My name is Good Trakumaite. I am an artist and gardener. My work ranges across several different fields and mediums including, but not limited to, visual art, video, sound, skill-and-resource sharing, and growing plants.
In 2015 and 2016, as part of an award I received from the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, I self-published two comic books about going to the gynecologist. The first issue told my own unfortunate story of searching for a birth control that didn’t wreak havoc with my body and mind. The second issue continued this saga, and also toldthe stories of a couple of my friends navigating their own gynecological misadventures – one with a hormonal IUD, and another with an infected fallopian tube.
These books generated a lot of relating – people flipping through them at comic fairs would often share their own deeply personal gynecology experiences with me, just a couple of moments after we had met. Friends who read them came back to me with their own stories. It became clear that confusion and chaos abounded in many of our interactions with the field of gynecology, and the medical establishment in general. Sharing these experiences provided some comic relief, as well as opportunities to strategize about how to advocate for ourselves in the often intimidating environment of the exam room. For me, one of these strategies has been to engage in the study of the human body, herbal medicine and other tools of self-and-community empowerment around health. I would like to return to this comics series in part from this perspective, and create a third installent that not only ties up a few loose narrative ends, but also offers more amusingly educational encouragement for navigating doctor’s visits, insurance phone calls, billing departments and all the rest.
Information about my gynecology related comics can be found here. They both are available to be read for free in full online here and here. And I have some copies of #2 available for purchase here on my site.
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