I’m looking forward to the Comics and Medicine 2018 conference in Vermont in August. This is one of my favorite conferences and I try to attend every year. I love the cross-disciplinary, cross-practice (health, art, conceptual) aspect of the conference. This year I’m presenting a paper called “Graphic Trauma: Drawing as working through sexual violence.” Here’s my abstract:

Stories of sexual harassment and assault are currently reverberating through US cultural and political life, and #metoo has become shorthand for the hard work of testifying to experiences of violence and trauma and the difficult working through of feelings of pain and anger. We have also seen in recent years the publication of several graphic narratives that deal with sexual violence and its aftermath. In this presentation, I will explore some examples of what I call graphic trauma, a process of drawing as a form of working through the experience and event of sexual violence. In a conversation between comics critic Hillary Chute and comics artist Scott McCloud, Chute uses the phrase “the secret labor of comics” to emphasize the hidden work involved in what McCloud describes as the choices comics creators have to make in terms of “what moments to include in a story and what moments to leave out.”[1]

A key aspect of the comics form, then, is the necessity of what Chute describes as the work of condensation and distillation. Thus, I want to explore the possibility of graphic narratives as a medium well-suited for rendering trauma, and in particular the trauma of sexual violence as exemplified in Una’s Becoming Unbecoming and Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! These works show how young women often first experience sex and sexuality as traumatic, because at the moment they are becoming sexual, their sexuality is taken away from them by a violent experience. Drawing for Una and Barry becomes a means by which they demonstrate resilience, the hard work of accessing what one can’t remember and what one can’t forget at the same time.

[1]Hillary Chute, Interview with Scott McCloud, Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 29.