Graphic bodies: Picturing feminised pathology, narrating resistance

Sundaram, Neeraja (2017) Graphic bodies: Picturing feminised pathology, narrating resistance. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 24 (2). pp. 236-265. ISSN 0971-5215

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Abstract

This article studies three graphic memoirs by women, Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen, Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles and Leah Hayes’ Not Funny Ha-Ha, to explore the use of the graphic form in the narrating of an experience of illness. I argue here that these writers engage the graphic form to visualise female embodiment as always already pathologised, even prior to the onset of illness. By making explicit the medical and socio-cultural scrutiny of female bodily practices, these texts interrogate the unequal structural relationship between the sign of gender female and the healthy/sick binary set up by mainstream illness narratives. This article also proposes that these graphic memoirs of illness by women perform a resistant femininity in narrative by refusing a linear progression from diagnosis to cure. The texts instead make visible their myriad sources, in the form of incoherent speech, unedited data, photographs and letters among others, thus refusing unity and coherence in the narrating self.

Item Type:	Article
Authors:	Sundaram, Neeraja
Document Language:	Language English
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Graphic novel, memoir, illness, narrative, autopathography, body
Subjects:	Social sciences > Sociology & anthropology > Culture & institutions Technology > Medicine & health > Diseases Literature & rhetoric
Divisions:	Azim Premji University - Bengaluru > School of Arts and Sciences
Full Text Status:	Public
URI:	http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/7291
Publisher URL:	https://doi.org/10.1177/0971521517697889

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