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.
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 (2015). Drawing from work on mental illness, social justice, and graphic medicine, I investigate the narrativization of the autobiographical subject's suffering through the comics medium. My aim is to show how Becoming Unbecoming counters the silences and stereotypes existing around the sexuality of abused and mentally ill women and girls. In her attempt to represent the symptoms of PTSD --itself the outcome of sexual violence --and to remove stigma from female rape survivors, Una makes use of braiding and metaphors in her narrative. These allow for a complex demonstration of PTSD symptoms and of the autobiographical subject's desire for (sexual) intimacy as she grows up. In this way, Becoming Unbecoming breaks into the silence and challenges the stereotypes that render the sexuality of (mentally ill) women and girls invisible at best and perverse at worst.
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 intertextual 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 to complicate the representation of Minnie's sexual objectification, Gloeckner fuses traces related to the negotiation of the female nude body traced in Duchamp's and Courbet's patriarchal, canonical art, and in Carolee Schneeman's and Judy Chicago's second-wave feminist art. I argue that the graphic memoir introduces Gloeckner as an active consumer of past artworks by performing her feminist reading and reinterpretation of them, and thus, it proposes ways of critically consuming gender formations that reach us via art, literature and social media. My aim is to stress the value of A Child's Life, particularly at the time of #MeToo, a period when we are surrounded by testimonies of sexual abuse told by girls and women, while simultaneously being bombarded with their sexualizing images reaching us through the media.
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