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This chapter examines a range of short narrative comics by Julie Doucet, and investigates Doucet’s use of cuteness as an affective and aesthetic strategy. It employs Sianne Ngai’s theory of cuteness as per formative powerlessness to argue that Doucet's comics subvert the historically gendered assumptions of cuteness as weakness. Doucet's work uses a visual a estheticdensely populated byrounded figures and small, anthropomorphic domestic objects, and her protagonist’s submissive, feminized poses, juxtaposed with violence and abjection, resist and critique gender norms. Her work parodies psycho analytic tropes, foreground sheravatar’s pleasure and control, and rejects the abnegation of abject desires. Doucet’s comics challenge patriarchal ideology, instead embracing a joyful refusal to conform.

Comparing a Tintin episode, "The Broken Ear, "with Julie Doucet’s "A Day in Julie Doucet’s Life, "this essay analyze show Doucet's story telling provides a countering perspective to the hyper-masculine, action-motivated crime narratives from the Tint in comics series. In contrast to Hergé’s attention to public space and deliberate objects, Doucet’s visual work explores the home, privacy, disorder, and female boredom. Her text highlights the unintelligible and its gendered significations, offering an example of what a "boring" story can expose. Considering the varying serialities of Hergé's and Doucet’s works, this chapter considers the potential for gendered domains of waiting, in coherence, and the everyday ordinary.

This chapter compares two of Julie Doucet’s comics stories: “The First Time” and “Monkey and the Living Dead.” Focusing on genre conventions, the chapter investigates the classification of the former comic as auto biography and of the latter as fiction. Side by side, the two stories of sexual becoming are in dialogue with one another, yoked by common visual symbols such as faucets, grates,and other abstract phallic and vaginal references. Building on Philippe Lejeune and Paulde Man, the chapter demonstrates Ann Miller’s theory of autobiographical bande dessinée. This chapter ultimately argues that while “The First Time” follows traditional, generic norms of auto biography, this reading of the fictional “Monkey and the Living Dead” reveals an alternative, subliminal account of the author’s feelings about her virginity loss, there by challenging the concept of auto biographical truth.

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 explores the importance of quotidian traumas and the emotional confusions of lived experience by analyzing the works of Phoebe Gloeckner, Debbie Drechsler, and Julie Doucet. Known for their stories of young women’s lives and for their individual comics, Gloeckner, Drechsler, and Doucet create powerful visual and textual metaphors for the visceral experiences of their early womanhood. All three carry on the legacy of Carolee Schneemann and her second-wave feminist peers. This chapter looks at the most powerful resonance of Schneemann’s themes, particularly that of “diaristic indulgence,” in Gloeckner, Drechsler, and Doucet. It also considers the notions of female adolescence and autobiography in the context of feminism.

This chapter examines Julie Doucet and MichelGondry’scoll aborative comics/video hybrid My New NewYork Diary, which consists of drawings made by Doucet and a shortfilm by Gondry. After outlining the claims made on behalf of the two forms in terms of their perceived ability to represent reality and “truth,” the chapter argues that the collaboration is a highly experimental engagement with issues such as realism, authenticity, and autobiography that playfully unsettles each category through a shrewd employment of the medium-specific properties inherent to comics as well as cinema. By calling the relationship between reality and representation into question, the hybridity built into the project serves not only to challenge accepted models of autobiography and author ship in comics as well as film, but also to interrogate issues of mediated autobiographical absence and presence more broadly.

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.

This chapter examines self-portraiture in contemporary graphic novels and how they oppose the standard theoretical skepticism regarding the viability of cognitive mapping, or the ability to plot oneself in a social order defined by the arrangements of late capitalism. Autography's peculiar textures of visuality and capitalism in self-portraiture are explored through an analysis of Julie Doucet's cover image of My New York Diary (1999) and David Small's Stitches (2009). Doucet's cover image resembles two types of the medieval colophon: one showing scribes and illuminators busy at work, and the other showing them transfixed in spiritual rapture. Doucet's colophonic cover invests in a fantasy of artistic self-representation that is replicated in Stitches Stitches. The chapter argues that Stitches aligns with the tradition of the künstlerroman, or narratives of the artist's development. It concludes by considering how artistic escape and expressivity produce narrative stitches for artistic labor to cover over.