RT info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
T1 Assembling crip archives: disability and illness in north american graphic narratives
A1 Díaz Cano, Coral Anaid
A2 Programa de Doctorado en Arte y Humanidades
K1 Análisis literario
K1 Narrativa gráfica
K1 Discapacidad
AB This dissertation studies three graphic narratives published in the United States andCanada that engage with representations of disability and illness: David Small’s Stitches:A Memoir (2009), Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me(2012), and Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me(2010). It develops an interdisciplinary approach that draws on disability studies, criptheory, and comics theory to explore how the authors of these texts construct crip archivesto interpret their embodied experiences away from normalizing discourses. Disabilitystudies contests the pathologization of bodyminds that do not conform to ableist norms.Within this framework, the political/relational model encompasses the manifoldunderstandings of disability and illness, acknowledging that the reality of impairmentsometimes entails trauma and medical intervention. Similarly, the subversive andcontestatory practices produced by crip theorists engage with the most negative, painfulaspects of the lived experiences of disabled bodyminds while affirming the knowledgesthat derive from them. The conceptualizations of crip time and futurity are thus crucial toinvestigate the uncanny temporalities of disability and illness portrayed in these graphicnarratives. In addition, this project builds on comics theory to vertebrate a study of therepresentational strategies used by these autobiographical cartoonists to capture theirdrawn selves. Specifically, the visual analysis focuses on the major formal properties ofthe medium and the network of relationships formed on the page. My reading of Stitchesoffers a critical discussion of the complexities of disability and its linkage to illness andpain. Articulating Small’s depictions of his own bodily interiors as crip potentiality, theanalysis suggests that this text composes a cripistemology of his situated experience ofcancer and voicelessness. My chapter on Marbles examines the textual and graphicdevices employed by the author to visualize bipolar disorder through her archivalpractices. Composed of internal and external sources, Forney’s archive also exhibits herexhaustive self-surveillance procedures and her refusal to be a passive recipient ofhealthcare. In Tangles, Leavitt exploits the fragmentation of the graphic form to compilea crip project that destabilizes ableist understandings of time, showing both the cruelprogress of Alzheimer’s disease and the precious moments that she shared with hermother. Ultimately, this research finds that these crip archives reject the portrayal ofdisabled bodyminds as sources of individual tragedies and medical oppression. Instead they devise and assemble graphic testimonies that resist ableist coherence andcompulsory able-bodiedness.
YR 2021
FD 2021
LK http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/28285
UL http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/28285
LA en
DS Repositorio institucional de la Universidad de La Laguna
RD 16-may-2024