Screening Modernity: Cinema and Sexuality in Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees

In Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald writes early twentieth-century Cape Breton and New York through attention to the popular culture of the era, particularly in aspects of the visual, including paintings, photographs, and films. Just as the female characters trangress boundaries between normative and queer sexuality, so too the text offers an aesthetic queering of the boundaries between representational media. The representations of 1920s film star Louise Brooks, particularly, guide readers to a supplemental set of cultural meanings carried by her image and to a recognition that representation, like history, is always partial."This article was written with the support of a doctoral fellowship from the Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l’Aide à Recherche (Fonds FCAR)."https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/scl/article/view/12790/1377

The Affective Topographies of Geneviève Castrée’s Graphic Life Narrative

This paper studies two autographics by the late Québecoise cartoonist Geneviève Castrée (Susceptible and “Blankets Are Always Sleeping”) and their mobilization online by a bereaved comics community. I begin with her autographic Susceptible (2012), a memoir of coming-of-age in a dysfunctional family in 1980s Quebec. Through an avatar, Goglu, Castrée recalls memories from her early childhood to late adolescence that dwell on emotional abuse in the Montreal home of her francophone mother and stepfather, and her attempts to re-unite with her anglophone father in British Columbia. I examine what Kathy Mezei calls the “domestic effects” of women’s autobiographical practices, the significance of interior spaces to the shaping of memory and the construction of an emergent self. Castrée draws Goglu in domestic spaces that are at once punitive and protective to convey the disjunction between a desire for home and its often brutal reality. My reading of Susceptible take Smith and Watson’s image of “the rumpled bed” of contemporary female autobiography literally to explore how beds and blankets are braided throughout Castrée’s work as material, metaphoric, and metonymic sites of memory. I argue that Castrée depicts her childhood bed as an ambivalent topos of security and anxiety. The bed becomes the privileged signifier of the domestic effects that form Goglu’s subjective memories, which are filtered through cultural memories particular to the political locations of her 1980s post-Quiet Revolution, pro-separatist Québécoise childhood. Goglu’s emergence as a speaking subject is shaped by the national traumas of the 1989 Montreal Massacre and the movement for Quebec sovereignty as well as the historical effects of outmigration, the Catholic Church, and the regulation of women’s bodies on modern Québécoise identity. The paper concludes by extending this analysis to Castrée’s 2015 series of self-portraits, “Blankets Are Always Sleeping”, in order to reflect on how images of the sleeping cartoonist were mobilized on social media after her untimely death in June 2016. I conclude that the phenomenon of online collective mourning expanded the visual braiding of beds throughout her autobiographical comics to the collective biographical work of memorialization in ways that sometimes sentimentalize and depoliticize her complex relationship to the domestic effects of beds

The Seeing Eye of Scientific Graphic Biography

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/58594

The burden of the body : selfhood and representation in the works of Dionne Brand

The works of Dionne Brand constitute an ongoing exploration of the formation and representation of the self. In the poems of No Language is Neutral (1990) and Land to Light On (1997), the short stories of Sans Souci (1989), and the novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996), Brand develops a notion of subjectivity in which the interior self strives for full expression through the performances of its body. The self's ability to determine its corporeal performances, however, is regulated by social forces which 'read' bodies according to hierarchies of difference. This circumscription of performativity is particularly acute for Brand's Black female characters, whose bodies are regulated within the social sphere according to hierarchies of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Because their bodies are perceived as different and therefore 'other,' Brand's characters cannot simply assume performative agency, but rather must struggle to articulate their selfhood through bodily performances which evade dominant regulations. Ironically, the body is at once the site of regulation and of resistance. Brand's works locate subjectivity within the corporeal to emphasize that desires--whether for a whole self, for an other, for a home, or for full expression--transgress dominant regulations of their bodies. This study approaches the texts thematically to assert that Brand's representation of Black female subjectivity is a critique of the discursive limitations which regulate the Black female body, as well as a representation of the agency possible through various alternative bodily performances

Introduction: “Indigenous Comics And Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography”

With contributions by Niigaan James Sinclair, Sonya Ballantyne, Jay Odjick, Taylor Daigneault, and Amy Mazowita.   NOTE: This is an introduction to the open access online resource, “Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography,” posted at <http://jeunessejournal.ca/index.php/yptc/resources>.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2019.000

Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography

The primary focus of this Annotated Bibliography is comics by self-identified Indigenous creators and publishers working in Canada and the United States, although where possible we have included Indigenous comics from outside North America. We have attempted to include as many titles as possible up until March, 2019, but this will always be an incomplete list and we regret any omissions or oversights. We regard this Annotated Bibliography as a preliminary work and hope it can serve as the basis for more in-depth work in the expanding field of Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels. For a more extensive guide to comics and graphic novels featuring Indigenous characters and stories (including those by non-Indigenous creators), see the Mazinbiige Indigenous Graphic Novel Collection at the University of Manitoba Library: https://libguides.lib.umanitoba.ca/mazinbiige. For more information about this project, see Introduction: "Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography” in Jeunesse, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp. 139-55 (2019). This resource will be updated twice a year, in July and December. Please send any suggestions for additions or revisions to Candida Rifkind ([email protected]).   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2019.000

Excavating Childhood: Fairytales, Monsters and Abuse Survival in Lynda Barry’s What It Is

This article investigates the excavation of abused childhood in Lynda Barry’s What It Is. Looking at the centrality of childish play, fairy tales and the Gorgon in the protagonist’s effort to cope with maternal abuse, it argues that comics complicate the life narrative and allow the feminist reconfiguration of the monstrous mother of Western psychoanalysis and art

When Mounties were Modern Kitsch: The Serial Seductions of Renfrew of the Mounted

When Mounties were Modern Kitsch: The Serial Seductions of Renfrew of the Mounte