Composing Crip Corporealities, or Decomposing Comics, in Dumb and Dancing After TEN

Publication Date

8-1-2023

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies

Volume

17

Issue

3

DOI

10.3828/jlcds.2023.27

First Page

369

Last Page

387

Abstract

The article extends understandings of embodiment in comics studies by exploring feminist, queer, and crip affinities and aesthetics in graphic medicine. It analyzes two works of graphic medicine, Georgia Webber’s Dumb: Living Without a Voice (2018) and Vivian Chong and Webber’s Dancing After TEN (2020), that explore the authors’ experiences of voicelessness and blindness respectively. The article employs Robert McRuer’s concept of “decomposition,” a disorderly process of writing that resists normativity, to examine how these two works draw attention to the embodied stakes of composition even as they destabilize disability as a fact of the body. The article first contextualizes how Dumb and Dancing After TEN crip corporeality by proclaiming disability as an epistemological position and politicized identity that is shaped by and resists heteropatriarchal and ableist power structures. It then analyzes how they crip comics aesthetics to emphasize the creative, intellectual, and embodied labor of their graphic medicine. By highlighting their creators’ composing bodies in the disorderly process of making comics, Dumb and Dancing After TEN invite multisensory modes of analyzing the lived realities of disability in graphic medicine beyond assimilation or celebration.

Department

English and Comparative Literature

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