"How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?"

Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs

Tahneer Oksman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231540780
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

American comics reflect the distinct sensibilities and experiences of the Jewish American men who played an outsized role in creating them, but what about the contributions of Jewish women? Focusing on the visionary work of seven contemporary female Jewish cartoonists, Tahneer Oksman draws a remarkable connection between innovations in modes of graphic storytelling and the unstable, contradictory, and ambiguous figurations of the Jewish self in the postmodern era.

Oksman isolates the dynamic Jewishness that connects each frame in the autobiographical comics of Aline Kominsky Crumb, Vanessa Davis, Miss Lasko-Gross, Lauren Weinstein, Sarah Glidden, Miriam Libicki, and Liana Finck. Rooted in a conception of identity based as much on rebellion as identification and belonging, these artists' representations of Jewishness take shape in the spaces between how we see ourselves and how others see us. They experiment with different representations and affiliations without forgetting that identity ties the self to others. Stemming from Kominsky Crumb's iconic 1989 comic "Nose Job," in which her alter ego refuses to assimilate through cosmetic surgery, Oksman's study is an arresting exploration of invention in the face of the pressure to disappear.

“My Independent Jewish Monster Temperament”

The Serial Selves of Aline Kominsky Crumb

line Kominsky Crumb has never disguised her Jewish identity on the page. From her earliest published works, she incorporates Yiddishisms into the language of her comics, often draws her alter egos displaying symbols of their Jewishness, such as wearing Stars of David around their necks, and does not shy away from continuous criticisms of and reflections on the Jewish middle-class community she was born into.¹ A close inspection of her comics also reveals a consistent awareness of the anxiety that accompanies representing the body as Jewish. As Derek Parker Royal points out in his introduction to a 2007 special issue of MELUS on ethnicity in graphic narratives, comics provides an especially fertile space for the examination of “those very assumptions that problematize ethnic representation” because the form has historically relied on visual stereotypes (9). By exaggerating Jewish bodily and behavioral “flaws,” especially in her female personae and characters, Kominsky Crumb confronts such stereotypical notions of Jewish identification by visualizing them.

This chapter will focus on the ways that Kominsky Crumb’s autobiographical comics play with long-held stereotypes about Jewish women and their bodies, about women and their bodies more generally, and about the representation of such bodies and subjectivities in the interface of various autobiographical styles and modes. Some have referred to her work as “sexist and anti-Semitic” (Crumb and Kominsky Crumb, “Introduction” 5) because she does not simply reject such bodily and behavioral codings in favor of more politically correct or antitypological portrayals of Jewish women. Instead, her comics reflect how, as Sander Gilman so aptly sums it up, “there is no hiding from the fact of a constructed difference” (The Jew’s Body 193). Kominsky Crumb confronts stereotypical representations by recognizing how ingrained they are in her subjectivity and portraying them as a constant and sometimes even productive influence in how she sees herself and others. In a 2007 interview published in Heeb Magazine, she discussed her Jewish identity in relation to her experiences growing up in an upwardly mobile, mostly Jewish, suburban community, and particularly in regard to her relationships with “Jewish boys [who] were real snotty” (“Drawn Together” 49). As she explained, “They were these short, skinny boys who wanted little blond girls. Those boys all grown up still make me feel like a Jewish monster. Whereas when I’m with a goy, I feel exotic and sexy and voluptuous.” With this statement, Kominsky Crumb reinscribes classifications of Jewish men as petite, feminized, and shiksa loving, while she reinforces her own feelings of marginality stemming from another gender stereotype: that of the Jewish woman as “monster.”² Additionally, what she enjoys about non-Jewish men is their fetishization of the Jewish woman as an exotic, or sexy, “other.”

In this response, and, as we shall see, in her comics, Kominsky Crumb suggests that long-standing categorizations of Jewish women, and, consequently, of Jewish and non-Jewish men as well, can become empowering based not only on who is creating the image, but also on how it is being made. In this interview as well as in her characteristically stylized comics, she reveals the contradictions inherent in depictions of Jewish women as both desirable and grotesque in their otherness. By favoring a seemingly unself-conscious portrayal of how conventional notions of the self and of communal identities continue to define the way she depicts herself and others, Kominsky Crumb risks being misread as an amateur artist confirming these stereotypes even as she distorts and dislodges them. Her postwar autobiographical comics present the potential of stereotype as a means of representation that, through dynamic reconstruction, can lead to new ways of seeing and understanding the self, although these new ways of seeing are also always connected to a limiting and destructive past.

Kominsky Crumb experiments with stereotypes to reveal their productive possibilities, as well as their limitations and degradations, not only in relation to her Jewish identity but also in relation to her identity as a woman and artist. Her Jewish body is always inevitably a gendered body, drawn in an often allegedly “crude and sloppy” manner (Kominsky Crumb, “Public Conversation” 124).³ In her 2007 graphic memoir, Need More Love, she illustrates the interdependence of these identity positions through serial depictions of various alter egos in the framework of one overarching narrative. As Nicole McDaniel points out in her 2010 essay “Self-Reflexive Graphic Narrative,” the definition of the word serial is currently undergoing a transition: “Now also linked with repetition, seriality can be either recursive and episodic or sequential and chronological” (199). For the purpose of this book, I understand the serial to be aligned with the recursive and episodic, that is, with a lack of any sense of closure—a definition that aligns with Stuart Charmé’s spiraling model of Jewish identity, as outlined in my introduction. While Kominsky Crumb previously published most of the comics included in her memoir, a reading of her representations of Jewish identity not separately but as part of this larger, serial, collage-like work reflects experimentation with notions of Jewishness as integrated into the scheme of a structured but nevertheless open-ended narrative. Teetering on the verge of the autobiographical and imaginary, her graphic memoir invokes and performs countless anxieties and fluctuations about genre classification and intent, much like the graphic narratives of all the cartoonists examined in this volume. The book comes to almost four hundred pages and collects an amalgam of everything from photographs and reproductions of paintings to reprints of previously published comics, both in full and as shorter excerpts, as well as typed journal entries. Her ambitious aesthetic project questions the constructions that form and inform self-identifications—of woman, Jew, or artist, for example. It also challenges and makes visible the artificial boundaries between how we define ourselves and how others define us. Finally, it reveals the ways that these various constructions can be informed, supplanted, or destabilized through a process of visually mapping them.

“It is Me But It’s Not Completely Me”

Born in 1948 in Long Island, New York, Aline Kominsky Crumb is best known as an autobiographical underground cartoonist and the wife of legendary countercultural cartoonist Robert Crumb. As Hillary L. Chute points out in Graphic Women, which includes a seminal chapter on Kominsky Crumb’s comics and especially her representations of sexuality, “the case of the Crumb family is possibly the defining example of th[e] double standard at work” (31). While Robert Crumb has achieved worldwide fame and is respected in the comics world for “writing the darker side of (his own) tortured male sexuality,” Kominsky Crumb’s work has been criticized for the very same reason. In fact, Chute’s chapter-length discussion of Kominsky Crumb’s comics is the first critical text to include an in-depth examination of this highly influential cartoonist. ⁴ Despite the lack of critical attention, Kominsky Crumb is clearly one of the initial and highly influential members in what can be seen as a genealogy of what I call postassimilated Jewish American women cartoonists.⁵

Kominsky Crumb’s comics have often been looked down upon as scratchy, “crude scrawls” (Crumb and Kominsky Crumb, “Introduction” 4). Instead of recognizing her works as intentionally stylized, some critics have dismissed them as narcissistic, amateur, and confessional. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out in Interfaces, women’s autobiographical projects are often viewed as transparent renderings of their life stories instead of carefully constructed interpretations and performances of their memories and experiences, which is what is more generally presumed about men’s autobiographies. Kominsky Crumb capitalizes on this misreading by frequently putting herself down in her comics, both verbally and visually. As critics and readers have frequently pointed out, she looks much more attractive in photographs and in person than she does in drawings of her personae. In public forums, too, she often plays along with the idea that she lacks a deliberate consciousness about her artistic style, as though the reason she draws herself as “ugly” and in such a “crude” manner is because she does not, in effect, have the skills it takes to draw in what would be considered a more realistic, and therefore ostensibly more skilled, style. In one interview, in response to a question about her artistic vision, she told the interviewer, “You seem to think I have a more sophisticated approach to the whole matter than I do” (Crumb and Kominsky Crumb, “A Joint Interview” 122). In this way she contributes to the false notion of herself as an untrained and amateur cartoonist, a conceit that allows her more freedom on the page, although it often reinforces misreadings of her comics.

Despite these projections, her works themselves draw attention to the performativity and deliberateness of her autobiographical depictions. In individual comics she often changes the style in which she draws herself from panel to panel. Sometimes the variation is as subtle as the shape of her nose or the cut of her hair; sometimes she brings attention to more radical fluctuations through textual commentary. For example, in many of the collaborative comics that Kominsky Crumb draws with her husband, some of which were included in Need More Love, she draws little starred notes, similar to footnotes, at the bottom of certain panels and pages.⁶ In one such note in the long comic “Krumb and Kominsky in Their Cute Little Life Together,” originally published in 1992 in The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics, she writes, “The Bunch changes her look a lot because she likes to draw herself in different cute outfits with new hairdos whenever she wants to!!” (186).⁷ Sure enough, The Bunch, one of Kominsky Crumb’s many personae, is drawn wearing different clothing and with several hairdos throughout the black-and-white, almost uniformly six-panels-per-page collaborative comic. Her hair is down and curly in all of the panels on one page, her feet bearing large and chunky platform shoes. On a previous page, she has her hair up in a ponytail, her unshaven legs sprout tiny black hairs, and her oversized feet are bare. Other physical details, from the width of her thighs and knees to the shape and size of her nose to the cut and cast of her mouth and eyes, are also continually modified over the course of the narrative. In these ways, flagrantly but also, at times, less obviously, Kominsky Crumb highlights the differing images she has of herself, each dependent on her mood and outlook at the time she is writing and drawing. Robert Crumb’s relatively uniform depictions of his alter ego throughout the comic—he dons the same plaid shirt and slacks for the first seventeen pages and often maintains nearly identical awkward postures and gestures over the course of numerous panels, if not whole pages—further serve to highlight Kominsky Crumb’s shifting compositions. In addition, although The Bunch’s outfits, accessories, body and face shapes, and hairstyles so frequently alter, the most obvious characteristics tend to remain generally uniform over the course of full pages, at which point they often change. Presumably, The Bunch does not significantly modify her appearance until the artist begins a new day of creating the comic, which starts on a fresh page. In this way the reader is reminded, particularly through Kominsky Crumb’s contributions to these joint ventures, of the process of drawing an autobiographical comic as something that happens over time, and that is therefore dependent on and bound to the very same shifts in subjectivity as the author herself. By continually refiguring the ways she draws herself, even or especially through subtle details, Kominsky Crumb’s work reveals the multiplicity of images that individuals have of themselves, which are reliant on context and undergo endless transformations, both considerable and slight.

Kominsky Crumb uses another powerful technique within her comics to relay the gap between life and its representation and to draw the reader’s attention to the constructedness of her self-depictions. Scott McCloud has outlined several different categories of word-image combinations often used in comics, although he admits the possibilities are endless (152).⁸ In a “word specific” combination, for instance, the text gives away the story line and the image on the page merely helps illustrate what is already written (153). In a “picture specific” combination, on the other hand, the opposite occurs, with the words on the page merely acting as a “soundtrack” to the image. McCloud determines that the most common combination, an “interdependent” one, involves “words and pictures [that] go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone” (155). Kominsky Crumb uses such interdependent combinations to reveal a disparity between what she is thinking and how she presents herself on the outside (often, at least in her earlier years, as amenable to others). For instance, in a comic reprinted only in part, and placed early on in the memoir, she depicts The Bunch talking to an art teacher who she later realizes was only interested in her because of her looks (Need More Love 110). In this vibrant and colorful piece, so typical of her individually created works, The Bunch, with curly black-and-red hair flowing and sporting a bright, flower-patterned dress, stands focused as she composes a cubist-inspired painting of the nude female model located at the front of the classroom. Each panel is cluttered with bright colors, lines, and shapes; imperfectly hand-drawn letters accented by exclamation points and inconsistent ellipses, and encased in word bubbles, thought bubbles, and narrative boxes, further crowd the scene. Hard at work, The Bunch is approached by an ogling instructor, whose directed gaze ironically neglects the naked woman standing in front of them as well as the one in The Bunch’s painting. She turns her back to her artwork in the following panel in order to hopefully, but unsuccessfully, engage as an artist with this male authority figure, who now stands with his back to the artwork and his arms folded. The dramatic difference between how The Bunch represents herself to him—with a smile and the words “Hm…Wow Great!”—and what she is thinking, which is that she has lost some of the pleasure in painting because of the “complicated” dynamics of the art classroom, comes across through this interdependent word/image combination. The reader has to work to assemble these often conflicting layers of consciousness and experience, in the same way that the reader has to accept The Bunch’s different body shapes and outfits as representative of the same person.

In these consecutive panels, the reader is additionally confronted with two differing versions of The Bunch’s painting of the nude model’s body, with the second image having acquired a tuft of curly orange pubic hair to match, in color and style, the art teacher’s own unruly head and beard. These small, transformative details reward the attentive reader, adding humor to the recollection of an otherwise humiliating and disempowering encounter. Carefully, but also often buoyantly, Kominsky Crumb employs the unique form of comics, specifically juxtapositions of words and images as well as images and images, to convey the inherently ambiguous and selective nature of self-projection and reflection. The visual self on the page, divided by and of itself, is differentiated from the verbal self on the page, which is further separated into overlapping internalized and externalized subjectivities.

The global framework and structure of Need More Love additionally establishes Kominsky Crumb’s self-imaginings and influences as multiple, fragmented, and often contradictory in sentiment, if not also in appearance, style, and voice. In the memoir, which interweaves many of her previously published works with a running diarylike commentary, she incorporates photographs and paintings of herself alongside her autobiographical comics as another way of highlighting the intentional contrast between the various ways she sees herself and the ways others see her. Her inclusion of serial but always slightly differing drawn and recorded autobiographical visions reinforces the idea that every single self-image is built out of a variety of notions of self. In another interview, she commented on the disparity between her drawn self and her so-called real life self by explaining, “The character that I draw is fictional to some extent. It is me but it’s not completely me. There’s another part of me that’s a little bit more well-adjusted, vain and confident” (“Interview with Andrea Juno” 172). Here she reinforces what is already plainly visible in representations of her personae on the page: much like her real-life persona, her cartoon selves are pieced together out of multiple and often mismatched versions of reality and fantasy.

Juxtaposing photographs beside paintings and drawings also allows Kominsky Crumb to play with and challenge the hierarchy of signification so often taken for granted in discussions of self-representation. The predigital photographic image, for instance, has sometimes been assumed to be a neutral object of communication—a nearly unmediated copy of the thing that has been photographed, surpassing writing in its truth-telling capabilities. As Susan Sontag argues in On Photography, “Photographed images do not seem to be statements of the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (4). Of course, as Sontag, Roland Barthes, and others have pointed out, photographs are n...