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So Long as They Grow Out of It: Comics, The Discourse of Developmental Normalcy, and Disability

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Abstract

This essay draws on two emerging fields—the study of comics or graphic fiction, and disability studies—to demonstrate how graphic fictions articulate the embodied, ethical, and sociopolitical experiences of impairment and disability. Examining David B’s Epileptic and Paul Karasik and Judy Karasik’s The Ride Together, I argue that these graphic novels unsettle conventional notions of normalcy and disability. In so doing, they also challenge our assumed dimensions and possibilities of the comics genre and medium, demonstrating the great potential comics hold for disability studies.

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Notes

  1. C. Ware, "Introduction," McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2004), 11.

  2. Ibid.

  3. S. McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1994), 139.

  4. Graphic fiction is not the most appropriate term here, but I am using it as an umbrella concept to discuss two works that might more accurately be described as graphic autobiographies, or graphic disability narratives. As they consider these themes, these three works explore the specificity—in material and social terms—of disability.

  5. Until the rise of modern medicine, disability had been conceptualized in moral terms, as the result of a moral or spiritual failing of the individual or of his/her ancestors. A. Silvers, D. Wasserman, M.B. Mahowald, eds., Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 56–69.

  6. G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (1966). Introduction by M Foucault (New York: Zone Books, 1991). All subsequent references to this work appear in the text.

  7. As Lennard Davis points out, this new concept of the norm as ideal is a result of the rise of statistics, with its central notions of the normal curve of distribution, and rankings within that curve. “The new ideal of ranked order is powered by the imperative of the norm, and then is supplemented by the notion of progress, human perfectibility, and the elimination of deviance, to create a dominating, hegemonic vision of what the human body should be.” Enforcing Normalcy (New York: Verso, 1995), 35.

  8. B. Hughes, "Disability and the Body," in Disability Studies Today, eds. C. Barnes, M. Oliver, and L. Barton (London: Polity, 2002), 38–77, 63. All subsequent references to this work appear in the text.

  9. This is not to say that impairment is caused by social interaction, but rather that all impairments, including congenital ones, have social meaning. Drawing on Turner, then, we can understand even congenital impairments as being available to articulate and/or to problematize personal and social issues. B.S. Turner, The Body and Society, 2nd Edition (London: Sage Press, 1996), cited in Hughes, 66.

  10. W. Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practice of the World’s Most Popular Art Form (Tamarac FL: Poorhouse Press, 2004), 103.

  11. David B., Epileptic, trans. K Thompson (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005). David B. [Pierre-Francois Beauchard] is a co-founder of L’Association, the French experimental comics collection. The translator, Kim Thompson, is co-owner of Fantagraphics. All subsequent references to this work appear in the text.

  12. E. H. Reynolds, “Todd, Hughlings Jackson, and the electrical basis of epilepsy,” Lancet 2001: 358 (9281): 575–577; Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. A correlation exists between epilepsy and autism, the disability central to the next memoir I will discuss. As Tuchman and Rapin report, “Approximately one-third of children on the autistic spectrum develop epilepsy.” Roberto F. Tuchman, MD and Isabelle Rapid, MD, “Regression in Pervasive Developmental Disorders: Seizures and Epileptiform Electroencephalogram Correlates,” Pediatrics (April 1997) 99: 560–566.

  13. McCloud, 24–59. As McCloud details, this vocabulary includes: the reliance on the icon, the use of the face as a mask, the distinction between the realm of concepts and the realm of the senses, the ability to portray the world without through realism and the world within through cartooning; and the masking effect, which allows readers to mask themselves in a character and imaginatively enter a sensually rich narrative world.

  14. R. Young, "The Euthanasia of People with Disabilities in Nazi Germany: Harbinger of the ’Final Solution’" (http://www.wce.weu.edu/Resources/NCWCHE/reviews/disabled.shtml).

  15. McCloud, 99.

  16. My thanks to Ralph Rodriguez for this observation.

  17. Ibid, 67.

  18. P. Karasik and J. Karasik, The Ride Together (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003). All subsequent references to this work appear in the text.

  19. Eisner, 44.

  20. Ibid, 46.

  21. Ibid.

  22. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30.http://www.iwup.uni-linz.ac.at/lxe/sektktf/gg/GeertzTexts/Thick_Description.htm (accessed 21 February 2007).

  23. Ugly laws, which made it against the law for people with disabilities to appear on public streets because their appearance was likely to offend the public, have recently become the focus of disability scholars. Tobin Siebers points out that such laws continued to be “on the books” in the 1960s in parts of the American Midwest, and he cites as typical a passage from one statute: “No person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowed in or on the public ways or other public places in this city, shall therein or thereon expose himself to public view.” Burgdorf and Burgdorf, 1976, cited in Tobin Siebers, “What Can Disability Studies Learn from the Culture Wars?” Cultural Critique 55 (Fall 2003): 182–216, 199.

  24. McCloud, 36.

  25. M. Clifton-Soderstrom, “Levinas and the Patient as Other: The Ethical Foundation of Medicine” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 28:4, 447–460.

  26. Eisner, 46. Eisner observes that “[t]he frame’s shape (or absence of one)...can be used to convey something of the dimension of sound and emotional climate in which the action occurs.”

  27. S. Locke, “Fantastically Reasonable: Ambivalence in the Representation of Science and Technology in Super-Hero Comics,” Public Understanding of Science 14 (2005): 25–46, 29–30 [my italics].

  28. Ibid.

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Correspondence to Susan M. Squier.

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An earlier version of this essay was published, in a Norwegian translation, as “Bare de vokser fra det—Tegneserier, normalitetsdiskurs og funksjonshemning” in Tegn på sykdom: Om litterær medisin og medisinsk litteratur eds. Hilde Bondevik and Anne Kveim Lie (Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2007): 87–111.

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Squier, S.M. So Long as They Grow Out of It: Comics, The Discourse of Developmental Normalcy, and Disability. J Med Humanit 29, 71–88 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-008-9057-1

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