How Do Techniques from Comics Narratives of Deafness Create a Sense of Disorientation and Potential Alienation that Reveal the Role of Sound in Graphic Medicine?

By | April 9, 2019

Lewis, A. D. (2019, April 9). How do techniques from comics narratives of deafness create a sense of disorientation and potential alienation that reveal the role of sound in graphic medicine? In Seeing Sounds / Hearing Pictures – A Round Table on Sound & Comics. The Middle Spaces. Retrieved from https://themiddlespaces.com/2019/04/09/seeing-sounds-part-one/

ABSTRACT:

These rhetorical innovations for deafness in comics are also present in the depiction of other medical scenarios, specifically the traumatic initial effect of a cancer diagnosis. Numerous cancer comics feature that moment of terrible discovery. This is not to conflate deafness with cancer nor define the illness as a disability necessarily, but to note that the same comics techniques that expose the hearing reader to the experience of the hearing-impaired character can fulfill a similar function for expressing the disorientation and renegotiated identity of the cancer patient.