Graphic Bodies: Picturing Feminised Pathology, Narrating Resistance

Neeraja Sundaram

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2017, vol. 24, issue 2, 236-265

Abstract: This article studies three graphic memoirs by women, Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen , Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles and Leah Hayes’ Not Funny Ha-Ha , to explore the use of the graphic form in the narrating of an experience of illness. I argue here that these writers engage the graphic form to visualise female embodiment as always already pathologised, even prior to the onset of illness. By making explicit the medical and socio-cultural scrutiny of female bodily practices, these texts interrogate the unequal structural relationship between the sign of gender female and the healthy/sick binary set up by mainstream illness narratives. This article also proposes that these graphic memoirs of illness by women perform a resistant femininity in narrative by refusing a linear progression from diagnosis to cure. The texts instead make visible their myriad sources, in the form of incoherent speech, unedited data, photographs and letters among others, thus refusing unity and coherence in the narrating self.

Keywords: Graphic novel; memoir; illness; narrative; autopathography; body (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indgen:v:24:y:2017:i:2:p:236-265

DOI: 10.1177/0971521517697889

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