely ignorable.” Consequently, Ngai concludes, through Bartleby, Melville makes evident how “tolerance is always, in some fundamental way, a negation of disgust” (Ngai 2005, 333).Last, but not least, Ngai sees disgust as an important catalyst for more instrumental or politically efficacious emotions insofar as disgust can powerfully diagnose existing social, political, and cultural structures in its urgency, decisiveness, and capacity to shake us out of the indifferent tolerance that makes injustice proliferate (Ngai 2005, 354). In that respect, Ngai seems to be in disagreement with cultural theorist of emotions Sara Ahmed, who, in her seminal book The Cultural Politics of Emotions, sees the immediacy of disgust as a limitation: “Disgust does not allow one the time to digest that which one designates as a ‘bad thing’” (Ahmed 2004, 99). That said, Ahmed also admits that the feeling of being disgusted can enable a critical response to abuses of power and discrimination, which is why she does not end up dismissing disgust completely, as Nussbaum does in her philosophical investigation.With Ngai, and in conversation with Nussbaum and Ahmed, I want to pick up disgust from the gutter of theory and explore the critical possibilities of disgust as staged through Solvang's graphic novel Frykt & medlidenhet. What aesthetic and critical possibilities lie in representing disgust through the medium of comics and what kind of social, political, and cultural structures do these representations diagnose? What does disgust do to the reader of Frykt & medlidenhet, and how does disgust tie in to a feminist agenda?Frykt & medlidenhet is Ane Barstad Solvang's first graphic novel, a complex narrative structured on several time lines. In the present, we see Lotte attending a reunion party with her former classmates from upper secondary school in the town she originally comes from. The atmosphere at the party is awkward and unpleasant. Lotte finds her old classmates to be tacky, ignorant, aggressive, deceiving, and gossipy. In turn, her classmates point out that she has changed a great deal after she moved to study in Oslo and started to travel around the globe. Lotte seeks to deal with the tense atmosphere at the party by calming her nerves with alcohol and paying frequent visits to the bathroom to empty her bladder and bowels. Her main distraction strategy is, however, to entertain the party with stories about her numerous health issues and how these have affected her sex life and spoiled her vacations and stays abroad: allergies, repeated tubal infections, genital herpes and pimples, abdominal pain, and bladder and bowel problems.Presented in eight anachronistic flashbacks, these stories of physical plagues flesh out Lotte's mental struggle with anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. Humor, agony, and gravity are mixed together in a complex web of narrative threads that culminate in a particularly traumatic episode that Lotte shares with the reader toward the end of the book, but not with rest of the party. It concerns her friend Katja K., who unexpectedly gives birth to a child while vacationing abroad with Lotte. Completely unaware of Katja's pregnancy, Lotte is deeply shocked not only by the birth itself, which she experiences close at hand, but also by the fact that Katja refuses to nurse the baby, releases the baby to adoption right away, and asks Lotte not to tell anyone about the incident. In hindsight, it becomes clear that Lotte's commitment not to share Katja's secret is what triggers many of the previous flashbacks in the book. Every time her former classmates mention Katja and beg Lotte for news from her, Lotte derails their attention by sharing personal stories of disease. The graphic novel ends with Lotte leaving the party after a last visit to the bathroom and a resolute decision not to entertain and give in to old classmates.Frykt & medlidenhet is filled to the brim with representations of bodily wastes, suppurating sores, and stench: snotty noses, mouths leaking saliva or spitting out vomit, malodorous or menstruating vaginas, puss-filled vaginal bumps, vaginal herpes, rectums spewing feces, gassy stomachs, and irritated and infected skin. In the medium of comics and through Solvang's line drawing, such classic objects of disgust become particularly repulsive, but also humorous. I argue that this peculiar combination of utter repulsion and humor is a result of a tactile excess. On the one hand, it is the tactility of disgust. Referencing David Kim's philosophical study of revulsion, Martha Nussbaum points out that disgust is closely connected to “all the three senses that the philosophical tradition regards as ‘tactile’ senses rather than mediated or distance senses: i.e., touch, smell, and taste, rather than sight or hearing” (Nussbaum 2004, 92). Accordingly, it is not so much the sight of disgusting objects that repulses as it is the idea of possible contamination through close contact by touch, ingestion, or smell that has made its way into the nose and is sitting there in contact with it (Nussbaum 2004, 92).On the other hand, it is the tactility embedded in the medium of the comic itself. In an analysis of Joe Sacco's Palestine, comics scholar Rebecca Scherr (2013) argues that comics are just as much a tactile medium as they are visual. Scherr shows how this tactility can be signified on a most obvious level by drawing hands, like Sacco does in his graphic novel. Equally importantly, though, the tactile quality of comics is expressed in the line drawing itself, which traces the presence of the artist who uses her hands to draw the comics (Scherr 2013, 24). Via line drawing, Scherr explains, readers come in intimate contact with the author, which in turn allows us to “become part of the text, or perhaps it's more correct to say the text becomes part of us” (2013, 24).Solvang, who draws and writes Frykt & medlidenhet entirely by hand, generates a tactile excess when she uses her line to represent objects of disgust through the medium of comics. A close reading of an excerpt from Frykt & medlidenhet is illustrative of how Solvang generates this tactile excess. In the second flashback in the book, Lotte, who now lives in Oslo, is not feeling well. A horrible stench is coming from her genitals. She has a fever, her eyes are watery, and her mouth is salivating. Lotte is anxious, yet she seeks sexual attention from her boyfriend Syver. Sickened by the vaginal odor and worried about his girlfriend, Syver calls a taxi, and they both end up at the hospital, where Lotte is about to have her first gynecological exam. After a brief phone conversation with her mother, who tries to reassure Lotte that gynecological exams are no big deal, Lotte joins the gynecologist in the examination room. The gynecologist is a muscular man with black, half-long hair, high cheeks, and a cleft chin. His tight clothes, which Solvang colors in black and profiles with white lines following the main muscles of the buttocks, legs, and upper body, emphasize his muscular build. Solvang's representation of the male doctor, who resembles male superheroes in mainstream comics, stands in stark contrast to Lotte's shapeless and plain appearance. Wearing only a white tank top and naked from the chest down, Lotte climbs up onto the chair and takes her position. A sequence of nine equally sized panels arranged on three rows follows (fig. 1). I want to pause on each of the nine panels in this sequence and show how Solvang deploys various devices to represent objects of disgust in an excessively tactile manner.In the nine-panel sequence, like in the rest of Frykt & medlidenhet, Solvang uses a nib pen and a brush, combining materials such as black ink and watercolor. The color palette in the sequence is minimalistic: black, white, shades of grey, and pink. The first panel is a full frontal shot of Lotte spreading her legs as a strong odor emanates from her genitals. Solvang signifies the vaginal stench by drawing small, stylized shrimps, stars, straight lines, and squiggles that emanate from between Lotte's legs. These small figures and lines congest the background of the panel and literally burst out of the frame, thus conveying both an unbearable odor and a violent explosion, a vomit of sorts, as the genital stench makes its way into the doctor's and by extension into the reader's nose.In the second panel, the perspective changes so that we see the examination room from Lotte's position, from between her legs to be precise. The gynecologist is in position, looking down at Lotte's genitals. His black hair and black clothes match the black tiles on the lateral walls of the examination room, which is drawn in perspective. A second staff member, a male nurse who has been called in to assist the consultation in lieu of a female health professional, is visible across the doctor's right shoulder. In the foreground, two lightning bolts are engraved across each of Lotte's inner thighs, which is suggestive of the burning sensation Lotte has in her genitals, but also of the fear she feels at being checked by a gynecologist for the first time. She is not the only one who feels afraid in the room. Indeed, the male nurse in the middle ground seems quite distressed, with his hands wrapped around himself.The third panel is a black-and-white extreme close-up of the gynecologist's right hand touching Lotte's vulva. His index and middle finger separate the vaginal outer lips to show the vaginal opening, while his thumb is pointing outward and sticking outside the frame of the panel. Straight, sharp lines, squiggles, shrimps, and lightning bolts fill the background in this panel also, and burst out of the frame in a similar fashion to the first panel in the sequence. The vaginal stench from Lotte's genitals becomes literally touchable through the doctor's fingers.The next two panels are medium shots of Lotte in great pain. First, a medium shot of Lotte slightly from the side with her head leaning backward. She has her fist inside her wide-open, tooth-filled mouth. The pain is visible on Lotte's distorted face (black cheeks, black bags under the eyes, flared nostrils, upper eyelids bending downward), but also vocalized through the letter “Å,” which Solvang writes fourteen times against a messy background consisting of irregular brushstrokes in grey and pink. Next follows a frontal medium shot of Lotte, who wraps her arms around herself. She is squeezing her eyes shut. Straight lines are scratched down from her eyes on her cheeks. Her mouth is closed, bending downward, while curvy lines double her mouth corners. An incomplete sentence written as a suspended line against the light grey-pink background sums up the gynecologist's reaction as he inspects Lotte's genitals: “SER BETENT UT, JA . . . ” (Solvang 2018; all caps in original) [LOOKS INFLAMED, YES . . . ].The sixth and the seventh panels in the sequence show the gynecologist delving deeper into the examination. Once again, we start with a point-of-view from Lotte's position, her thighs in the foreground, the gynecologist in the middle ground, and the other staff member in the background. The male nurse has now moved closer to the door, standing with his back turned to Lotte as if ready to exit the room. In a speech bubble, the doctor announces that he will examine the cervix. The seventh panel is a black-and-white close-up of the gynecologist's arm pointing straight at Lotte's groin and his hand inside her. Small lightning bolts, drops, and straight and curvy lines emanate from between Lotte's legs. The word “SCHLL-UUU-RRRP” is written along the longest three straight lines scratched down on Lotte's left buttock. The onomatopoeia “SLURP” is an aural suggestion of vaginal discharge, but it also conveys pressure as the doctor's hand penetrates the vagina in order to get to the cervix.The last two panels focus on Lotte's reaction to the cervical examination. First, a medium shot of Lotte with black-contoured, teary eyes, open mouth, curvy lines shadowing the corner of her eyes, and small black dots on her cheeks. Her elbows are raised high, her right hand holding tight to the examination chair. In a thought bubble against a light pink and grey background, Lotte tries to comfort herself in unterminated sentences that convey fear mixed with doubt: “DETTE GÅR BRA . . . DU HAR OPPLEVD VERRE . . . ” (Solvang 2018) [THIS WILL BE FINE . . . YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED WORSE . . . ].The last panel in the sequence is a close-up of Lotte's head in profile, her chin stretching up toward the ceiling, her eyes closed, her forehead and eye area pink. A spiral line emanates from Lotte's wide-open nostrils, signifying a rotating airflow like in a hurricane. There is an erotic connotation to this pose, an eroticism that is otherwise contradicted by the previous panels and the black background engraved with white perpendicular and horizontal lines that give a sense of entrapment and pain.This erotic pose in an otherwise unglamorous and medicalized account of the female reproductive system is reminiscent of recent feminist graphic art from the UK, United States, and Japan, where ambivalence about embodied sexuality and competing desires have become major themes (Chute 2018, 162). In Solvang's comic book, however, erotic ambivalence and desire barely come to the surface before they are quickly drowned in a sea of vaginal stenches and fluids that secure the reader an excessively tactile and contagious experience. In the scene at the gynecologist, representations of body parts with a high density of tactile organs are abundant: not only hands and fingers, like in Sacco, but also mouth, nose, forehead, genitals, and inner thighs. The forms of tactility vary as well, from light touch (fingers splitting the vaginal lips) and pressure (hand pushing its way to the cervix; air bursting out through the nostrils) to burning sensations (lightning bolts on thighs) and sharpness (fist inside teeth-filled mouth). Visual cues such as small shrimp, squiggles, stars, and lightning bolts stimulate the reader's sense of smell, which is one of the three touch-like senses Nussbaum mentions in her philosophical study of disgust. These small figures crowd the background of the panels and make their way into the gutter between the panels, signifying an uncontrollable motion of sorts and a smell that cannot be sealed off.Solvang's line drawing further enhances this tactility in various ways. Her style is raw, exaggerated, distorted, and congested. Her lines and brushstrokes are sharp and irregular. Spots of black ink and color systematically “spoil” the gutter and the panels. In the first panel of the sequence I have just described, the pink watercolor exceeds the frame, while in the fifth panel, thick, shaky brushstrokes of black ink make a literal mess of the already irregular frame. In the fourth panel, a black ink dot has fallen on Lotte's right collarbone. Pink, a color that otherwise denotes softness, girlhood, and femininity, has a troubling quality in Solvang's comics. In the nine panels described above, various shades of pink are used for the background of six out of nine panels. Pink is also used to color Lotte's forehead and eye area.The pink face from the mouth up is in fact a distinct feature to Lotte throughout the rest of Frykt & medlidenhet. What is more, on several occasions, Lotte uses the word pink to describe her hurting organs. In a later flashback, this time from London, a female doctor from the university medical center makes Lotte take multiple tests: chlamydia, HIV, mouth swab drug test, and a cystoscopy. In a medium close-up, we see the doctor's hand insert the collection stick into Lotte's wide-open mouth as Lotte reflects in a speech bubble: “MUNNEN ER INNSIDA AV KROPPEN, ET ÅPENT KJØTTSÅR, ROSA, SOM INNSIDA AV MEG . . . ” (Solvang 2018; emphasis added) [THE MOUTH IS THE INNER PART OF THE BODY, AN OPEN WOUND IN THE FLESH, PINK, LIKE MY INSIDES . . . ]. Two pages later, on her way to have the cystoscopy, Lotte is overwhelmed by fear and anxiety on the London tube. In two subsequent panels, she expresses her dread to have her insides checked by yet another doctor: “HVOR LENGE SKAL LEGEN HA HÅNDA SI INNI MEG I DAG?” [HOW LONG WILL THE DOCTOR HAVE HER HAND INSIDE ME TODAY?]; “GRIPE TAK I INNSIDA MI, RØSKE UT INNVOLLENE MINE, DE ROSA, GLATTE SLANGENE. DRA MEG FRA HVERANDRE?” (Solvang 2018; emphasis added) [GRAB MY INSIDES, TEAR OUT MY GUTS, THE PINK, SMOOTH CORDS. PULL ME APART?].Once she arrives at the urologist, Lotte has a quick flashback to the cervical examination performed by the male gynecologist back in Oslo: a close-up of her genitals making a SCHLL-UUU-RRRP-sound as the doctor's hand disappears inside her vagina. Pink then is both the color of Lotte's upper face and the color of her painful and exposed inner organs: the inside of her swabbed mouth, her torn apart intestines, her infected vagina, her thin urethra that is penetrated for clinical examination. In a sense, we could say that Lotte's inner organs turn inside out on her face. She is an open wound, which we cannot help but touch as we flip through the pages of Solvang's excessively tactile text. What are the effects of this enhanced tactility in Frykt & medlidenhet?The medium of comics makes it possible for the reader to come closer to Lotte and her bodily wastes before she can pull away. In the scene at the gynecologist, Solvang uses each of the nine panels to break up the experience of Lotte's vaginal stench and discharge. Shot by shot, from various perspectives and distances, with each brushstroke and line, Solvang puts the reader literally in touch with the disgusting. This tactile experience enabled through the medium of comics is a slow motion of sorts that addresses the concerns raised by Ahmed in regard to the immediacy of disgust. By breaking down Lotte's painful experience during the gynecological examination in a sequence of nine panels, Solvang stretches out time and allows the reader to come close enough to Lotte so that they can feel her pain. Most obvious, it is the pain caused by the vaginal infection itself, but also the pain of being objectified by the medical establishment—in this flashback, very tangibly represent