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This chapter uses trauma as a point of access into Gabrielle Bell’s three most recent works—The Voyeurs (2012), Truth is Fragmentary (2014), and Everything is Flammable (2017). Highlighting how Bell develops a traumatic narrative by fragmenting it across these three texts, it analyzes the role speed plays in the ways we tell and receive traumatic accounts. By slowing down her own telling to the point of decentralizing trauma, Bell posits suffering not as spectacle, but as part of everyday living. While trauma consistently resurfaces throughout her oeuvre, its fractured and non linear format makes it easy to overlook. Building on Lee Gilmore's recent theorizing of female testimony and witness, this chapter traces the network of trauma that threads these books to suggest that ethically bearing witness often means slowing down.

Gabrielle Bell's The Voyeurs stages voyeurism in multiple ways. Bell's avatar of ten acts as a voyeur, peering at neighbors or passers by. Some times she is the object, not subject, of a gaze: both other characters, as well as the reader, often observe her as she goes about her daily routines. But sometimes readers are presented with a third aspect of voyeurism, which is what she sees. Instead of just watching her watch, sometimes the reader sees what she sees. Thus Bell presents us with her vision, as well as offering herself to our gaze. While we generally associate voyeurism with radical subjectivity, loneliness, and alienation, Bell offers her vision as an invitation to join in a community of watchers, as we become more a ware of what and how we see.

As forms of auto biography, diaries are of ten framed as secret, private, and confessional genres–they are presumed to be (desired as) an unfiltered and uncensored mode. In popular culture, diaries are frequently used to connote the image or experience of a teenage girl and are connected to expectations for emotionally heightened and subjective or unfiltered narration. This chapter explore show the contemporary comics artists Gabrielle Bell and Julie Doucet use diary as a both a methodology (a structural device) and a symbolic mode: in a body of diary comics, these artists respectively narrate autobiographical stories that center on the mundane, banal, and ephemeral, in away that both heightens and contests the voyeuristic frame of diary point of view.

This chapter examine show the histories of women's comics have failed to capture and contextualize the full range of women's work. Assessing the recuperative scholarship of Hillary Chute and Trina Robbins sets the stage for understanding the various reasons why women's work is overlooked. This frame then turns to cartoonists Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell and situates them in abroad er genealogy of histories of women's comics. This chapter engages both artists' work in anthologies comics and trace show second-wave, under ground feminist cartoonists have influenced and connect these artists together.