Olga Michael
Biographic Data
| ID | 1356327 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Olga Michael |
| GIVEN NAMES | Olga |
| FAMILY NAME | Michael |
| SIGNATURE | MICHAEL O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Lancashire |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0523-9929 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Decolonial chronotopes and palimpsestic heterotopias in Safdar Ahmed’s Still Alive
Refugee and asylum-seeker graphic storytelling constitutes a core segment of contemporary graphic life narrative. The texts belonging in this category articulate border-crossing experiences of subjects who become othered within Eurocentric media, legal, and other discourses. In expressing such life stories, these narratives often, but not always, counter injurious formations of border-crossing subjects, and they foreground the violence that becom…
Novel Reviews
Tiitu Takalo and Tiina Männistö-Funk, Polkimilla: Nyt, ennen ja tulevaisuudessa (Tampere: Suuri Kurpitsa, 2023), 168 pp., €28 (paperback). Safdar Ahmed, Still Alive: Graphic Reportage from Australia's Immigration Detention System (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books Inc., 2022), 222 pp., $30.00 (hardback)
Looking at the Perpetrator in Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland
Nina Bunjevac’s graphic memoir, Fatherland (2014), tells the story of her father, Peter Bunjevac, who died when she was a year old while preparing a bomb to attack the Yugoslavian Consulate in Toronto as part of his activities as a member of the Serbian terrorist group ‘Freedom for the Serbian Fatherland’. This man is depicted as a distant, elusive father, through an account that is marked by gaps and aporias, and which is based on historical and…
PTSD and female sexuality in the aftermath of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse in Una’s Becoming Unbecoming
In this essay, I examine the representation of female sexuality in the aftermath of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse and in the course of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Una’s Becoming Unbecoming. Drawing from work on mental illness, social justice, and graphic medicine, I investigate the narrativisation of the autobiographical subject’s suffering through the comics medium. My aim is to show how Becoming Unbecoming counters the sile…
Crossing, Conflict, and Diaspora in Cyprus and Beyond in Miranda Hoplaros and Lara Alphas’s The Sign-Maker
The Sign-Maker is a work of “graphic docufiction” that demonstrates how languages and signs reproduce conflict, colonial relations, and segregation. In addition, it foregrounds the function of spaces and monuments as “national topobiographies,” underscoring similarities between three different (post-)colonial areas. By highlighting maps and colonial uses of passports and passbooks, it also demonstrates its fictional characters’ diasporic fluidity…
Queering the Family, Reclaiming the Father
This essay argues that Alison Bechdel’s Proustian allusions in Fun Home structure queer gender and sexuality performances that allow Alison to reclaim and reunite with her distant and ultimately lost father. Thus, it points to the potential value of intertextual readings in identifying positive accounts of queer lives in the field of “autographics
Reading Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life and Other Stories at the Time of #MeToo
In this essay, I analyze the autobiographical subject's sexual suffering in Phoebe Gloeckner's graphic memoir, A Child's Life and Other Stories (2000), through an investigation of the cartoonist's reference to Marcel Duchamp's installation, Étant Donnés: 1° la Chute d'Eau, 2° le Gaz d'Eclairage (1944–66), and the tradition in which it is situated, which spans back to Gustave Gourbet's infamous painting, L’Origine du Monde (1866). I propose that t…
Excavating Childhood
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
Excavating Childhood
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
Excavating Childhood
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
Reading Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life and Other Stories at the Time of #MeToo
In this essay, I analyze the autobiographical subject's sexual suffering in Phoebe Gloeckner's graphic memoir, A Child's Life and Other Stories (2000), through an investigation of the cartoonist's reference to Marcel Duchamp's installation, Étant Donnés: 1° la Chute d'Eau, 2° le Gaz d'Eclairage (1944–66), and the tradition in which it is situated, which spans back to Gustave Gourbet's infamous painting, L’Origine du Monde (1866). I propose that t…
PTSD and female sexuality in the aftermath of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse in Una’s Becoming Unbecoming
In this essay, I examine the representation of female sexuality in the aftermath of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse and in the course of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Una’s Becoming Unbecoming. Drawing from work on mental illness, social justice, and graphic medicine, I investigate the narrativisation of the autobiographical subject’s suffering through the comics medium. My aim is to show how Becoming Unbecoming counters the sile…
Crossing, Conflict, and Diaspora in Cyprus and Beyond in Miranda Hoplaros and Lara Alphas’s The Sign-Maker
The Sign-Maker is a work of “graphic docufiction” that demonstrates how languages and signs reproduce conflict, colonial relations, and segregation. In addition, it foregrounds the function of spaces and monuments as “national topobiographies,” underscoring similarities between three different (post-)colonial areas. By highlighting maps and colonial uses of passports and passbooks, it also demonstrates its fictional characters’ diasporic fluidity…
Queering the Family, Reclaiming the Father
This essay argues that Alison Bechdel’s Proustian allusions in Fun Home structure queer gender and sexuality performances that allow Alison to reclaim and reunite with her distant and ultimately lost father. Thus, it points to the potential value of intertextual readings in identifying positive accounts of queer lives in the field of “autographics
Looking at the Perpetrator in Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland
Nina Bunjevac’s graphic memoir, Fatherland (2014), tells the story of her father, Peter Bunjevac, who died when she was a year old while preparing a bomb to attack the Yugoslavian Consulate in Toronto as part of his activities as a member of the Serbian terrorist group ‘Freedom for the Serbian Fatherland’. This man is depicted as a distant, elusive father, through an account that is marked by gaps and aporias, and which is based on historical and…
Decolonial chronotopes and palimpsestic heterotopias in Safdar Ahmed’s Still Alive
Refugee and asylum-seeker graphic storytelling constitutes a core segment of contemporary graphic life narrative. The texts belonging in this category articulate border-crossing experiences of subjects who become othered within Eurocentric media, legal, and other discourses. In expressing such life stories, these narratives often, but not always, counter injurious formations of border-crossing subjects, and they foreground the violence that becom…
Novel Reviews
Tiitu Takalo and Tiina Männistö-Funk, Polkimilla: Nyt, ennen ja tulevaisuudessa (Tampere: Suuri Kurpitsa, 2023), 168 pp., €28 (paperback). Safdar Ahmed, Still Alive: Graphic Reportage from Australia's Immigration Detention System (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books Inc., 2022), 222 pp., $30.00 (hardback)
Art (6 works) · Comics and Graphic Narratives (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Narrative (5 works) · Digital Storytelling and Education (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · History (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Memoir (3 works)