Graphic Medicine:
Comics, Health, identity, and power
Fall 2024, ThursDAYS, 4:00-7:00PM; MEETS AT MIT
Graphic medicine is a method and a movement at the conjuncture of comics, clinical medicine and healthcare, and the experience or event of illness, trauma, or disability. Key tenets include: 1. resistance to the idea of a “universal patient,” one which defaults to white, cis, hetero, male of European descent, 2. outcomes linked to more inclusive perspectives of medicine, illness, and disability in healthcare scholarship and clinical practice, 3. growing comics’ historical role in cultural and political change.
Graphic Medicine: Comics, Health, Identity, and Power expands the frame of graphic medicine through GCWS methodologies centered around culture and identity. We will orient our inquiry of comics in the concepts and practices of disability justice, what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha describes as, “a movement-building framework that would center the lives, needs, and organizing strategies of disabled queer and trans and/or Black and brown people marginalized from mainstream disability rights organizing’s white-dominated single-issue focus” (15) . Mixing critical texts and graphic narratives, we’ll consider pathographies of disability, illness, and madness at intersections with race, class, gender, sexuality, climate, indigeneity, war, and migration. We’ll also explore how the cultural practices and artifacts of graphic medicine acquire significance and social impact via their use and exchange. Finally we’ll work creatively to imagine graphic medicine(s) invested in shifting illness politics as well as individual and collective experiences of both caregiving and being cared for.
FACULTY
Dr. Briana Leigh Martino is Associate Professor and Chair of Communications and affiliated faculty in Race, Gender, and Culture in the Gwen Ifill School of Media, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Simmons University where they teach courses in visual culture and communication, the graphic novel, media theory, and queer/trans studies. Dr. Martino received their PhD in Cultural Studies with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stony Brook University. Their research and teaching interests span madness and disability, visual and documentary culture, graphic medicine, feminist pedagogy, and care work. Their video essay on graphic medicine as feminist pedagogy appears in MAI: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture, and their article on graphic medicine’s shared genealogies with mutual aid is forthcoming in The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. They are currently working on a book chapter which considers graphic medicine and graphic journalism texts as sites of collaboration in migration and refugee comics. The chapter, co-authored with Lisa Diedrich, will be published in Constructing Sites: Surveying Scenes of Interdisciplinary Collaboration, out from Bloomsbury in 2025. Their book, Keywords/Images in Graphic Medicine, also co-edited with Lisa Diedrich, is forthcoming from Penn State University Press in 2025.