Venkatesan, S., & Murali, C. (2020) Drawing infertility: an interview with Paula Knight, Jenell Johnson, Emily Steinberg, and Phoebe Potts, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2020.1764074
ABSTRACT:
Although infertility is a gender-neutral health quandary, women are often blamed and stigmatised for the couple’s failure to reproduce. The valorisation of the maternal within the discursive constructions of womanhood engenders severe psychic harm to childless women. In such a context, the recent proliferation of graphic memoirs on infertility, where women recount the affective perceptions and sensed realities of their infertility experiences attains special significance. In this email interview, four graphic memoirists, Paula Knight, Jenell Johnson, Emily Steinberg, and Phoebe Potts, reflect on a wide range of issues centred on female infertility including the social pressures surrounding motherhood, liberative potential of comics and graphic medicine, readership and community building, and the significance of creating art and telling stories. The conversation illustrates how these graphic artists create contexts and generate a unique visual-verbal vocabulary to visibilize and thereby destigmatise female infertility. The interview is divided into two sections: in Part A titled Of Comics and Infertility, the authors respond to generic questions related to infertility, graphic memoirs among others and, in Part B titled Storytelling is my contribution. Otherwise, why am I here? Each of the authors responds to questions related to their respective infertility memoir.