Posted on October 9, 2024 in Interviews
This TIE Talks features Crystal Yin Lie, an Assistant Professor of Comparative World Literature at California University, Long Beach. In this interview, Crystal dives into how her research interests of disability studies and comics & graphic narratives intersect. Following a 2021 Choice-ACRL webinar on utilizing graphic narratives for interdisciplinary teaching, Crystal describes historical and contemporary portrayals of disability in comics, the counternarratives and limitations of graphic medicine, and her forthcoming research projects. We also include a list of the resources Crystal mentions (comics, articles, websites) at the end of the interview.
As a visual-verbal storytelling medium, comics can inspire reader engagement in innumerable ways—imagery, color, style, paneling, character expressions, and novel juxtapositions of image and text, for example, can pique students’ curiosity and investment in serious topics in ways that traditional texts might not. When it comes to racial and social justice issues, the dynamic ways comics visualize people, objects, memories, and events can make inequities feel more urgent, histories more immediate, and abstract concepts more concrete. I often start with the seemingly simple question, “what do you see?”, to get students talking about the settings, social encounters, and symbols on the page, helping them develop close reading and narrative analysis skills as well as their ability to critically examine social justice issues. Conversations about form—not just what the text is saying, but how it is being said—and genre are especially generative for getting them to pay attention to the politics of representation. Why does it matter a particular issue is told through a non-linear memoir, or the lens of Afrofuturism, or a fairytale aesthetic? Comics can help open discussion for how formal choices can reinforce and, importantly, challenge social norms and the status quo. Certain genres like comics journalism and works that blur fiction and non-fiction or realism and non-realism can also prompt productive discussion around bearing witness to injustice and broadening what counts as truth and testimony.
The visual-verbal nature of comics can also elicit visceral and emotional reader responses (especially scenes that depict violence and trauma), which critics and educators often consider a marker of a text’s success. Using comics to foster empathy, however, comes with caveats: empathy can be biased or conflated with pity; is not necessarily universally felt; and importantly, doesn’t always engender action or engagement with broader politics relevant to those experiences (Andrew Godfrey-Meers’s “Cripping Empathy in Graphic Medicine” is an insightful read). A reader can feel empathy for a character but still vote for policies that ignore or harm those lived realities, so in teaching racial and social justice issues, I try to use comics as occasions for not only forging understanding, connection, and solidarity, but also a desire to advance change, action, and solutions.
As an example, in my most recent comics course, I used Ecuadorian lawyer and activist Pablo Fajardo’s Crude: A Memoir as an entryway to discuss environmental and racial injustices abroad and the issues students were concerned about in their own backyard. Using Crude as a model, they created their own eco-zines to share with each other. Featuring narrative and actionable steps, these mini comics documented the process of each student identifying an environmental inequity, addressing it through developing their storytelling voice, and creating a resource and plan for action. Historically, comics are deeply connected to subversion and social activism, and I think it’s important to empower students to feel a part of that tradition by both reading and trying their hand at creating comics.
In general, the history of disability in comics is filled with negative stereotypes and associations—disabled characters are often tragic victims, evil villains, objects of pity, or comedic relief and vehicles for satire. In the widely popular superhero genre and beyond, disabled characters frequently conform to the “supercrip” trope, whereby disability, or some compensatory trait, gives them extraordinary superpowers to “overcome” their disability. While usually well-intentioned, this trope implies that the only way to be valuable as disabled is to be exceptional, heroic, and/or inspirational. Contemporary counter-narratives push back against these one-dimensional representations, presenting disabled characters with agency and complex identities. They also usually frame disability as a natural part of human existence rather than a sensational anomaly, and they emphasize it as a positive cultural identity rather than a deficit or flaw. This is not to say all contemporary comics featuring disabled characters are liberatory or challenge problematic tropes, but there is a growing body of disability-authored and disability-conscious comics across genres that are intentionally activist and anti-ableist. Sensory: Life on the Spectrum edited by Bex Ollerton is an example of a comics anthology doing this kind of work.
I’m interested in how authors use disability to play with and break from formal conventions, which is powerful because it demonstrates the way disability has innovative creative and communicative value.
I’m very interested in how the comics medium shows, not just tells. The texts I’m drawn to go beyond just being about disability and illness subject-wise, and instead I look for how they take up the experiences of these embodiments as generative aesthetic and narrative resources. In other words, I’m interested in how authors use disability to play with and break from formal conventions, which is powerful because it demonstrates the way disability has innovative creative and communicative value. For example, there are pages in Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me that work the narrator’s mania into the form by breaking with the regularity of a closed panel, linear layout, showing the reader how this kind of experience can open new perceptive and imaginative states of mind, as well as expand what comics can look like. These pages stand in contrast to the regular, structured panels depicting Ellen at the psychiatrist office, which is symbolic of a host of social norms and the medical model which the reader might feel compelled to reflect on as formally and socially constraining, oppressive, etc.
Additionally, as a visual-verbal medium, comics also demand ethical reflection on the visual politics of representing and looking at disability and illness. For instance, comics can encourage readers (as they are also spectators) to acknowledge and question their own potentially voyeuristic or objectifying gaze over a disabled character. Comics can also refute readers’ expectations or stereotypes of what disability/illness “looks like,” or provide new iconographies and visual metaphors for understanding that go beyond medicalized language, pathology, and deficit model ways of thinking.
Graphic medicine is a field of study concerned with the intersection of the comics medium and healthcare discourse. It was coined by Ian Williams, a physician and cartoonist from North Wales, who created the official website in 2007. It has since grown to become an international collective and community of people, welcoming physicians, academics, artists, activists, and everyday readers alike. The cross-disciplinary conversations the field fosters are important, especially those around the therapeutic power of reading and creating comics and challenging stigma. The term “graphic medicine” has also expanded in usage to encompass a genre or subgenre of comics focused on illness, disability, and healthcare. This has provided these narratives with general increased recognition and a more formalized legitimacy in academic, healthcare, and community settings.
However, genrefication can often obscure other frameworks that might enrich our understanding of these texts, such as trauma studies, feminist theory, intersectionality, and disability studies, which could provide deeper insights into such texts that are often still read and written from a diagnostic or medical model lens (in other words, just because something gets catalogued as graphic medicine doesn’t mean it is a counter-narrative—and I think there is a well-intentioned tendency in the field to sometimes read them all as such). As a literary scholar trained in life writing studies, I have concerns about how memoiristic works of graphic medicine are frequently interpreted too literally and the ways in which the field has an over-investment in “authenticity,” which life writing scholar Sidonie Smith reminds us is not a simple truth but a complex construction of personal experience, cultural factors, audience/social expectations, and limits of narrative techniques. Ultimately, integrating different frameworks into the conversation is essential; otherwise, we risk overlooking the intricacies of these texts, including both the valuable insights they offer and the potentially problematic issues they may perpetuate.
The invisibility of whiteness as a category and the canonization of predominantly white, upper- and middle-class narratives in graphic medicine are related limitations. Soha Bayoumi discusses this and looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic has generated works that challenge the whiteness of narratives in graphic medicine. My colleagues and I examine other limitations around empathy, access, and representation in a two-part special issue of The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies on “Cripping Graphic Medicine,” which can be read here and here. In my article, “‘The Real Requires the Fantastic’: Teaching Comics, Race, and Disability in the Era of Black Lives Matter”, I show how a Black feminist disability studies lens can enrich graphic medicine, as well as demonstrate how important it is to teach texts that don’t necessarily register as graphic medicine in the conventional way (such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation and Victor LaValle’s Destroyer, which aren’t “about” disability, illness, and healthcare per se, but have representational significance). I also emphasize the importance of prioritizing texts and frameworks that move away from Western-centric perspectives on knowledge and healing, which could help decolonize our understanding of the bodymind.
Nonlinear and translinear comics break with the traditional notion of storytelling that takes the form of a straight, chronological sequence, and they often visually break with typical Western conventions of being read from left to right and up to down. They might use a fragmented layout to engender a more dynamic and fluid reading experience; jump between different time periods, perspectives, or narratives; or feature overlapping images and panels (Richard McGuire’s Here is one example). Stories about disability, illness, and the body don’t always fit into neat timelines, plots, or structures with a distinct beginning and end, so this form of play with time and space can be quite apt to represent those experiences. For fields like graphic medicine and disability studies, which aim to interrogate normative structures and highlight texts that expand our understanding of embodied experiences, these kinds of narratives can be particularly insightful.
These kinds of narratives can absolutely intersect with the representation of “crip time,” and I write about this at length in my article, “Crip Time as Space: Drawing Chronic Illness in Julia Wertz’s The Infinite Wait and Other Stories.” In this piece I think about how the comic honors mundane moments of chronic illness and crip time as politically and socially significant. I also argue that the comic’s graphic temporalities (i.e. those that are non-chronological, recursive, slow, and discontinuous) force readers to slow down and deepen our understanding of how illness affects one’s orientation to space, time, and ableist social structures.
The notion that comics are accessible operates under assumptions the reader is sighted or that they are already adept at processing the complexity of the medium. Regarding the former, accessibility in comics isn’t just about making text and images larger. It involves considering alternative formats, i.e. audio description, tactile illustrations, and comic transcripts. There are exciting conversations around making comics accessible to blind and low vision readers in these ways at The Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability in collaboration with Comic Studies and the Program in Visual Impairments at San Francisco State University. They’ve assembled the Accessible Comics Collective, a network of comic artists, access providers, and blind experts.
In terms of the latter, traumatic brain injury and learning disability, for example, can impact a reader’s relationship with the medium. Reasons beyond disability, like sociocultural exposure to visual material, or socioeconomic factors that determine access to education and literacy, can also impact how accessible comics are to a reader. There’s also a commonplace assumption that comics are more accessible because they distill difficult material into images which ostensibly require less mental work to read and comprehend. While this is true in some cases for some people, comprehending visual language is not necessarily universal, as Neil Cohn argues. In general, reading and creating comics requires skill, patience, and practice, like learning a new language or syntax according to Alison Bechdel. So to promote inclusivity in teaching comics it’s important to give students ample guidance and interpretive tools to read comics with, rather than starting with the assumption comics will automatically be accessible or make a topic accessible right out of the gate for them.
The piece on dementia and historical memory, “Drawn To History: Healing, Dementia, and the Armenian Genocide in the Intertextual Collage of Aliceheimer’s,” was part of a monograph from Biography titled Graphic Medicine that was nominated for the 2023 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work. In that article I explore how the author Dana Walrath’s narrative of her family’s past during the Armenian Genocide challenges dementia as a popular metaphor for political amnesia, trauma, and denial. Rather than use her mother Alice’s dementia to comment on the loss of personal and historical memory, Walrath presents Alice as an agent in recuperating trauma through story and history making. Through a disability studies lens I center my approach to graphic medicine beyond the clinic (and patient/doctor dynamics) to issues of human rights and social justice, to argue for the emergent centrality of more global, intersectional, and situated engagements within future directions of graphic medicine scholarship. Overall, the article suggests that Aliceheimer’s attends to intersectionality and situatedness not by framing Alice as at a loss for memory, as popular dementia discourse is wont to do, but instead by illustrating how Alice’s dementia connects her with personal and collective history in new and meaningful ways.
I currently have a few projects forthcoming including an article on the representation of sideshow performer Schlitzee Surtees in Bill Griffith’s graphic biography Nobody’s Fool and a piece on dementia in genre fiction. I’m also co-editing a new Palgrave Handbook that brings disability studies and comics studies into conversation. It’s a collection that is going to showcase topics like accessibility, intersectionality, and disability justice from a range of contributor perspectives, and there will be some graphic forms of scholarship in the volume as well!
Crystal Yin Lie is an Assistant Professor of Comparative World Literature at California University, Long Beach, where she teaches courses in disability studies, health humanities, literature & medicine, and comics & graphic narratives. Her research interests include contemporary literature and life writing about dementia and the representation of disability in comics. She received her PhD in English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor with a graduate certificate in Science, Technology, & Society. Her work can be found in Graphic Medicine (University of Hawai’i Press), Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. She was a co-editor of Sex, Identity, Aesthetics The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies (University of Michigan Press) and is currently co-editing a volume on Disability and Comics (Palgrave).
This interview was conducted by Choice’s digital media producer Sabrina Cofer.
This interview feature invites academics, librarians, teaching faculty, and higher education stakeholders to discuss their latest projects and research. Spotlighting both early and late career researchers, TIE Talks aims to sit down with fascinating individuals whose engaging and informative work inspires others in their fields and intersects with DEIA topics.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.
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