Communicable Diseases: Graphic Medicine and the Extreme

Abstract

This article examines a new mode of communicating illness: graphic medicine or auto/pathography, biographies and autobiographies about the experience of illness (one’s own or that of another), written in comics form. In auto/pathography, the extreme condition of chronic pain or illness intrudes into the everyday, and the representation of this extreme is the subject of the article. The article demonstrates how the extreme is constituted by multiple temporalities, new protocols of engagement with everyday objects, the eversion of interiority, even as the narrative is cast as a sentimental one. Finally, it also unpacks the attempts by the sick to retain or assert a measure of agency in the face of illness.