Drawing in the margins : identity and subjectivity in contemporary autobiographical comics

[À l'origine dans / Was originally part of : Thèses et mémoires - FAS - Département d'études anglaises]Mon projet de thèse démontre comment le genre de la bande dessinée peut être mobilisé de façon à déstabiliser les idéologies identitaires dominantes dans un contexte autobiographique. À partir de théories contemporaines de récits de vie et de leurs emphase sur la construction du sujet au travers du processus autobiographique, j’explore les façons par lesquelles les propriétés formelles de la bande dessinée permettent aux artistes féminines et minoritaires d’affirmer leurs subjectivités et de s’opposer aux idéaux hégémoniques reliés à la représentation du genre, du traumatisme, de la sexualité, de l’ethnicité, et du handicap, en s’auto-incarnant à même la page de bande dessinée. Par une analyse visuelle formelle, ma thèse prouve que les esthétiques hyper-personnelles du dessin à la main découlant d’une forme ancrée dans l’instabilité générique et le (re)mixage continu des codes verbaux et visuels permettent aux artistes de déstabiliser les régimes de représentation conventionnels dans une danse complexe d’appropriation et de resignification qui demeure toujours ouverte à la création de nouveaux sens. Suite à l’introduction, mon second chapitre explique la résistance de Julie Doucet par rapport aux plaisirs visuels découlant de la contemplation des femmes dans la bande dessinée par son utilisation du concept originairement misogyne de la matérialité féminine grotesque comme principe génératif à partir duquel elle articule une critique de la forme et du contenu des représentations normatives et restrictives du corps féminin. Le troisième chapitre considère la capacité de la bande dessinée à représenter le traumatisme, et se penche sur les efforts de Phoebe Gloeckner visant à faire face aux abus sexuels de son enfance par l’entremise d’un retour récursif sur des souvenirs visuels fondamentaux. Le chapitre suivant maintient que la nature sérielle de la bande dessinée, sa multimodalité et son association à la culture zine, fournissent à Ariel Schrag les outils nécessaires pour expérimenter sur les codes visuels et verbaux de façon à décrire et à affirmer le sens identitaire en flux de l’adolescent queer dans sa quadrilogie expérimentale Künstlerroman. Le cinquième chapitre suggère que l’artiste de provenance Libanaise Toufic El Rassi utilise la forme visuelle pour dénoncer les mécanismes générateurs de préjugés anti-Arabes, et qu’il affirme son identité grâce au pouvoir de rhétorique temporaire que lui procure l’incarnation d’un stéréotype connu. Mon dernier chapitre démontre comment Al Davison emploie la bande dessinée pour mettre en scène des rencontres d’observations dynamiques avec le spectateur implicite pouvant potentiellement aider l’auteur à éviter le regard objectivant généralement associé à la perception du handicap.This dissertation argues that the comics form can be mobilized to destabilize dominant notions of identity in an autobiographical context. Drawing on current theories of life writing that stress the construction of the self through the autobiographical process, it explores how the specific formal properties of comics provide opportunities for women and minority artists to assert subjectivity and contend with hegemonic ideas concerning the representation of gender, trauma, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability through the embodiment of the self on the comics page. Through formal visual analysis, the dissertation shows how the highly personal and hand-drawn aesthetics of a form that thrives on generic instability and the continual (re)mixing of verbal and visual codes allows artists to destabilize conventional representational schemes in a complex dance of appropriation and resignification that is always open to the creation of new meanings. Following the introduction, Chapter 2 shows how Julie Doucet resists the visual pleasure associated with looking at women in comics by using the originally misogynistic concept of grotesque female materiality as a generative principle from where she articulates a critique in both form and content of normative and restricting representations of the female body. Chapter 3 examines the comics form’s ability to depict trauma, and focuses on Phoebe Gloeckner’s attempts to come to terms with childhood sexual abuse through a recursive return to key visual memories. Chapter 4 argues that the form’s serial nature, multimodality, and association with zine culture provides Ariel Schrag with the tools to experiment with visual and verbal codes in order to delineate and assert a sense of the in-flux and queer teenage self in an experimental four-volume Künstlerroman. Chapter 5 argues that Lebanese-born artist Toufic El Rassi uses the visual form to expose the mechanism behind the production of anti-Arab prejudice, and that he asserts personal identity through the temporary rhetorical power afforded by the inhabitation of a known stereotype. Chapter 6 shows how Al Davison employs the comics form to stage dynamic staring encounters with the implied observer that have the potential to help the author elude the objectifying gaze commonly associated with looking at disability

Working it through: Trauma and autobiography in Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and The Diary of a Teenage Girl

This article explores the relationship between autobiography, trauma, and comics in the work of Phoebe Gloeckner, and demonstrates through close readings how the visual and fragmented comics form can be mobilized both for therapeutic purposes and as a means to assert agency for a victim of trauma. Comics autobiography, crucially, externalize the self as a drawn visual representation on the page that is self-evidently other to the contractual author. This splitting of the subject into a narrating author and a narrated visual representation on the comics page is congenial to the representation of traumatic memories, which theorists have long recognized to be manifesting themselves as the intrusion of visual snapshots into normal consciousness. The comics form, further, functions as a kind of visual scriptotherapy, which allows the author to dissociate the traumatic memory onto the page and create a narrative from a series of disjointed memories. Readings of selected passages from Gloeckner’s two books A Child’s Life and The Diary of a Teenage Girl illustrate how her use of the comics form take advantage of its inherent ability to present traumatic memory and construct a literal eyewitness in the reader. Finally, the article argues that the form’s ability to establish narrative from fragmented, repetitious, and disjointed images allows Gloeckner to organize painful memories into a coherent sense of self, and in this way work through her trauma

“A Grotesque, Incurable Disease”: Whiteness as Illness in Gabby Schulz’s Sick

In Sick, his 2016 memoir about suffering from a mysterious illness, Gabby Schulz depicts himself as experiencing extreme pain, which he depicts on the page in the shape of monsters and gargoyles tormenting him. Under the pressure of a rising fever, Schulz eventually achieves a clarity of vision that allows him to see that the illness he suffers from is inseparable from his complicity as a white man in the many injustices of Western culture. This essay reads Sick as an extended meditation on racial whiteness, and argues that because whiteness in many comics is often naturalized as nothing more than an absence of signification on the typically white page, it mirrors the way racial whiteness has historically been conceptualized as invisible and universal. A horror story with whiteness as its monster, Sick works to make whiteness visible through drawn depictions of white racial identity morphing into increasingly disturbing images of the death and destruction upon which it rests

Comics, Form, and Anarchy

This article suggests a deep relationship between comics and anarchism. The examination of this fundamental relationship serves to illustrate how similar organizational and communicational principles are embedded within these two apparently disparate forms of human expression, and therefore also makes an argument for why an understanding of the history and form of comics is incomplete without a consideration of anarchism, and vice versa. In order to provide an example of how the two traditions have fruitfully cross-pollinated each other, I end by offering an examination of several anarchism-inflected underground comix from the American counterculture years and beyond, including a reading of perhaps the most explicit attempt to bear out this relationship in practice, namely the four-issue series Anarchy Comics (1978-1987). In my reading of Anarchy Comics, additionally, I expand my analysis beyond narrow structural concerns and discuss various other anarchism-inflected strategies of visual narrative available to comics makers, including such punk-inspired techniques as collage and the satirical redeployment of corporate comics and cartoon characters for subversive purposes. While my focus in what follows is thus largely on formal features, my argument ultimately aims to illuminate the relationship between comics and anarchism at the levels of both form and content