Visualizing Crip/Queer Time in Comics Life Writing: A Meta-Autobiographical Graphic Essay
摘要
In this work of graphic autotheory, comics artist Elk Paauw considers how individual non-normative experiences of time can be expressed using the medium of comics. Drawing from his own comics about his transness and experience with mental illness, Paauw links his autobiographical comics practice to the theoretical works of Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman. First, Paauw defines crip time and queer time, explaining how they trouble notions of chrononormativity (AKA normative time) as “event-centered” and “productive” (Freeman 5) in a capitalist sense. He then discusses how the multiplicity and fragmentation of the subject is enabled through experimental use of the comics medium, looking at the scholarly work of Hannah Miodrag, Tamryn Bennett, and E. Del Rey Cabero on non-linear comics practices. Next, Paauw looks at how interior “psychic-scapes” (as coined by Venkatesan and Saji 2021, 38) are expressed in first-person comics such as Sarah Lippett’s Puff of Smoke (2019), Georgia Webber’s Dumb (2018), Ellen Forney’s Marbles (2012), and his own work, A Matter of Life and Jeff #2 (2017). Finally, he meditates on crip/queer history and encourages building cross-temporal connections with queer and disabled elders and future people through comics as an act of resistance.