Graphic Memoir Research Articles

Halfway There: A Graphic Memoir of Self-Discovery by Christine Mari (review)

Halfway There: A Graphic Memoir of Self-Discovery by Christine Mari (review)

Pockets of tenderness: Lesbian earth in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.

The subfield of rural queer studies and the concept of lesbian earth encourage scholars to explore the significance of rural place, nature, and climate change in queer texts. Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family TragicComic, presents nature as a source of familial conflict, creativity, and mutual support and as under threat due to strip mining. The climate change novel, 2 Degrees, focuses intensely on the realities of climate change and lesbian relations with the earth. These two texts are drastically different, yet they both convey a lesbian earth sensibility, featuring main characters who practice an open, vulnerable, interdependent stance with themselves and the more-than-human world.

“Tweet of the town”: Synthesizing Local and Social Media Discourse on Book Bans

This project explores the intersection of local and online discourse around book bannings. I use the McMinn County School Board’s decision in 2022 to remove Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir, Maus, as a case study for this discourse. Through a combination of interviews with McMinn County residents and data collected from Twitter, I argue that social media has altered local community discourse and responses to book bannings. Interviews with local residents asked them to discuss their experiences when Maus was removed by the school board and to reflect on how the local community responded amidst worldwide scrutiny once the event reached digital spaces via social media. Online discourse on Twitter involved collecting tweets mentioning the McMinn County Schools Twitter account along with tweets discussing Maus to understand the broader online response to the board’s decision. I use Danielle Allen’s discourse flow model as the theoretical framework for this project and in my initial findings, discourse around the Maus ban has traveled as described by Allen. In the age of social media, discourse frequently begins at the local level before traveling online and then back into local spaces. Ongoing data analysis has shown that locally, residents were concerned with not only the board’s decision, but also the perception of their community once news of the banning spread. This is supported by online discourse on Twitter, where initial analysis shows frequent characterization of the McMinn County community in a negative light based on the school board’s actions.

“All Eyes on McMinn:” Book Banning Discourse in the Age of Social Media

ABSTRACTThis project explores the intersection of local and online discourse around book bannings using the McMinn County School Board's decision in 2022 to remove Art Spiegelman's graphic memoir, Maus, from their school curriculum as a case study. Through interviews with McMinn County residents and data collected from Twitter, I argue that social media has altered book banning discourse. I interviewed 10 residents and asked them to discuss their experiences when Maus was removed by the school board and to reflect on how the local community responded amidst worldwide scrutiny online. Discourse on Twitter involved collecting over 2000 tweets mentioning the @McMinnCountySch account and tweets discussing Maus to understand online responses to the board's decision. I use Danielle Allen's discourse flow model as the theoretical framework for this project. In my initial findings, discourse began at the local level before traveling online and then back into the local space. Ongoing data analysis has shown that locally, residents were concerned with the board's decision along with the perception of their community once news of the banning spread. This is supported by Twitter discourse, where many tweets cast the McMinn County community in a negative light based on the school board's actions.

Sarah Leavitt’s <i>Tangles</i>: Teaching Queer Caregiving Memoir on Disability, and Pedagogy as Resistance

This article examines Sarah Leavitt’s graphic novel <i>Tangles: A story about Alzheimer’s, my mother and me</i> (2010, 2011 UK), in relation to queer identity, feminist wilfulness (Ahmed, 2014), and critical disability studies. <i>Tangles</i> takes up themes of lesbianism, disability, and activism, and it does so through storytelling. Studies around life writing and disability, including the dementia disease Alzheimer’s, point the reader strongly toward recognition of the key importance of storytelling in the preservation of selfhood. Whose stories are told, and whose are not, and by whom? How can or does patient selfhood emerge or survive in caregiving narratives written and/or drawn by others? This article examines graphic memoir in the contexts of Comics Studies, Canadian Gender Studies and Critical Disability Studies.

Drawing invisible illness: an interview with Claire Lordon

ABSTRACT The depiction of illness narratives within the comics medium has garnered renewed scholarly attention since the advent of graphic medicine in 2007. This interdisciplinary field aims to reconceptualise the emotional landscapes associated with illness, disability, and healthcare. Leveraging the unique affordances of comics, memoirists employ vivid verbo-visual elements that facilitate a more immersive and emotionally resonant depiction of their lived experiences with illness, treatments, and healthcare. Unlike prose narratives, which can be hindered by the limitations of language, comics allow readers to see and feel the struggles, fears, and triumphs of individuals living with illness. The visual nature of comics enables the use of metaphors and visual allegories to represent abstract or internal aspects of illness, such as pain, fatigue, or mental health struggles. The present interview discusses Claire Lordon’s debut graphic novel, One in a Million, a graphic memoir about Cushing’s disease, a rare condition. In this email interview, Lordon explores her artistic vision, community engagement, the comics industry, graphic medicine, future prospects in healthcare and self-care, and her ongoing projects.

Graphic Histories of Solidarity, in Solidarity

Revolutionary experiments require building revolutionary relationships. This praxis of material and social creativity to reorganise power dynamics and weave connections across weaponised divides, are evident in the content, the form and the backstory woven into Janet Biehl's Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS. Written and illustrated by Janet Biehl, it is a graphic memoir that can be read as both an historical narrative and a blueprint of a contemporary revolutionary experiment that combines political theory and graphic art to tell the story of how ISIS has been driven back in Northern Syria by people fighting for a society based on principles of direct democracy, political secularism, gender equality, and ecological sustainability. Whereas in the past, after the liberation of Rojava in 2012, Biehl spent time interviewing leadership, this book relays her interviews with women across the region and across the various projects of reorganising and defending social, political, cultural and economic life in 2019 after four years of warfare against ISIS and the Turkish state. Reflecting on the relationships that make revolutionary history, and that produce artistic histories of revolutionary experiments, this review article considers the history in this book and of this book, in conversation with recently published graphic non-fiction, and draws on engaged scholarship concerned with the politics of collective knowledge production in and for movements of solidarity urgently needed in the face of the imploding crisis of colonial borders.

“Systems that make humans inhumane”: nursing home care, graphic medicine and Susan MacLeod’s Dying for Attention

ABSTRACT Nursing home care across world have predominantly undergone a progressive marketisation in recent decades, characterised by the dominance of neoliberal values such as productivity, profit motive among others. The looming economic costs and the social-political preferences for neoliberal values have placed the need to provide care for increasing number of older people with complex care needs low on government agendas. As the result, the experiential realities of the stakeholders: care providers, care receivers and their families are often overlooked and undervalued. Susan MacLeod’s Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care (2021), besides demonstrating underrepresented and unarticulated of realities of Canadian nursing home care and critiquing the system in place, emphasises the need to reconcile and embrace the long-term care system. Taking cues from the graphic memoir, this article examines how the network of relationships in nursing homes impacts each other and the care provided to the residents. In so doing, the essay brings to light the necessities for coordinated functioning of the system. Utilizing the affordances of comics, the article also examines how evaluating care work based on capitalist standards coerces the care workers to compromise the quality of care provided to the residents.

"Inside Out of Mind": Alternative Realities, Dementia and Graphic Medicine.

Graphic medicine, an interdisciplinary field situated at the crossroads of comics and healthcare, operates as a medium through which the intricate nature of experiences with illness can be articulated, challenging orthodox medical dogmatism in an engaging and accessible way. Combining the affordances of comics and the narrative power of storytelling, graphic medicine elucidates the socio-cultural stigmatization of dementia influenced by a multitude of discourses. Diverging from existing discourses that depict individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) as zombies, brain-dead, or empty shells, graphic memoirs reconstruct these reductive notions and represent them as imaginative, productive, and perceptive. Taking these cues, the present paper close reads some sections of Dana Walrath's (2016) Aliceheimer's: Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass in order to demonstrate how graphic medicine reconceptualizes the preeminent hallucinatory experiences of her AD-afflicted mother, Alice, as visions. Walrath deploys collage art to epitomize Alice's ordeal with AD. In particular, Walrath deploys thought-provoking fragments from Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland, strategically to proximate Alice's experiences with AD and tackle the problem of dementia and sociality. Additionally, the paper explores how the text fosters interdependence, respect, and trust to recognize and restore Alice's personhood. The paper concludes by discussing how Aliceheimer's operates as an alternative paradigm beyond the confines of biomedical and cultural models of dementia through the use of lexical puissance.

Comic Elements as a System of Queer Expression: A Close Analysis of Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer: A Memoir

The paper analyses the relationship between queer and comics, with a particular emphasis on Maia Kobabe's graphic memoir Gender Queer: A Memoir. It explores the narrative significance of comics and the convergence of queerness within the medium, framed within the theoretical frameworks of Scott McCloud, Richard Walsh, Ramzi Fawaz, and Darieck Scott. The primary objective of the study is to demonstrate how words and images interact to communicate Maia's gender and sexual identities in a way that defies accepted cultural norms. It analyses and exhibits the ability of the visual narrative to convey nuanced facets of queer identity, ranging from representations of physical discomfort during medical exams to the presentation of romantic fantasies defying binary gender norms. The paper concludes that Maia employs an effective tool to convey the subtleties of eir queer identity through the symbiotic relationship between words and pictures, based on a careful analysis of eir narrative. Beyond the confines of conventional language, a more comprehensive expression of gender and sexuality is made possible by the interaction of words and images.

Hope and Healing in Thi Bui’s ‘The Best We Could Do’

Thi Bui's graphic novel, "The Best We Could Do", is a powerful exploration of one journey from war-torn Vietnam. The narrative delves into the anguish of immigration and the enduring impact of displacement on a child, providing an intimate portrayal of the challenges faced by refugees. Bui vividly reconstructs her family's troubled past through poignant illustrations and heartfelt narrations, creating a transportive picture of life in Vietnam and America. The memoir is recognised for its evocative storytelling, making it a touching exploration of the search for a better future and the longing for the past. Through evocative illustrations and heartfelt narrations, Bui vividly reconstructs the troubled past of her family. The narrative explores the anguish of immigration, the lasting effects of displacement on a child, and the search for a better future while grappling with a longing for the past. This ambitious memoir not only serves as a powerful historical record but also delves into the themes of hope and healing amid adversity. As Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize winner, describes it, the book is a poignant journey that both breaks and heals the heart. "The Best We Could Do" stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of challenging circumstances. This paper strives to show the significance of graphic memoirs in academia and society and how they create an alternate history that is humane and de-centres the prevailing accounts that ignore marginalised voices.

On the distinction between creative and non-creative labour and on making comics in Guy Delisle’s graphic memoirs. From “travelogues” to “laborlogs”

ABSTRACT Guy Delisle’s comics have often been categorised among the subgenres of graphic journalism, travelogues, or travel autobiographies. Nonetheless, apart from the obvious detailed depictions of his travel impressions – an amply elaborated topic– there are some important, yet overlooked, recurring themes such as the aporia of creative labour, and the consequences of the changing nature and organisation of work from the beginning of the 1980s to the late 2010s on cultural industries and comics profession. Delisle’s memoirs delineate different types of organisational structures, interpersonal relations, and working conditions from the time he was employed as a salaried labourer and animator, along with the setting in which he had to perform his job as a self-employed, freelance artist. His visual narrations constitute a canvas of anecdotes and events, revolving around his working environment and professional context, not only during his sojourn in various countries but also in his hometown, Quebec, Canada. The present article suggests that Delisle’s ‘travelogues’ can be better understood as ‘laborlogs’. That is a term coined here from the synthesis of the word labour, toil, and log, a record book, a list, employed in order to lay emphasis on the importance of work and labour in the artist’s illustrations.

Commemoration, modernism and self-identity in contemporary graphic memoir

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on two texts, Mary M. Talbot’s and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (2012) and Sarah Laing’s Mansfield and Me: A Graphic Memoir (2016). Both texts are in a direct line of influence from modernist authors such as James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield, but also from an earlier appropriation of modernism to support a life narrative within the graphic novel form, Alison Bechdel’s celebrated text Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). As I will show by responding to the critical background from both modernist studies and comics studies, these more recent graphic memoirs, which I term ‘auto/biographics’, use comparative memory to register historical changes between our generation and the modernist generation in order to fully develop their memory narratives. Talbot’s and Laing’s combination of words and images, memoir and biography, combine difficulties of identity and resemblance in hybrid forms that both seek to commemorate modernism as a historical period and attempt to render the ambiguities of memory through modernist techniques.

Word and Image in Alison Bechdel's Memoirs

Abstract: Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs— Fun Home, Are You My Mother? and The Secret of Superhuman Strength —explore the relationship between word and image, both in their form, as comics, and narratively, via Bechdel's musings on self-expression, sexuality, psychoanalysis, and exercise. On each of these sites, she is deeply concerned with the pervasive dichotomies of subject/object, self/other, and past/present. The fraught dichotomy between words and images forms the organizing force for how she writes and draws about all dichotomies, as she disrupts the hierarchy between word and image of Lacan's symbolic order without, as many feminists scholars have, deeming the symbolic order of language inherently patriarchal. Drawing from Julia Kristeva's theorizing of Lacan's symbolic order, Hillary Chute's comics theory, as well as W.J.T. Mitchell's work on the relationship between word and image, I analyze each book sequentially. In her memoirs, Bechdel disrupts the very distinction between word and image. When she recreates book passages and letters, these are not simply transcriptions, but drawings of physical pages, treating words as images. Chute and DeKoven's definition of comics focuses on it as a dual medium, but in Bechdel's memoirs, the relationship between word and image is not as stable as duality. It is a collaboration requiring constant renegotiation.

Aesthetic Affairs: Art, Architecture, and the Illusion of Detachment

Abstract: "Aesthetic Affairs" turns to three contemporary works of art—a short story, a graphic memoir, and a film—to consider how they invoke the conventions of human relationship and the paradigm of desire to highlight the inarticulable and seemingly inappropriate feelings solicited by art objects, architectural space, and design. Bringing together theories of architectural space, materiality, and desire with imaginative texts that both utilize and disrupt linguistic referentiality, this essay interrogates the illusion of detachment that governs an ocularcentric approach to art and the rational language that often accompanies it.

Traversing the (In)Visible Territory of Schizophrenia in HOAX Psychosis Blues: An Intersection of Life Writing and Graphic Medicine in Comics

ABSTRACT By closely reading Ravi Thornton’s graphic memoir, HOAX Psychosis Blues, as a testament to her brother Rob’s decade-long battle with schizophrenia, this article dwells on the intersection of life writing and graphic medicine in comics to discuss how comics provide an expanded opportunity to visualise the (in)visible territory of schizophrenia. The aim here is first to examine the ways in which Thornton endeavours to contextualise the poetic narrative of Rob’s mental illness through stylistic features of comics; and, second, to illuminate the confessional aspect of Rob’s poetic evocations to understand how schizophrenia imposes practical limitations on the everyday life of the sufferer. Using Foucault’s conceptualisation of clinical gaze and drawing on insights from conceptual metaphor theory, this article examines how a tangible tapestry of visual illustrations, symbols, and metaphors interprets the grave realm of Rob’s thoughts more powerfully and critiques the rigid standards of psychiatric treatment. Ultimately, the article intends to explain how, by illustrating the metamorphosis of Rob’s body into a butterfly, the narrative provides a sense of hope and vitality for other sufferers that medical reasoning fails to do.

Decoding Trauma: A Cultural Ecological Reading of the Graphic Memoir Persepolis

Trauma is an amalgamation of repercussions happened and the effects of socio-cultural conflicts. Graphical novels always combine images and text to decipher the narrative by appealing to all senses. Persepolisis, a graphic memoir is also an autobiographical narrative written by Marjane Satrapi. This memoir covers the societal and cultural aspects through pictorial representation. It delineates Satrapi’s childhood and her adult years in Iran and Austria during the Islamic Revolution. Satrapi resists to accept the new changes happening in the society. Eventually, she forgets her real self who migrates abroad in search of hope but ends up in trauma. This research article sets out to analyse Satrapi’s existential crisis, identity trauma, self- discovery and how the ecology influenced her culture and life.

Unravelling crip temporalities: epilepsy, chronic illness and Elodie Durand’s Parenthesis

ABSTRACT Throughout history, epilepsy has been subject to spiritual or supernatural interpretations and is often construed as a form of possession, divine retribution, or even a mystical endowment. However, from a medical perspective, epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder. Elodie Durand’s graphic memoir, Parenthesis (2021), offers a personal narrative documenting the complexities of epilepsy. Through a meticulous analysis of Durand’s memoir, this article aims to investigate the intersections of crip temporalities and the affective dimensions of epilepsy as experienced and depicted by Durand, encompassing her epileptic seizures and neuropsychological evaluations, as well as her attempts at narrative reconstruction. Situated within the conceptual framework of crip time developed by Ellen Samuels, this essay examines the concealed nature of epilepsy as a chronic illness and its implications as an invisible disability. This study in graphic medicine conveys the embodied and experiential nature of epilepsy visualised through the medium of comics.

CULTURAL MATERIALIST READING: VISUALIZING DOMINANT IDEOLOGIES AND DISSIDENT DISCOURSES IN THE CREATIVE GRAPHIC PANELS OF MUNNU: A BOY FROM KASHMIR

One of the prominent theories of cultural studies is cultural materialism, which has its base on the theory of Marxism. Much of the research work done regarding cultural materialism is on Renaissance literature; the development of the theory itself is through the studies conducted on the plays of William Shakespeare, who is one of the epitomes of Renaissance literature. This paper aims to be a unique cultural materialist reading done on a graphic novel based on Kashmir, Indian subcontinent. Kashmir is one of the most desired lands on Earth; it has also been a land of contest right from 1947. This article attempts to explore Malik Sajad’s reflection of the Kashmiri society by analyzing and discussing graphic panels from Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (originally published in 2015) in the light of cultural materialism. Since cultural materialism admits that a text mirrors the socio-cultural and political life of a society; it has been used for interpreting this Kashmir-based graphic novel which is a blend of image and words. This graphic memoir offers a unique narration of the political and societal lives of Kashmiris through the creative deployment of an anthropomorphic metaphor. This study shows how Sajad graphically reflects the dominant ideology and dissident discourses in these panels.

Separating the territory from the map: The intersection of cartography, memory and identity in autobiographical comics

Alison Bechdel said in an interview with Lynn Emmert that both maps and comics ‘take a complex or confusing three-dimensional reality and iron it out into a much more manageable two-dimensional version’. Yet the way maps weave together space, place, history, tradition and personal experience through multiple levels of signification points to anything but transparency of form, especially when deployed within autographics. We often encounter maps in autobiographical comics, where their uses can be as different as the lives they help to illustrate. When the layers of historical, cultural and personal references that intersect on the map plane are embedded in the formalist structures of comics, the levels of signification become multiplied – panel borders and topographical borders intersect, the geography of space merges with the geography of the page, and the subjectivity of the illustrated line overlays the objectivity of cartography. While the semiotic structures of maps and comics are presentationally different, both derive narratorial power from the relationships they make explicit through the marks on the page, and how their boundaries carve up space and time. Mapping traditions may be referenced to signpost authentication strategies within graphic memoirs. The structures of the map may be utilized – or even disrupted – in order to illustrate dynamics that cannot be signified through text or representational mimesis. This article will critically examine mapping modalities used in a variety of autographic narratives, focusing on the link between representation and experience of place for both the author and reader. By analysing what is included and excluded in a map, as well as the relationships the maps create between signifier and signified, we can draw some conclusions about how the mapmaker is positioning themselves within such frameworks as cultural background, socio-economic structures and hierarchies of knowledge.