Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine: Travails of Motherhood

129 Pages·2021·17.559 MB·English

by  Chinmay Murali, Sathyaraj Venkatesan

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“Murali and Venkatesan’s close examination of infertility comics, or
‘gynographics,’ confirms what proponents of graphic medicine have
long known: comics are a powerful space for silenced voices to, finally,
be heard.”
Matthew Noe, Harvard Medical School, USA
“Combining an acute analysis of the often conflicting medical and
socio- cultural constructions of infertility with illuminating, theoretic-
ally informed readings of four trailblazing works of graphic medicine,
this book will be a valuable addition to courses in Feminist and Women’s
Studies, Medical Humanities, History of Medicine, and Comics Studies.
More than that, this will engage the mind and heart of anyone who has
faced the challenging experience of infertility.”
Susan Squier, Brill Professor Emerita of Women’s,
Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English,
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
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Infertility Comics and
Graphic Medicine
Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine examines women’s graphic memoirs on
infertility, foregrounding the complex interrelationship between women’s life
writing, infertility studies, and graphic medicine.
Through a scholarly examination of the artists’ use of visual-v erbal codes of
the comics medium in narrating their physical ordeals and affective challenges
occasioned by infertility, the book seeks to foreground the intricacies of gender
identity, embodiment, subjectivity, and illness experience. Providing long-
overdue scholarly attention on the perspectives of autobiographical and comics
studies, the authors examine the gendered nature of the infertility experience
and the notion of motherhood as an ideological force which interpolates socio-
cultural discourses, accentuating the potential of graphic medicine as a creative
space for the infertile women to voice their hitherto silenced perspectives on
childlessness with force and urgency.
This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to scholars and students
in comics studies, the health humanities, literature, and women’s and gender
studies, and will also be suitable for readers in visual studies and narrative
medicine.
Chinmay Murali was a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities
and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. He
is currently an independent researcher. His research interests include literature
and medicine, graphic medicine, and critical health humanities. His research art-
icles have appeared in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Journal of Medical
Humanities, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Women’s Studies, among
others. He is a recipient of the Visiting Scholar fellowship from the Center for
Health Humanities, MCPHS University, Boston, USA.
Sathyaraj Venkatesan is Associate Professor of English in the Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy,
India. He is the author of six books and over 90 research publications that span
African American literature, health humanities, graphic medicine, film studies,
and other literary and cultural studies disciplines. He is most recently co- author
of Gender, Eating Disorders and Graphic Medicine and India Retold.
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Routledge Focus on Gender, Sexuality, and Comics
Series Editor: Frederik Byrn Køhlert, University of East Anglia
Routledge Focus on Gender, Sexuality, and Comics publishes original
short- form research in the areas of gender and sexuality studies as they
relate to comics cultures past and present. Topics in the series cover
printed as well as digital media, mainstream and alternative comics
industries, transmedia adaptions, comics consumption, and various
comics- associated cultural fields and forms of expression. Gendered
and sexual identities are considered as intersectional and always in
conversation with issues concerning race, ethnicity, ability, class, age,
nationality, and religion.
Books in the series are between 25,000 and 45,000 words and can be
single- authored, co- authored, or edited collections. For longer works,
the companion series “Routledge Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and
Comics” publishes full- length books between 60,000 to 90,000 words.
Series editor Frederik Byrn Køhlert is a lecturer in American Studies
at the University of East Anglia, where he is also the coordinator of
the Master of Arts program in Comics Studies. In addition to several
journal articles and book chapters on comics, he is the author of Serial
Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics.
Cosplayers
Gender and Identity
A. Luxx Mishou
Gender and Sexuality in Israeli Graphic Novels
Matt Reingold
Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine
Chinmay Murali and Sathyaraj Venkatesan
www.routledge.com/ Routledge- Focus- on- Gender- Sexuality- and-
Comics- Studies/ book- series/ FGSC
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Infertility Comics and
Graphic Medicine
Chinmay Murali and
Sathyaraj Venkatesan
vi
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Chinmay Murali and Sathyaraj Venkatesan
The right of Chinmay Murali and Sathyaraj Venkatesan to be identified as authors
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978- 0- 367- 46415- 8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 1- 032- 07739- 0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978- 1- 003- 02862- 8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003028628
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Newgen Publishing UK
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Contents
List of figures ix
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
Graphic medicine and gynographics: discipline, discourse,
and perspectives 2
Infertility: defining a global problem 3
Is infertility a disease? 4
Infertility and gender 5
Data for analysis 8
Aims, objectives, and methodology 8
Overview of the book 10
1 Visualising illness: comics and graphic medicine 15
Introduction 15
Humanising healthcare: from medical humanities to health
humanities 16
Narrative medicine: legitimising the patient’s perspective 19
Autopathography, graphic pathography, and life writing 21
Comics, graphic medicine, and women’s life writing 23
Graphic medicine as a pedagogical tool 25
Graphic medicine as therapy, community, and critique 27
Internationalisation and popularisation of graphic medicine 29
Conclusion 31
2 Imagining “the barren”: cultural representations of
women’s infertility 35
Introduction 35
Illness and representations 36
viii
viii Contents
Infertile women in popular novels and mass- market women’s
magazines 38
Self- blame and neurosis in TV melodramas 40
Egg- freezing ads and the rhetoric of choice 42
Infertile monsters in reality TV, and horror films 43
Countering infertile subjectivity in women’s memoirs 45
Conclusion 47
3 Hegemonic creations: pronatalism and the social
construction of motherhood 52
Introduction 52
Pronatalism and the social construction of motherhood 52
“NO! THIS way!”: girl child as a pronatalist subject 55
“We’re in the club!”: childlessness and cultural otherhood 60
“Let me out!”: thinking beyond motherhood 64
Conclusion 68
4 The infertile body in the clinic: medicalisation and
loss of agency 71
Introduction 71
Feminist critique of medicalisation 71
“The infertility death trap”: Broken Eggs and Present/ Perfect 76
“Der straightener Herr Doktor”: The Facts of Life and
Good Eggs 83
Conclusion 87
5 Traversing infertility: endurance and alternatives 91
Introduction 91
Resilience, coping, and infertile subjectivity 91
Spiritual and creative coping in Good Eggs 94
Art, ecology, and alternative mothering practices in
The Facts of Life 97
Conclusion 102
Conclusion 106
Index 111
ix
Figures
3.1 Paula Knight, The Facts of Life (Myriad, 2017), 18 55
3.2 Paula Knight, The Facts of Life (Myriad, 2017), 19 59
3.3 Paula Knight, The Facts of Life (Myriad, 2017), 205 63
3.4 Paula Knight, The Facts of Life (Myriad, 2017), 227 68
4.1 Emily Steinberg, Broken Eggs (Cleaver, 2014). n.p 77
4.2 Emily Steinberg, Broken Eggs (Cleaver, 2014). n.p 80
4.3 Paula Knight, The Facts of Life (Myriad, 2017), 85 85
5.1 Paula Knight, The Facts of Life (Myriad, 2017), 214 100