graphic medicine

Reading notes: drawing en abyme

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I have begun working on a new project called “Comics panels and file cabinets: Inside Alison Bechdel’s queer archives.” In this project, I will explore Bechdel’s queer archives—that is, both her comics in the archives and her comics as an archive of queer life. I am interested in two kinds of containers—panels in comics and file cabinets in archives—and what and how they document. I will visit Bechdel’s archives at the Sophie Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College to do research on Bechdel’s life and work, but also to get a feeling for her archive and her practices of documenting. Before heading to Smith this summer, I have been re-reading Bechdel’s work—not exactly systematically, as I started with Fun Home and then read The Secret of Superhuman Strength. Right now, I am devouring The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. Are You My Mother?awaits, promising more pleasure in re-reading. My earlier work on Bechdel’s comics has led to my interest in her archive and what it enacts as an archive and in her comics.[1]

But for this reading notes post, I want to take a moment to look at two paired panels in Bechdel’s Secret of Superhuman Strength that capture her creative process and demonstrates a concept and practice I call “drawing en abyme.” I first presented on drawing en abyme at the Comics and Medicine Conference in Dundee, Scotland in 2016, and I further developed the concept in a keynote address for the Curating Health: Graphic Medicine and Visual Representations of Illness, organized by the Nordic Network for Gender, Body and Health in Stockholm in 2018. Some of that address was posted on The Polyphony blog as “Graphic Medicine en abyme: drawing sketching-as-therapy in Ellen Forney’s Marbles.” I have also used this concept to discuss mirrors and mirroring in graphic Frankenstein narratives. I describe drawing en abyme as a method-image for thinking about how graphic narratives stage identity as a process of becoming through drawing. I have discussed at length the mirror as a prominent prop and visual trope in many graphic narratives, including in Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

[Screen grab of detail from p. 172 of Alison Bechdel, The Secret of Superhuman Strength (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021).]

In Secret of Superhuman Strength, we see this staging with a different prop—a digital camera—used as part of a drawing process that Bechdel explains in a caption “now involved many layers of preparatory sketches” (172; figure 1). The two panels depicting Bechdel’s process are at the bottom of a 6-panel page in which Bechdel juxtaposes images of an intense exercise program that she adopts to match her intense work schedule. In the second tier of two square panels, we see Bechdel on an exercise bike struggling to catch her breath and on her back on the floor trying to slow her heart rate during a tachycardia episode. Bechdel then expresses frustration that she couldn’t “increase her drawing speed by sheer force of will,” explaining that her “process had grown progressively more laborious over the years…” (172). In the left panel, we see a digital camera on a tripod in the foreground with the camera’s viewfinder framing a photo of Bechdel in the center of the panel pouring whiskey from a bottle into a glass. This doubling is then repeated with a difference in the right panel in which the viewer is in the position of the cartoonist, who holds the camera in her left hand with an enlarged close up of the image the hands, bottle, and glass as the right hand sketches the image in a panel-in-process on the page. The left panel includes a caption in the bottom right that reads, “first digital camera” and the right panel has a caption in the middle above the camera that says, “my comic strip.” This is Bechdel at her meta-best! We have a drawing of a staging of a digital photo and then a drawing of a drawing of the digital photo which stages for us Bechdel’s process of drawing her comic strip.

[1] I have written about Bechdel’s practice of graphic analysis, which I define as a “long and difficult therapeutic and creative process of doing and undoing the self in words and images” in her graphic narrative Are You My Mother? Lisa Diedrich, “Graphic analysis: Transitional phenomena in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?,” Configurations 22 (Fall 2014), 183-203. I have also taken up Bechdel’s work as an example of documenting health activism in comics in, Lisa Diedrich, “Drawing Health Activism: Illness Politics and Practices of Care in Graphic AIDS Narratives,” in Lester Friedman and Theresa Jones, eds. Handbook of Health and Media (New York and London: Routledge, 2022), 346-359.

Teaching illness & the politics of care

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Fall 2022

This coming semester I’ll be teaching two undergraduate classes on illness and the politics of care: Documenting Mental Illness and Life/Death | Health/Justice. The syllabuses for these classes are below. In both classes, I work with comics and graphic narratives (and many other genres and forms). Check out my piece on Comics as Pedagogy: On Studying Illness in a Pandemic. Despite a push to return to “normal,” we’re still in a pandemic, which impacts our experiences in the classroom. I am committed to working together with students to create a flexible and inclusive space for learning that takes seriously the themes of these classes: the need to think creatively about our practices of healing and spaces of care. This includes the space in which we study mental health and illness in a pandemic.

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lifedeath-healthjusticeDownload

Portals into a field: connecting across & through keywords/images in graphic medicine

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2022 Graphic Medicine Conference, Chicago

Friday, July 15 | 3pm

Briana Martino and I will moderate a panel at the 2022 Graphic Medicine Conference in Chicago that will showcase a variety of contributions to our Keywords/images in Graphic Medicine book project. This project is a verbal and visual resource into the formal elements, theoretical concepts, practical and pedagogical tools, and health and illness politics of the field of graphic medicine. We are inspired by the work of literary and cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams and his book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, a text that articulates the politics of such a vocabulary. As the keywords framework risks reducing graphic medicine to only one component of the form, we have coined the term keyimages to indicate the significance of images, separate from and in relation to words, in the emergence and enactment of the field of graphic medicine. Keyimages are visual tropes and iconography used by comics artists in their work, as well as aspects of the comics form that help create the vocabulary of graphic medicine. Or, in relation to the theme of this conference, keyimages create a connective tissue between graphic medicine practitioners across disciplines and domains (the arts, healthcare, academia, etc.). Our project demonstrates how graphic medicine/illness comics are symptomatic texts of our time: that is, texts that literally describe symptoms (and struggle with finding a form to describe the affective and physical experience of symptoms), and texts that describe illness as an event that goes beyond any individual’s experience and account of it, reflecting wider cultural categories, including race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Panelists & their keywords/images: 

  • Savita Rani: PERFORMATIVE
  • Kay Sohini: WINDOWS + CLIMATE
  • Emmy Waldman: OCD
  • Brian Fies: CANCER
  • A. David Lewis: CANCER 

Virtual presentations (available on the Graphic Medicine Conference website):

  • benjamin lee hicks: VISIBILITY + CARE
  • Luke Jackson: IVF
  • Kara Pernicano: EMOJI
  • Amritha Radhakrishnan: CHRONIC PAIN
  • Sofia Varino: SOLVING/SOLUTIONS
  • Justin Wigard: UNFLATTENING

EYES keyimage collage includes images from (clockwise from top left): Jaime Cortez, Sexile; Èlodie Durand, Parenthesis; Nick Sousanis, Unflattening; David B. Epileptic; Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters.

Life/Death | Health/Justice

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Fall 2021

lifedeath-healthjustice-syllabus-fa21Download
[Image description: Screen grab from the film Wit. The camera looks down from the ceiling of Dr. Bearing’s hospital room. She lies unconscious on her bed at the center of the shot. Her nurse Susie leans over her and holds her head gently in her hands.]

One thing that can be said for an eight-month course of cancer treatment: it is highly educational. I am learning to suffer.

                        —Prof. Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson’s Wit

In fact, the Hmong view of health care seemed to me to be precisely the opposite of the prevailing American one, in which the practice of medicine has fissioned into smaller and smaller subspecialties, with less and less truck between bailiwicks. The Hmong carried holism to its ultima Thule. As my web of cross-references grew more and more thickly interlaced, I concluded that the Hmong preoccupation with medical issues was nothing less than a preoccupation with life. (And death. And life after death.)

                        —Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

To me, disability is not a monolith, nor is it a clear-cut binary of disabled and nondisabled. Disability is mutable and ever-evolving. Disability is both apparent and nonapparent. Disability is pain, struggle, brilliance, abundance, and joy. Disability is sociopolitical, cultural, and biological. Being visible and claiming a disabled identity brings risks as much as it brings pride.

                        —Alice Wong, Disability Visibility

I conceive of care as the way someone comes to matter and the corresponding ethics of attending to the other who matters.

                        —Lisa Stevenson, Life Beside Itself

In this course, we will explore big questions about life and death and health and justice. We will investigate these questions through several case studies, moving from experiences of ill and disabled bodies in the world to the way global events and structures affect those experiences, and back again. Our first series of case studies will look at various relationships within the institution of medicine: between doctors and patients, patients and nurses, doctors and nurses, etc. As we analyze these relationships, we will consider the way knowledge, power, and choice gets expressed in and through these relationships. Our second series of case studies will expand out from specific relationships within medicine to larger global events and structures that affect the health of peoples throughout the world, historically and in the present. In the most general terms, we are interested in being, doing, and becoming in relation to illness and disability experiences and events, therapeutic thought and practices, and clinical and caring institutions and spaces. We will explore biopolitical issues, including the social determinants of health and structural violence, to address why some people are at greater risk for illness and premature death than others. We will also explore disability justice as a practice of care. Some of our organizing questions for the semester include: Why and how are illness and disability political? What factors impact health? What constitutes good care? How can we improve access and deliver better care? 

Life/Death | Health/Justice syllabus

Keywords and Keyimages in Graphic Medicine

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Panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference 2021

Saturday, January 9, 2021 | 10:15-11:30am

Medical Humanities and Health Studies Forum

I will be presiding over a session at the MLA conference in 2021 that will demonstrate graphic medicine in action using a keywords and keyimages framework. We will have six lightning presentations on examples of verbal and visual tropes illustrating the formal elements, theoretical concepts, practical and pedagogical tools, and health and illness politics of the field of graphic medicine. Please join us!

Tracing of mirror frame from Alison Bethel’s Are You My Mother?

Presentations:

‘And None of It Fits inside Panels’: Graphic Silence in Graphic Medicine

Briana Martino, Simmons University

The Therapeutic Performance in, and of, Ian Williams’s The Bad Doctor

Anna Mukamal, Stanford University

Dialogic Diagnostics

Elizabeth J. Donaldson, New York Institute. of Technology, Old Westbury

Sustainable Wellness in Seven Generations

Rosemary J. Jolly, Penn State University, University Park

Assembly: The Work of Grief

Tahneer Oksman, Marymount Manhattan College

‘Birthgiving’ Comics and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Korea

Haejoo Kim, Syracuse University

Comics & Medicine freshman seminar

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I’m teaching a freshman seminar on Comics & Medicine in the Science and Society undergraduate college at Stony Brook University this spring.

I’ve been working on the syllabus and here’s the almost-final draft:

Comics and Medicine syllabus

This is the description of the course from the syllabus:

In recent years, comics and graphic narratives have become a popular and innovative form for telling auto/biographical stories in a medium that artfully combines words and images. Our course will focus on one exciting sub-field of the form known as graphic medicine, which explores the conjuncture between comics and clinical medicine. We will discuss how comics and graphic narratives have become important resources for communicating a range of ethical and clinical issues related to the experience of illness, and how this hybrid verbal/visual form helps medical practitioners, patients, families, and caregivers creatively reimagine the boundaries of “health,” “illness,” “life,” and “death.” We will investigate the ways that graphic medicine/illness narratives can be read as symptomatic texts of our time in at least two respects: as texts that literally describe symptoms (and struggle with finding a form to describe the affective and physical experience of symptoms), and as texts that describe illness as an event that goes beyond any particular individual’s experience and account of it, reflecting wider cultural categories, including race, gender, class, and sexuality.

The image on the left is from David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger, and Marguerite van Cook’s 7 Miles a Second and the image on the right is from MK Czerwiec’s Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371. Both are portraits of the artists: in one, Czerwiec stands before and is dwarfed by one of the huge Keith Haring murals at Rush University where Czerwiec studied nursing; in the other, Romberger and van Cook portray Wojnarowicz at work spray-painting a canvas. Above the artist and his canvas, an image of Wojnarowicz’s lover Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS in 1987, looks down. After I initially mis-characterized this image as a Wojnarowicz self-portrait, Romberger kindly wrote to inform me that he and van Cook created it “informed by specifics that I knew well as his friend: the layout of his apartment and that he had that particular photo of Peter on the wall, that he is working on that particular hopeful painting he did of a cosmic scientist, and doing it wearing a protective mask, necessary for a person with AIDS working with aerosol paint and which also comments ironically on the text about him breathing the air his dead friends cannot.” The caption at the top is from Wojnarowicz’s writing and begins, “I’m acutely aware of myself alive and witnessing.”

These are two of the texts we will explore in Comics & Medicine. There is so much to say, as these two images of a page and panel suggest.

 

Comics and Medicine 2017: Unpacking Building Stories

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As anyone who reads my blog will know, one of my favorite annual conferences is the Comics and Medicine Conference organized by the Graphic Medicine collective. The reason I love this conference is that it brings together a diverse mix of people and projects: comics artists, health practitioners, and academics who teach and write about comics and graphic narratives. My recent work explores the conjunction of illness, thought, and activism in different times and places, and the Comics and Medicine Conference has shaped how I approach this conjunction.

This year the Comics and Medicine Conference is in Seattle and the theme is Access Points. The conference artwork was designed by ET Russian, artist, performer, and creator of the Ring of Fire zine, which is a remarkable document of queer/crip as a way of life.

I am presenting a paper called “Unpacking Building Stories at home and in the classroom.”

Chris Ware’s Building Stories is all about access, not as a condition of being but as a becoming that is enacted in everyday life through the interaction between bodies and environments. In this presentation, I consider Ware’s “building stories” as his title indicates we might, with building read both as: 1. a verb, emphasizing how stories are built and crafted; and 2. an adjective, suggesting the stories of a building, not simply those stories of its inhabitants, but stories that the building itself tells with a kind of agency that Ware seeks to give the reader access to through graphic form as much as through narrative. Building Stories tells the story of an unnamed disabled woman with a prosthetic leg, but the objects and spaces that surround and sustain her have a kind of agency too.

We can’t read Building Stories in a conventional way. The stories come in a box that we explore by unpacking its contents. The box contains several cloth-bound and stapled books, differently shaped and sized pamphlets, posters, a large folded board that opens into quadriptych of the building and its occupants, etc. The phenomenology of “reading” building stories is very different from the phenomenology of reading a typical book or comic book. In the process of exploring the contents, our taken-for-granted reading practices are challenged; we are made to feel both disoriented and invigorated in the process of unpacking. Building Stories was one of the required texts in my Cultures of Dis/ability class this past spring, and thus, I also discuss the phenomenology of unpacking Building Stories in relation to teaching the text. In teaching Building Stories I had students explore the text at home and in small groups in the classroom in relation to a larger discussion of how dis/ability is enacted in different spaces. In reading Building Stories in the classroom, we asked questions about access in terms of both the spaces that facilitate (or not) inclusion and participation and in terms of the stories we build in and about those spaces.

Graphic Medicine 2016: Stages & Pages

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It was lovely to spend a weekend in Dundee, Scotland for the Graphic Medicine Conference at the University of Dundee. Despite coming on the heels of the Brexit vote (or perhaps because of–Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in Europe), the city and university provided a perfect location for doing graphic medicine. The University of Dundee is home to the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies and the vibrant DeeCAP (Dundee Comics/Art/Performance) scene. Participants were treated to fabulous keynotes (by Elisabeth El Refaie, Al Davison, and Lynda Barry, who also taught a comics and writing workshop with Dan Chaon). Check out the #stagespages hashtag on Twitter.

Comics&Medicine cfp image

I presented on a panel with Ariella Freedman (Concordia University), Andrew Godfrey (University of Dundee), and Sarah Hildebrand (CUNY-Graduate Center). Andrew was one of the main organizers of the conference and created the fabulous image for the conference above.

Our panel,”Performing Illness,” blended the theoretical and the personal in order to reflect on “illness as performance” in graphic narratives. Calling attention to both form and function, we analyzed how the genre shapes and is shaped by the experience of being ill, and how we might more critically engage with Graphic Medicine by making our own readings more performative. We asked: If comics are indeed stages upon which authors perform their illness, how might Graphic Medicine be used as a filter through which to view and respond to other people’s experiences, as well as our own? How might the subject “become” through drawing? And how might a better understanding of the performativity of patienthood help us break down obstacles to care?

Below is the abstract to my paper, “Drawing en abyme: staging illness and identity in graphic narratives” (for the sake of time, my paper focused mostly on drawing en abyme in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?).

Jules Valera, a comics artist from Dundee, sketched our panel presenting our papers. You can’t get more meta than being drawn while presenting on drawing en abyme! That’s Jules on the right with her drawing of Sarah and Andrew in the middle presenting his own drawing en abyme.

Meta-drawing-en-abymePerforming IllnessJules Valera's drawing of Sarah Hildebrand

 

“Drawing en abyme: staging illness and identity in graphic narratives”

In a reading of Jacques Derrida’s use of the concept of mise en abyme[1] as a “fundamental operation of the text” that is “synonymous with textuality” itself, art historian and critical theorist Craig Owens argues that what the mise en abyme does is show how representation is staged in the text.[2] For Derrida, the mise en abyme stages the staged-ness of textuality—textuality en abyme. With this double operation in mind, Owens discusses photography in general and several photographs with mirrors in particular—a “photography en abyme,” arguing that what is depicted in such photographs is not some truth of identity, but “the process of becoming self-reflective.”[3] I want to extend Owens’s extension of Derrida’s use of the concept mise en abyme in order to explore the double operation of what I call drawing en abyme in graphic narratives. Graphic narratives work formally to deconstruct subjectivity in general and the experience of illness in particular. By emphasizing the subject as becoming through drawing, graphic narratives work to render the subject not as something one is, but rather as something one does, in relation to nonhuman objects and other human subjects.[4] Through particular formal elements, including drawing en abyme, graphic narratives demonstrate the ongoing and recursive processes of subjectification and de-subjectification. In this paper, I will explore in particular the way the representation of illness and identity is staged through the doubling of mirrors, photographs, and other imaging technologies in the graphic narratives of Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, and Brian Fies.

[1] According to the OED, the phrase “mise en abyme” describes the heraldic device in which a shield includes a smaller version of itself at its center. Andre Gide borrowed the term from heraldry to suggest the device of self-reflection in psychological novels.

[2] Craig Owens, “Photography en abyme,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 20.

[3] Ibid, 22. Owens discusses Brassaï’s “Groupe joyeux au bal musette” (1932), Lady Clementina Haywarden’s “At the Window” (c. 1964), and Robert Smithson’s series “Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9).” In his essay, Owens is interested in historicizing the device of photography en abyme in relation to the changing understanding of subjectivity in modernity and postmodernity. Although beyond the scope of this essay, I find Owens’s analysis useful in contemplating the concept of self-reflexivity expressed in the age of the selfie.

[4] I am, of course, drawing on Judith Butler’s theorization of gender as something we do, and are compelled to do, not something we are or have as a kind of attribute, as first articulated in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). I am also drawing on the work of Annemarie Mol, who describes illness as “something being done to you, the patient. And something that, as a patient, you do,” The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 20.