Informed by the insights of intimacy studies, psychoanalysis, comics studies, and visual studies, this book shows how these works participate in the process of meaning-making, and how the comics genre allows them to do so in particularly inventive and contemporary ways.
Santé, intimité, et identité dans la bande dessinée autobiographique de tradition franco-belge examines the ways different autobiographical comic books explore the theme of health, and its influence on identity construction. How do artists represent abstract feelings of pain? How do illnesses influence our sense of self? What is the role of others in our personal history? Our state of health, both physical and mental, has a profound effect on our identity, and how we perceive and tell stories about this dimension of our lives is crucial to forming a sense of self, particularly in a contemporary digitalized world that is now flooded with information and images once considered too private for public consumption. All the works studied exhibit a constant tension between the anxieties of revealing intimacy and vulnerability, and the desire to make suffering meaningful, which is a fundamental aspect of these authors’ quest to recover and to reconstitute a sense of self. Informed by the insights of intimacy studies, psychoanalysis, comics studies, and visual studies, this book shows how these works participate in the process of meaning-making, and how the comics genre allows them to do so in particularly inventive and contemporary ways.