Taryn A Mahoney

This paper establishes the ways in which graphic narratives generate unfettered spaces for marginalized identities, focusing specifically on the first self-portrayals of women cartoonists in the 1960s comix underground. Aline Kominsky’s autobiographical “Goldie: A Neurotic Women” was published in the inaugural issue of The Wimmen’s Comix Collective, instituting a new and progressive conception of the female experience
in graphic form. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Janet Miller, and Hillary L. Chute, among others, I argue illustrated depictions of selfhood employ an alternative mode of expression from conventional writing methods. In doing so, graphic autobiographies necessitate a “recuperating [and] reconstructing” of the self, “even as [it is] produce[d]… differently in the very act of telling” (“Giving Account of Oneself” Butler). In reconciling the work of Aline Kominsky and the Wimmen’s Comix Collective with theories of self-expression and narratology, I demonstrate the emancipatory potential of graphic narratives. The graphic form liberates the eye from the repetitive and compulsory rituals of linear analysis, creating opportunities for progressive representations and complex understandings of gender, sexual, and racial identities.

Previous scholarship on the subject of early seventeenth century cosmetics in the works of William Shakespeare has tended towards a consideration of their use in his theatre, with little attention paid to the everyday attitudes surrounding controversial beauty regimes of the period in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Farah Karim-Cooper alludes to this lack of critical forethought in her book Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, wherein she determines the “contemporary culture of cosmetics extended beyond practice and vanity and into the domains of theatre, art, and poetry” (1 my emphasis). Despite this observation, Karim-Cooper dedicates the majority of her focus to Shakespeare’s dramatic works, interspersed with powerful yet insufficient references to the sonnet form. My contribution seeks to re-contextualize Karim-Cooper’s assertion that “early modern dramatists attempted to revalue the cosmetic” (2) within Shakespeare’s poetical framework, through a comparative reading of the ‘Procreation’ and ‘Dark Lady’ sequences; Shakespeare’s Sonnets “elevate” cosmetics not only by “reinvigorating their metaphorical uses” (Karim-Cooper 135) but by framing beauty, reproduction, and poetry as cosmetic devices.