How art constitutes the human : aesthetics, empathy, and the interesting in autofiction

This chapter examines ‘graphic autofiction’ in Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! (2002) and What It Is (2009) and Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories (2000) and The Diary of A Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (2002), demonstrating how it allows feminist performances that visualize cartoonists’ authentic experiences of sexual and other forms of trauma. The chapter makes a valuable contribution to current debates on autofiction by moving beyond its literary expressions and investigating how the hybrid medium of comics accommodates the genre and how that, in its turn, complicates the representation of trauma. It also proposes that ‘graphic autofiction’ allows the formation of feminist counter-narratives to the silencing of female abuse victims and the latter’s representation beyond victimhood