Graphic Somatography: Life Writing, Comics, and the Ethics of Care

This text is fashioned from an email exchange between the authors during the spring, summer, and fall of 2015. Our aim with this informal, collaborative process was to develop a few of the key principles for discussing graphic narratives as a mode of life writing, especially graphic memoirs relating to illness, disability, and care work, as well as issues of difference more broadly (including gender and sexuality). Thinking through the genres and media of graphic life writing, we discuss narrative, text authentication, institutional positioning, world-making, narrating difference, and the role of the visual, while giving particular attention to the importance of objects and temporality to the comics form. Rather than a resolved or comprehensive series of guidelines, we offer instead an experiment in epistolary criticism, through which we formulate several points of contact between graphic narrative and life writing scholarship—instances and considerations where the central concerns for scholars in both fields overlap. Ultimately, our sense is that graphic memoirs of disability, illness, and other types of difference share many characteristics with more traditional, exclusively textual life writing forms, though in graphic life writing the visual dynamic—involving the connections and disconnections between the verbal and visual—produces specific engagements with disjunction, complexity, and the ineffable. KEYWORDS Comics; graphic memoir; disability; queer

BMJ/Medical Humanities , 2024

Looking beyond anthropocentric care relationships reveals nuanced levels of interdependence among human and non-human entities. Attention to these heterogeneous inter-relationships illuminates the subtle and visceral affective intensities among diverse participants, including humans, objects and the environment, among others. The interdisciplinary field of graphic medicine foregrounds these entanglements through comic affordances, challenging the predominant notion that care belongs only at the scale of human beings. This article analyses selected sections from graphic medical narratives such as Brian Fies’s Mom’s Cancer, Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles and Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits to illustrate how objects become a source of care for humans during illness, thus becoming care objects. Furthermore, using the affordances of comics, this essay examines, how the selected sections of the abovementioned graphic narratives portray the often unnoticed/overlooked affective entanglement between the sufferers and objects. In doing so, this article underscores the inter-relatedness between humans and non-human entities within the context of caregiving.

2017

In her introduction to Extraordinary Bodies, Rosemarie Garland Thomson adds, to a long list of the different forms disability might take, the observation that “everyone is subject to the gradually disabling process of aging,” a fact, she notes, that “many people who consider themselves able-bodied are reluctant to admit” (13-14; my emphasis). My presentation proposes to examine four recent North American visual memoirs of aging, each of which deploys a range of graphic resources to i) grapple with the facts of parents’ disintegrating bodies and, especially, their disintegrating minds; ii) witness the increasingly complex demands these deteriorations make on available forms and economies of care; and iii) specifically shape comics’ aesthetics to the frequent uncanniness of dementia’s incursions. If, as Amelia DeFalco claims, aging is a vastly under-theorized site of cultural difference (xii-xvi), comics – until recently associated almost exclusively with youth- and counter-cultures –...

ALTERNATIVE FRANCOPHONE

The 2015 publication of Nick Sousanis’s graphic dissertation, Unflattening, opened doors for artist-scholars who challenge conventional research methodologies by producing graphic dissertations, graphic research, and comics-based publications in academic, scientific, and medical journals. Unflattening came out one year after I began a PhD program in cultural studies at the University of California, Davis, with a proposed graphic dissertation of my own. In this essay, I will discuss how my intended project, a graphic narrative about my maternal grandmother and her experiences of the Second World War in Germany, became a graphic memoir—an intersectional feminist Bildungsroman that explores themes of transgenerational memory, displacement, and childhood sexual abuse. As an astute scholar in my cohort put it, “You’ve found a new way of ‘doing’ psychology and history.” How is the very particular kind of subjectivity, a seeing from the ground up, or from a “snail’s eye view,” engendered b...

Journal of Medical Humanities, 2025

"Our approach speaks to and expands the scope of the field of ‘materialities of care’ (Buse et al. 2018), which demonstrates how objects and artefacts represent, intervene, and mediate everyday experiences of health and social care in fields such as medicine, museum studies, architecture, activism, and design. In editing this collection, we emphasise the interconnected and integral role materials and objects play in sustaining and representing material care in narratives, both fictional and qualitative. Although materials and objects may not know their role in the caring process, Talia Schaffer (2021) suggests that it is through narrative form that ‘we imbue the object with… imagined feelings’ and so therefore ‘to the extent that a particular artifact gives us comfort, we are in a care relationship’ (40–41). The articles collected here underscore the role of materiality in practicing relational and translational medicine (from clinical laboratory to hospital bedside and back) in various narrative cultural forms, including literary texts, newspapers, memoirs, television episodes, exhibitions, and almanacs" (Joshi and French 2025).

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2018

This essay analyzes four graphic memoirs of a daughter's caregiving through a mother's final years, examining how each text chronicles the mother's health-care needs; the daughter's emergence as caregiver; the negative emotions of caregiving; and the processes of forgetting by which ugly emotions are refined and re-storied as elegiac compassion.

Precarious Youth in Contemporary Graphic Narratives: Young Lives in Crisis, 2022

This introduction presents precariousness and precarity as recurrent motifs in contemporary culture in general and graphic narratives in particular. It explores different critical approaches to precarity, precariousness, and other related terms—vulnerability, precariat, cognitariat, good life—building up the theoretical background of the volume. The introduction argues that precarity and precariousness are related to graphic narratives through a triple dimension: formal, authorial, and thematic. It includes a historical overview of the thematic presence of precarity and precariousness in comics including young characters, whether fictional—comic strips, superhero comic books, sci-fi, etc.—or non-fictional, directly influenced by underground comix—autobiography, autofiction, biography, memoir, etc. Finally, it justifies the structure of the volume and summarizes its chapters, in which an international team of authors explore graphic narratives from different comics traditions as examples of moral outrage in the face of a reality in which precariousness has become an inherent part of young lives.

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2016

Affordances, in the context of comics, connote to the general attributes of the medium such as temporality, spatiality, gestures, tone/handwriting and economy. Although comics evinces a dynamic relationship among these elements, it is possible to delineate functional and rhetorical role of these affordances on a conceptual and technical level. Taking these cues, the paper after briefly reviewing the definition and scope of graphic medicine aims to demonstrate the functional and rhetorical role of the aforementioned affordances in communicating illness and illness related experiences. Among other issues this article also seeks to address the following: how do comics engage in the visual and verbal translation of the experiences of chronic illness? how do affordances of comics facilitate the readers' haptic experience of an author's subjective trauma? Despite its juvenile legacy, comics capacitates graphic medicine to represent physical and emotional aspects of narrating subjective illness experiences within the medium. The paper concludes that comics is a uniquely suited communicative medium as it diagrams the interiority of illness experience, and, in the process, evolves itself as a locus of tacit knowledge through its translation and mediation of emotional truths and affective states altered by illness.

An empathetic patient-practitioner relationship has been shown to improve treatment and recovery among patients, and decrease the likelihood of malpractice suits among medical professionals. It is, therefore, puzzling why an empathetic approach to medical education through medical humanities has not been more widely adopted. The interdisciplinary field of medical humanities includes topics such as graphic narrative. Operating from a discourse analytic perspective , this paper presents a dissection of the place of graphic narrative in medical education grounded in the visual semiotic theories of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) and Jewitt and Oyama (2001). Graphic medicine is a form of graphic narrative that gives those suffering with, treating, or caring for loved ones with an illness, a form of expression that isn't available through verbal communication. Through semiotic analysis of representational, interpersonal, and com-positional metafunctions of four graphic narratives composed by medical students at Penn State College of Medicine, this paper explores the significance of empathy in the doctor-patient interaction, revealing that an empathetic approach to medicine is valuable to patients and their families, as well as to doctors and medical students, and should be further implemented beginning in medical school. ARTICLE HISTORY

Affordances, in the context of comics, connote to the general attributes of the medium such as temporality, spatiality, gestures, tone/handwriting and economy. Although comics evinces a dynamic relationship among these elements, it is possible to delineate functional and rhetorical role of these affordances on a conceptual and technical level. Taking these cues, the paper after briefly reviewing the definition and scope of graphic medicine aims to demonstrate the functional and rhetorical role of the aforementioned affordances in communicating illness and illness related experiences. Among other issues this article also seeks to address the following: how do comics engage in the visual and verbal translation of the experiences of chronic illness? how do affordances of comics facilitate the readers' haptic experience of an author's subjective trauma? Despite its juvenile legacy, comics capacitates graphic medicine to represent physical and emotional aspects of narrating subjective illness experiences within the medium. The paper concludes that comics is a uniquely suited communicative medium as it diagrams the interiority of illness experience, and, in the process, evolves itself as a locus of tacit knowledge through its translation and mediation of emotional truths and affective states altered by illness.