Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine
ISBN: 9781003028628
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited



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.


Chinmay Murali was a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. He is currently an independent researcher. His research interests include literature and medicine, graphic medicine, and critical health humanities. His research articles have appeared in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine , Journal of Medical Humanities , Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics , Women's Studies , among others. He is a recipient of the Visiting Scholar fellowship from the Center for Health Humanities, MCPHS University, Boston, USA.

Sathyaraj Venkatesan is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. He is the author of six books and over 90 research publications that span African American literature, health humanities, graphic medicine, film studies, and other literary and cultural studies disciplines. He is most recently co-author of Gender, Eating Disorders and Graphic Medicine and India Retold.

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