Reflections on the Boom of Graphic Pathography
The Effects and Affects of Narrating Disability and Illness in Comics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21792575 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gesine Wegner (Technische Universität Dresden, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 57-74 |
| Publication date | 2020-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1757-6458 • E-ISSN: 1757-6466 |
| Publisher | Liverpool University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3828/jlcds.2019.18 |
| OpenAlex | W2952367469 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
| References cited | 24 |
Over the past decade, autobiographical comics that focus on experiences of illness and disability—a genre also known as “graphic pathography”—have not only received increasing recognition from literary critics and scholars but have also sparked an unprecedented interest in comics by health professionals. This article contextualizes and critically reflects on the increasing popularity of autobiographical comics and their frequent engagement with experiences of illness and disability. What effect does the merging of the textual mode and the visual mode have on the affective strategies employed by graphic memoirs of illness and disability? Considering the affective strategies they employ, what cultural work is done by these memoirs? In this article, I problematize some of the cultural assumptions that form the basis for the current popularity of graphic pathographies in the US and their use in medical training. Rather than a mere critique of medical practices, graphic illness, and disability narratives not only reflect but also reinforce medicine’s typical reliance on the visual mode. This analysis sheds light on, among other things, the ocularcentrism that takes effect whenever visual modes of storytelling are privileged in order to create emotional and thus supposedly meaningful responses to disability
Aesthetics · Art · Comics · Disability studies · Literature · Memoir · Narrative · Popularity · Sociology · Storytelling · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Computer Science · Digital Storytelling and Education · Gender Studies · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Psychology · Social Psychology
‘Don’t worry. It’s just the baby blues’
“Systems that make humans inhumane”
Comic Artists’ Navigation of Trauma, Affect, and Representation
Coloring Outside the Lines
Who Sees and Who’s Seen in Graphic Medicine
Skin Scarred by Structural Violence
Composing Crip Corporealities, or Decomposing Comics, in Dumb and Dancing After TEN
Crip Empathography
Cripping Empathy in Graphic Medicine
‘There were days I felt empty’
Barriers Remain
Between abjection and fetishization. Challenges of writing about emotional othering in Disability Studies
Staring How We Look
Narrative Medicine
Graphic medicine
Death, Disability, and the Superhero
Embracing Disorientation in the Disability Studies Classroom
Signifying Bodies
An Introduction to Visual Culture
Using Graphic Novels in the High School Classroom
Literature and Medicine, Future Tense
Tenderness and Steadiness
Teaching with Comics
Graphic medicine
Disability in comic books and graphic narratives
Not forgetting happiness
Is There a Body in This Text? Embodiment in Graphic Somatography
Screening the Body
Reflections About Images,Visual Culture, and Educational Research
Media and the Rhetoric of Body Perfection
The Trauma of Diagnosis
Autography's Biography, 1972-2007
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2025 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |