Overview

In Show Me Where It Hurts, Monica Chiu argues that graphic pathography—long-form comics by and about subjects who suffer from disease or are impaired—re-vitalizes and re-visions various negatively affected corporeal states through hand-drawn images. By the body and for the body, the medium is subversive and reparative, and it stands in contradistinction to clinical accounts of illness that tend to disembody or objectify the subject. Employing affect theory, spatial theory, vital materialism, and approaches from race and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, disability studies, and comics studies, Chiu provides readings of recently published graphic pathography. Chiu argues that these kinds of subjective graphic stories, by virtue of their narrative and descriptive strengths, provide a form of resistance to the authoritative voice of biomedicine and serve as a tool to foster important change in the face of social and economic inequities when it comes to questions of health and healthcare. Show Me Where It Hurts reads what already has been manifested on the comics page and invites more of what demands expression. Pathbreaking and provocative, this book will appeal to scholars and students of the medical humanities, comics studies, race and ethnic studies, disability studies, and women and gender studies.

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9780271096827

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Reviews

Monica Chiu demonstrates that the highly personalized rendering of illness experience in graphic pathographies provides readers with an embodied illness perspective that significantly differs from biomedical and clinical accounts, diagnoses, and understandings of illness. Her study on how drawing in graphic pathographies functions to retell and reimagine illness from an ill individual's perspective is poised to make a foundational contribution to a field of study that is just now reaching maturation. -Nancy Pedri, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Author Information

Monica Chiu is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the editor of Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives.

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