guest post by Monica Chiu, monica.chiu@unh.edu, University of New Hampshire
I’m a professor of English and American studies at the University of New Hampshire, where I teach courses in American literature, Asian American studies, race and ethnic studies, literature and medicine, and graphic narrative. The last two categories—literature and medicine and graphic narrative—held me captive for a long time. While at first I viewed them as separate entities, I began to image their inextricability. I also stumbled on the Graphic Medicine website about ten years ago, regularly reading the featured comics and reviews. I subsequently attended a Graphic Medicine conference held in White River Junction, Vermont, touring the Center for Cartoon Studies while there (it was across the street from the conference venues). Given all of this exposure to the medium, I acknowledged that graphic medicine draws out private responses and representations of suffering, anxiety, grief, and courage to encourage compassionate responses. I also knew that ill or impaired subjects wanted to be heard—to be seen—through their own devices, not through those offered by the medical establishment. Nobody had written a scholarly work on what graphic medicine can do, and how, so I plunged in.
Show Me Where It Hurts brings me full circle to my first book, based on my dissertation, which explored why Asian American characters in Asian American fiction by women often became ill. In this latest publication, Show Me, I examine how subjects in graphic medicine become sick or face challenges posed by an environment not conducive to a range of abilities. But given my interest in ethnic literature in general, in Asian American literature in particular, as I was writing Show Me I also wondered about the absence of graphic pathography by and about people of color, the subject of the book’s Coda. Whose dys-functional body (a term borrowed from Drew Leder), I inquired, is most often featured in the medium? If predominantly white bodies self-represent in graphic narrative, what does this glaring omission portend for the larger field of graphic medicine and its readers? To whom does medicine cater? Historically, black men and women unknowingly served as experimental bodies for medical science; meanwhile, Asian immigrant bodies were grounded in cultural narratives of both disease and palliation, the former playing out during the COVID 19 pandemic, the latter in their consideration as model minorities. In what unfortunate ways do images of black, yellow, and brown bodies intersect with illness and disability? How is an academic focus on comics by white subjects, in a dearth of comics by others, consciously exposing or unconsciously contributing to an historical convergence between race and disease? Approaches to black and brown cartoonists’ self-presentation are imperative, and perhaps the inquiries in my Coda will be the topic of a subsequent publication.
Show Me Where It Hurts: Manifesting Illness and Impairment in Graphic Pathography is now available from Penn State University Press!
You can find it here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09682-7.html
In Show Me Where It Hurts, Monica Chiu argues that graphic pathography—long-form comics by and about subjects who suffer from disease or are impaired—re-vitalizes and re-visions various negatively affected corporeal states through hand-drawn images. By the body and for the body, the medium is subversive and reparative, and it stands in contradistinction to clinical accounts of illness that tend to disembody or objectify the subject.
Employing affect theory, spatial theory, vital materialism, and approaches from race and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, disability studies, and comics studies, Chiu provides readings of recently published graphic pathography. Chiu argues that these kinds of subjective graphic stories, by virtue of their narrative and descriptive strengths, provide a form of resistance to the authoritative voice of biomedicine and serve as a tool to foster important change in the face of social and economic inequities when it comes to questions of health and healthcare. Show Me Where It Hurts reads what already has been manifested on the comics page and invites more of what demands expression.
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