Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine: Travails of Motherhood

__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-verbal 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. "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-verbal 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 for 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"-- Provided by publisher 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. 0Through a scholarly examination of the artists' use of visual-verbal 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.0This 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 Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine examines womenâ••s graphic memoirs on infertility, foregrounding the complex interrelationship between womenâ••s life writing, infertility studies, and graphic medicine.Through a scholarly examination of the artist Cover 1 Half Title 4 Title Page 6 Copyright Page 7 Table of Contents 8 Figures 10 Acknowledgements 11 Introduction 14 1 Visualising illness 28 2 Imagining “the barren” 48 3 Hegemonic creations 65 4 The infertile body in the clinic 84 5 Traversing infertility 104 Conclusion 119 Index 124