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Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed BibTeX citation key: Bhattacharjee2019 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Are You My Mother?", "Fun Home", Autobiography, Bechdel. Alison, Disability, Gender, USA Creators: Bhattacharjee, Tripathi Collection: Gnosis |
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Abstract |
Concepts in Comics like ‘arthrology’, ‘transtextuality’, ‘multimodality’ along with ‘Crip Theory’ can be of immense help when it comes to sensory access to disability, neatly embedded in the panels of Alison Bechdel’s autopathographies. Broadly categorizing the representational space of disability into four types (“wondrous”, “sentimental”, “exotic” and “realistic”), Rosemarie Thomson emphasizes on the use of visual images of disabled people acting as rhetorical figures (Thomson 339) and thereby playing the role of punctum (Roland Barthes), which shapes the narrative with a “rich narrative texture” (Hilary Chute 4). Autobiographical Comics – a new form of Alternative Comics (Charles Hatfield x) – bears the traces of trauma in its various dimensions and subsumes into it a boulevard of mingled feelings. In the light of these critical concepts, the paper intends to reread Fun Home (2006), a narrative about Alison Bechdel’s dysfunctional family and Are You My Mother? (2012) about her relationship with her mother, as far as theme is concerned. It also intends to look into how Bechdel’s queerness and disability inflect the memoirs as “the disabled figure in western culture is the to-be-looked-at rather than the to-be-embraced” (Rosemarie Thomson 340).
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