VOL 1 No 1, 2024 Research Article
1Thakurdas Jana 2Ritendra Sharma
1 Research Scholar, Department of English, Indus University, Ahmedabad.
2 Professor, Centre for Indic Studies, Indus University, Ahmadabad.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21659/jsae/v1n1/v1n117
[Article History: Received: 19 Feb 2024. Revised: 13 Mar 2024. Accepted: 18 Mar 2024. Published: 30 Mar 2024]
Abstract
Leo Tolstoy’s configuration of ‘true art’ as the ‘art of the people’ that present the individual experience of the artist has been prevalent in the world of medical humanities where the artworks forecast the first-hand experience of the artists affected by certain diseases and epidemics provide psychological relief from depression and anxiety, besides the sympathetic illustrations by established artist or narrators. This cathartic function of artworks is fulfilled by some contemporary ‘barren’ women to bring their psychogenic disorder, both at home and at hospitals, into non-verbal representations as found in the channeling of pain into comics by a mom and comic artist Alison Wong from California, in cartoonist Jessica Olien’s sharing of her infertile journey in “An Infertile Story” and “May be, Baby?”, and Christine MacDonough’s comic illustrations of her actual experiences as an infertile woman in her webpage entitled Infertility Illustrated. With the help of this ‘intersection between the medium of comics and discourses of healthcare’, this paper aims to vitalize the comics and autobiographical cartoons by the aforementioned artists in the study of graphic medicine and document how their arts helped them to cross the infertile pathways of their journey in life.
Keywords: comic, cartoons, infertility, graphic medicine, motherhood
