As she creates her own lists to keep track of her moods and her reactions to certain medications, Forney dialogises scientific expert discourses with her own story as a patient and counters the authority of medical expertise with the authority of personal experience. Forney senses that her diagnosis and her treatment are latently interwoven with power relations and regimes of normativity.ĭrawing on the concept of remediation (Bolter/Grusin) I will show how the cartoonist manages to remediate and appropriate the medical lists. I argue that it is medical list language and its specific underlying message of not fulfiling a certain norm that complexly intertwines Forney’s experience as a bisexual woman with her experience of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Drawing on queer theory (Barker, Cvetkovich, Halberstam, Warner) and Foucault’s concept of biopower, my article will explore the exuberant use of lists in Ellen Forney’s graphic somatographics Marbles: Mania, Michelangelo, Depression, and Me and Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice from My Bipolar Life.īy situating Forney’s experience of mental illness within the long history of female sexuality and insanity, I discuss the extent to which Forney’s visual account of experiencing and coming to terms with bipolar disorder is positioned within historical and contemporary discourses of heteronormativity and ableism.
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