Serial Selves

Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics

Frederik Byrn Køhlert

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813592251, 9780813592299
• eBook ISBN: 9780813592268
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Autobiography is one of the most dynamic and quickly-growing genres in contemporary comics and graphic narratives. In Serial Selves, Frederik Byrn Køhlert examines the genre's potential for representing lives and perspectives that have been socially marginalized or excluded. With a focus on the comics form's ability to produce alternative and challenging autobiographical narratives, thematic chapters investigate the work of artists writing from perspectives of marginality including gender, sexuality, disability, and race, as well as trauma. Interdisciplinary in scope and attuned to theories and methods from both literary and visual studies, the book provides detailed formal analysis to show that the highly personal and hand-drawn aesthetics of comics can help artists push against established narrative and visual conventions, and in the process invent new ways of seeing and being seen.As the first comparative study of how comics artists from a wide range of backgrounds use the form to write and draw themselves into cultural visibility, Serial Selves will be of interest to anyone interested in the current boom in autobiographical comics, as well as issues of representation in comics and visual culture more broadly.

1

Female Grotesques

The Unruly Comics of Julie Doucet

Until recently, comics have largely been a man’s world. This is true in terms of their creators, who have historically been overwhelmingly male; their subject matter, which has generally been portrayed from the point of view of men and male characters; and their readership, which is often stereotyped as consisting of mostly boys and middle-aged men on the model of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.1 Although this view is currently being conclusively upended by the large number of women making and reading comics today, as well as by the increasingly visible participation of women in the fan culture surrounding the comics world, it is nevertheless the case that to a degree unfamiliar in most other art forms, comics have historically and inescapably been gendered male. Such a view of the form is not least evident in terms of its customary way of representing women, who—in both mainstream comics and in work by underground or alternative cartoonists such as Robert Crumb—are often reduced to sexualized objects and erotic spectacle for the implied male reader. In comics, the female body is typically put on display for the reader to enjoy, in drawings that routinely but unrealistically exaggerate certain physical features or postures. This representational model is accentuated by the slick drawing style of most mainstream comics, which provides the reader with glossy fantasies that heighten the sexually inflected pleasure commonly associated with—and sometimes almost expected of—the act of looking at women in comics. As a vehicle for the depiction of male sexual fantasy, the comics form offers both creators and readers the opportunity to untether from a realistic approach to depicting female characters and instead produce and enjoy images of women that fall within a narrow range of acceptable femininity characterized by bodies that may be voluptuously sexual but are nevertheless always contained and neatly appealing to the male eye. Although this could, perhaps, to some degree equally be said about male superheroes (whose bodies tend to bulge with impossible but perfectly sculpted muscles), the specific way comics have tended to portray women as objects of visual pleasure is bound up with the broader patriarchal structures that regulate how female bodies appear and are represented in the culture. Because the comics form has in this way traded in images of women as erotic spectacle since its inception, the challenge for women creators of especially autobiographical comics becomes how to draw the female body and its cultural space without succumbing to established sexist and objectifying visual paradigms. How, in other words, might female comics autobiographers resist what Kaja Silverman has called “imaginary capture” (206) by the culture’s dominant ways of seeing and representing women? In one answer to that question, this chapter examines the comics of French Canadian artist Julie Doucet, who in a series of autobiographical comics and book collections from the 1980s and 1990s mounts a striking challenge to patriarchal ideologies that discipline and limit the female body and its representations.

Although Doucet’s comics are particularly unwavering in their insistence upon portraying alternative versions of femininity, her work is part of a tradition of comics by women that began with the underground comix movement based in San Francisco in the 1970s. As noted in the introduction, the cartoonists associated with the underground approached the anodyne cultural form of comics with intentions of subverting it through taboo-breaking and often offensive personal content. For several of the movement’s leading figures, this project sometimes involved depicting their sexual fantasies, often in unsavory or plainly sexist fashion. Crumb, for example, made a habit of drawing women with large legs and backsides, which he then subjected to various sexually explicit and humiliating scenarios. In addition to the frequently misogynistic content, the fact that the underground consisted mostly of male cartoonists did not aid in providing a more inclusive perspective or artistic environment. As pioneering female cartoonist Trina Robbins remembers, “The big problem, if you were one of the few cartoonists of the female persuasion, was that 98% of the cartoonists were male, and that they all seemed to belong to a boy’s club that didn’t accept women” (vii). Responding to this situation, Robbins and a group of other female cartoonists published the comic book It Aint Me Babe in 1970, subtitled Women’s Liberation and featuring drawings of such classic characters as Wonder Woman and Olive Oyl on the cover, marching and with their fists raised in a presumed protest against the patriarchy. After a single issue, It Aint Me Babe soon morphed into the regularly published series Wimmen’s Comix, which lasted for seventeen issues under a democratically rotating editorship before ending its run in 1992.

Almost single-handedly, Wimmen’s Comix opened a cultural space for women to draw and publish comics, and it is nearly impossible to overstate its lasting influence on the comics world. In addition to Robbins, its many contributors over the twenty-year run included such celebrated and widely read cartoonists as Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Mary Fleener, Melinda Gebbie, Roberta Gregory, Aline Kominsky Crumb, Diane Noomin, Sharon Rudahl, and Dori Seda, as well as Phoebe Gloeckner and Doucet (who appeared together in issue 15 from 1989, which Gloeckner also coedited), among many others. The list of contributors is noteworthy for being an almost complete lineage of female alternative American comics creators during the period, most of whom used the new forum to engage directly with issues concerning gender and its associated injustices. But where artists such as Robbins, for example, often drew politically earnest critiques of contemporary society or stories of female goddesses set in the mythical past, and did so in a relatively slick visual style, other cartoonists were particularly inspired by the form’s potential for self-representation. For her contribution to the first issue, for example, Kominsky Crumb drew an autobiographical story that depicted her having sex, throwing up, and masturbating with assorted vegetables while overcome with guilt. As Hillary Chute has argued about Kominsky Crumb’s work in general, her “political project is to visualize how sexuality, even when disruptive, does not have to be turned over to the gaze of the other” (Graphic Women 30). For Kominsky Crumb, this goal is accomplished through a combination of an intimate focus on lived female experience and her highly unusual style, which at first sight appears unschooled and primitive, but which Chute shows to be a conscious political choice and a “deliberately erotic mode of production that inscribes her own messy body in her work” (Graphic Women 59). By positioning both Kominsky Crumb’s style and subject matter as direct challenges to the dominant male perspective and its accompanying gaze, Chute highlights the form’s potential for challenging established ways of depicting—as well as looking at—women in comics. Although this potential was often in evidence throughout the run of Wimmen’s Comix, few artists more directly followed Kominsky Crumb’s example of drawing autobiographical comics with a confrontational and explicitly feminist slant than Doucet, whose first comics began to appear as self-published zines in the late 1980s. But where Kominsky Crumb’s autobiographical stories are generally focused on depicting everyday events as filtered through a neurotic and often crippling self-doubt, and are drawn in a style that accentuates a corporeal and resolutely nonidealized female body, Doucet’s approach to autobiography is preoccupied with depicting an emotional life consisting of dreams, desires, and sexual fantasies, as well as with unconventional representations of the undisciplined female body and its capacity for a joyfully transgressive sexual agency.

Born in Montreal in 1965 and holding degrees in fine arts and printing, Doucet began self-publishing (that is, photocopying and distributing to local bookstores and through the postal service) her mini-comic Dirty Plotte in 1988. The original series—advertised, on its covers, as a “fanzine”—lasted fourteen issues and fluently switched between French slang and imperfect English. Eventually, upstart Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly picked up the comic in 1991, and the series continued in (mostly) English with another twelve full-size issues and a number of book collections throughout the 1990s.2 During the Drawn & Quarterly run of Dirty Plotte, Doucet lived in Montreal, New York, Seattle, and Berlin, and her work was widely published in English and French, while also being translated into other languages. Appearing around the same time as several other autobiographical titles, Doucet’s comics are often grouped with the other cartoonists published by Drawn & Quarterly in its early years, such as Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth. Aside from sharing a publisher and an inclination for self-representation, however, Dirty Plotte has little in common with, for example, Matt’s series Peepshow, which includes detailed stories about the author’s many arguments with an on-again, off-again girlfriend, as well as his increasingly pathological cheapness and the failure to rid himself of an unflattering obsession with pornography. Closer in spirit to especially the early issues of Brown’s Yummy Fur, which did not yet include autobiographical material but instead serialized the explicitly surrealistic narrative later collected as Ed the Happy Clown, the early issues of Dirty Plotte (both as mini-comics and in their Drawn & Quarterly incarnation) contained a freewheeling and impressionistic mix of short strips and collage work. The covers, especially, are examples of grunge-era collages mixed with almost Dada-esque absurdities, such as random shout-outs like “Hey you,” “Read her sexy,” and “Disco frog” yelling at the reader from wherever space permits. Although Doucet would eventually turn to a longer narrative in a story line originally serialized in the final three issues of Dirty Plotte and later collected as My New York Diary, the majority of the early strips feature few connective threads and instead rely on one-offs, most of which gradually come to concern the adventures of a clearly self-representational character named Julie. Although without a doubt autobiographical in spirit, Doucet’s comics never simply depict the quotidian details of her everyday life, and the stories tell the reader little to nothing about her childhood, her various jobs, or her romantic partners. While incarnations of the latter appear regularly throughout her stories, they are often interchangeable and—with the exception of the boyfriend in My New York Diary, which is partly the story of the decline of the relationship—seem to come and go undramatically. Instead Doucet approaches her autobiographical character with an irreverent attitude that emphasizes fantasy, in stories that embrace her desires and excessive appetites for sex, alcohol, and sometimes even violence. A direct kick in the groin to both propriety and idealized versions of femininity, Doucet’s comics are both a politically astute critique of patriarchal attempts to regulate and restrict the female body and a curiously innocent celebration of sex, death, and everything in between.

Doucet’s position as a woman challenging a dominant male point of view made her both something of a feminist icon and a relative outsider in a world of alternative comics dominated by men. Despite such incursions into broader feminist culture as having her comics reprinted in quintessential 1990s alternative teen girl culture magazine Sassy and being name-checked along with such figures as Joan Jett and Gertrude Stein (in a list of feminist heroes that also include fellow cartoonist Ariel Schrag, the subject of chapter 3) in the song “Hot Topic” by riot grrrl descendants Le Tigre, however, Doucet nevertheless often expressed reservations about being ascribed a feminist agenda. As she told me in a 2013 interview, “In the late ’80s and beginning of [the] ’90s it was not really sexy to call yourself a feminist. I got influenced by that. Today I would say of course I’m a feminist!” (“Words into Pictures”; emphasis in the original). Doucet’s initial ambivalence is typical of 1990s third-wave feminism and its popular incarnations as riot grrrl or girl power—the icons of which, as Rebecca Munford has pointed out, have “perceptibly distanced themselves from the political agendas of second wave feminism” (143). Representing “young women whose experiences and desires are marginalised by the ontological and epistemological assumptions of a feminism that speaks for them under the universalising category of ‘woman’ ” (Munford 145), the third-wave riot grrrl ethos encompasses both Doucet’s embrace of zine culture and her rejection of working within a specific feminist tradition associated with the policing of cultural practices in the name of a serious and potentially dulling political correctness.

Working within a punk and riot grrrl–inflected feminist framework, Doucet’s comics consistently engage with concerns about women’s bodies, and do so in ways that make them impossible to describe as dully serious. In the course of Doucet’s many stories, characters unzip their skin, snakes perform oral sex, cats get tangled in their owner’s snot, noses are picked, penises are severed, cookies are used for masturbation, tampons are inserted into penises, razor blades are used for self-inflicted cuts, and guts are spilled and eaten by stray dogs. Exemplifying Doucet’s thematic preoccupation with the body, its functions, and the boundary-obscuring links between its inside and outside, these often troubling events are generally depicted as occasions for joy or even, in some cases, transgressive sexual excitement. Mixing imagery of the unruly and uncontained body with a joyful attitude anchored in parody, Doucet’s comics use the misogynistic concept of grotesque female materiality as a generative principle from which she articulates a critique in both form and content of normative and restricting representations of the female body.

The subversive joy that Doucet associates with bodily transgression can be understood through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of carnival and its intrinsic connection with the grotesque. As articulated in Rabelais and His World, medieval and renaissance carnivals were liminal moments of play associated with such spectacles as feasts, pageants, and various iterations of festivals and markets. They were pure manifestations of folk or popular culture that functioned to release the transgressive energies of society. Employing inversion, mockery, and travesty in order to break taboos, carnival “celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions” (10). Concerned with change, becoming, and renewal, the carnivalesque worked within the cultural forms and protocols of the dominant class but also mocked high culture through a strategy of leveling and debasement that had the potential—temporarily, at least—to unsettle and disrupt authority.

The aesthetic expression most closely associated with the carnivalesque, according to Bakhtin, is the concept of grotesque realism and its concretization as a bodily principle. “The lowering of all that is high, spiritual, abstract,” grotesque realism is “a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body” (19) and its corporeal incarnation is therefore concerned with “the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs” (21). While the classical, bourgeois body is closely identified, as Kathleen Rowe notes, with the “ ‘upper stratum’ (the head, the eyes, the faculties of reason)” (33) and its spiritual and abstract associations, as well as with notions of individuality and containment, the grotesque body is concrete, material, and constantly overflowing its boundaries. The emphasis here is on the orifices, bulges, and protrusions of the human form, and on what Rowe calls “the drama of ‘becoming,’ ” such as “intercourse, giving birth, and dying” (33). In this conceptuali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Serial Selves
• 1. Female Grotesques: The Unruly Comics of Julie Doucet
• 2. Working It Through: Trauma and Visuality in the Comics of Phoebe Gloeckner
• 3. Queer as Style: Ariel Schrag’s High School Comic Chronicles
• 4. Staring at Comics: Disability and the Body in Al Davison’s The Spiral Cage
• 5. Stereotyping the Self: Toufic El Rassi’s Arab in America
• Conclusion: Making an Issue of Representation
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author