School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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Item“Revolting Developments”: productive shame in the graphic narratives of Phoebe Gloeckner and Aline Kominsky-Crumb( 2019)“Revolting Developments” presents the first extended, comparative analysis of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Phoebe Gloeckner’s comics, prose and visual works through the critical framework of shame as an affective mode. These two innovative cartoonists, as well as being contemporaries and peers, have both produced formally and affectively disruptive representations of subjectivity over time, negotiating and subverting the gendered conventions of genre in order to instantiate a new, more productive relationship with their readers. The politics and poetics of looking and the gaze are refigured through Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s anti-confessional, testimonial representations of sexual violence and psychological parental abuse, their tentative embrace of abjection, and their resistance to prescriptive discourses of childhood. Kominsky-Crumb’s autobiographical comics refuse the categorisation of passive victimhood. Her representation of past trauma troubles the distinction between tragedy and comedy. Gloeckner’s representations of violence interrogate agency, complicity and the mutating power shifts that her young protagonists experience. Although these cartoonists approach shame differently (stylistically as well as conceptually), they both ultimately demonstrate a similar feminist politic. Orienting their texts through the history of the gendering of autobiographic strategies, the assignation of abjection, and the fragility and vulnerability of childhood, I argue that the critical lens of affect, specifically that of shame, provides a productive means of interrogating and analysing Gloeckner’s and Kominsky-Crumb’s negotiation of gendered interpellation and formal subversion of generic modes in order to represent serialised subjectivity. This thesis examines how the affective states of shame and abjection are registered and subverted in Gloeckner and Kominsky-Crumb’s work; following on from the work of Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Hillary Chute it asks how these writers represent shame and how they make this affect and experience productive for the female-gendered subject. Structured through shame’s identity-constituting delineation of subjectivity, heightened sense of embodiment, and identificatory relationality, this thesis analyses Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s negotiation of autobiographic strategies, subversion of gendered and cultural abjection, and critique of the discursive construction of girlhood. Their instantiation of an alternative relational identification is limited to a racially bounded image of girls, as Gloeckner, and to a lesser extent Kominsky-Crumb, instrumentalise a covetous and objectifying American Africanism in order to exploit the association of white fragility and feminine value.