Infertility Comics and Graphic 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 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.

"Combining an acute analysis of the often conflicting medical and socio-cultural constructions of infertility with illuminating, theoretically informed readings of four trailblazing works of graphic medicine, this book will be a valuable addition to courses in Feminist and Women's Studies, Medical humanities, History of Medicine, and Comics Studies. More than that, this will engage the mind and heart of anyone who has faced the challenging experience of infertility."

Susan Squier, Brill Professor Emerita of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

"Murali and Venkatesan's close examination of infertility comics, or "gynographics," confirms what proponents of graphic medicine have long known: comics are a powerful space for silenced voices to, finally, be heard."

Matthew Noe, Harvard Medical School, USA