Reading Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life and Other Stories at the Time of #MeToo

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I analyze the autobiographical subject's sexual suffering in Phoebe Gloeckner's graphic memoir, A Child's Life and Other Stories (2000), through an investigation of the cartoonist's reference to Marcel Duchamp's installation, Étant Donnés: 1° la Chute d'Eau, 2° le Gaz d'Eclairage (1944–66), and the tradition in which it is situated, which spans back to Gustave Gourbet's infamous painting, L’Origine du Monde (1866). I propose that to complicate the representation of Minnie's sexual objectification, Gloeckner fuses traces related to the negotiation of the female nude body in Duchamp's and Courbet's patriarchal, canonical art, and in Carolee Schneeman's and Judy Chicago's second-wave feminist art. I argue that the graphic memoir introduces Gloeckner as an active consumer of past artworks by performing her feminist reading and reinterpretation of them, and thus it proposes ways of critically consuming gender formations that reach us via art, literature and social media. My aim is to stress the value of A Child's Life, particularly at the time of #MeToo, a period when we are surrounded by testimonies of sexual abuse told by girls and women, while simultaneously being bombarded with their sexualising images reaching us through the media.

KEYWORDS:

• Phoebe Gloeckner
• A Child’s Life
• Lolita
• sexual abuse

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Olga Michael is a Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Central Lancashire. She has published on feminism, female beauty and sexual violence in Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs, on the intersections between Lynda Barry’s What It Is and revisionist fairy tales and on graphic autofiction in Barry and Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs.

Notes

1 Duchamp (1887–1968), the French-American father of postmodern conceptual art, was the first to introduce readymade objects and materials in his artworks with his infamous urinal, entitled The Fountain (1917), being his most representative piece. Étant Donnés, translated in English as Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Glass, is one of his most controversial works and it depicts a three-dimensional nude woman lying in an open space with no traces of life apart from her raised arm (see Honold 2016). Saul Ostrow describes Duchamp's distinct ‘brand of anti-aesthetic practices,’ which challenges conventional perceptions of what art is (2013, x). Courbet (1819–1877) is a French painter and father of nineteenth-century, realist ‘retinal’ art with L’Origine, the close-up depiction of a vagina, being his most controversial piece (see Hentschel 2002).

2 Feminist poet and philosopher Adrienne Rich writes that ‘re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women […] an act of survival’ (1972, 18). Rich's comment concerns, however, a revision of the archive of women's art and literature for the creation of a maternal canon that would counter that of the fathers. In this essay, I examine the potential of an artistic daughter's revisionist engagement with canonical fathers’ works in relation to second-wave women's feminist art.

3 The US underground scene of the 1960s and 1970s is where the genre of autobiographical comics emerged as a reaction to Fredrick Wertham's ‘Comics Code,’ a set of censoring rules imposed on mainstream comics during the 1950s, which were believed to contribute to juvenile delinquency. Underground comics was a male-dominated genre with Robert Crumb, its initiator, extensively drawing scenes of rape in his work. Countering the machismo of the underground scene, women cartoonists started producing their own autobiographical comics with the initiator of the genre being Aline Kominsky-Crumb, the former's wife. Women's underground comics include stories of sexual experimentation and abuse (see Sabin 1993; Robbins 1999; Merino 2001; Kominsky-Crumb 2007; Chute 2010; Michael 2014).

4 I use the term graphic memoir to refer to the book versions of autobiographical comics that flourished during the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century, after Art Spiegelman's landmark Maus: A Survivor's Tale and My Father Bleeds History (1986), which signalled the legitimation of the genre, its circulation in book forms as opposed to comic strips in newspapers and magazines, and the academic turn to it (see Bradley 2013; Michael 2017).

5 I refer to Laura Mulvey's schema as described in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ whereby the male subject is the bearer of the gaze and the female object, invested with ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ holds the position of the spectacle (436; see also Berger 1972).

6 For photographic reproductions of the installation, see http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/65633.html.

7 Jerrold Seigel explains that Étant Donnés is an ‘illustration of [Courbet's realist] retinal art’ as presented in L’Origine (1995, 111). For a photographic reproduction of Courbet's painting see http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/search/commentaire/commentaire_id/the-origin-of-the-world-3122.html.

8 Drucilla Cornell defines heterosexual pornography as the ‘explicit presentation and depiction of sexual organs and sexual acts with the aim of arousing sexual feeling through either (a) the portrayal of violence and coercion against women as the basis of heterosexual desire or (b) the graphic depiction of a woman's body as dismembered by her being reduced to her sex and stripped completely of personhood’ (1995, 106; see also MacKinnon 2006).

9 Elsewhere, I read Duchamp's influence on Gloeckner's graphic memoir as connecting the extreme sexual crime against the young American actress known as the Black Dahlia, which took place in 1947, with the contemporary subtle version of abuse that Minnie suffered because of her sexualisation by Pascal in the domestic domain (‘The Other,’ 2018).

10 Two examples of such re-readings include Orlan's revisionist take on Duchamp's Etant Donnés in her Documentary Study: The Head of Medusa (1981) and her parody of Courbet's L’Origine du Monde, entitled L’Origine de la Guerre (1989), photographic reproductions of which can be seen here: http://www.paris-art.com/lorigine-de-la-guerre/ (for analyses of Orlan’s works see Jeffries 2009; Knafo 2009).

11 Meaning creation has been perceived as an interactive process in visual culture studies (see Jones and Stephenson 1999; Mirzoeff 1999; Betterton 2003; Jones 2003; Brison 2004).

12 Chute translates the subtitle as ‘the bath, the father, the hand, the cock’ (2010, 71).

13 Gloeckner insists that her texts aim to formulate collective rather than personal stories: ‘I aspire,’ she notes, ‘to create characters who can be universally understood despite being constructed with details so numerous that they could only refer to a particular situation […]. It is not my story. It’s our story’ (2011, 179).

14 Richard Dyer explains in his analysis of male pinups that a disruption of balance takes place when placing a male model in the role of the spectacle and a woman in that of the spectator, because this distribution violates ‘the codes of who looks and who is looked at (and how)’ (1993, 104). Nevertheless, ‘some attempt is instinctively made to counteract this violation’ (104). The spectacle's return of the gaze to the female spectator and the display of ‘phallic’ muscularity are two such examples.

15 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2010) define the drawn depictions of the narrated ‘I’ in graphic narratives as autobiographical avatars.

16 In Frames of War, Butler (2016) explains that a photograph is always a partial subjective interpretation of reality, while analysing war photography.

17 Poe (1809–1849) is considered the father of the literary gothic, Clarke Henderson's (1887–1958) work forms a sample of post-WWI hard-boiled fiction and Burroughs (1914–1997) is one of the most representative writers of the Beat Generation. These American authors’ works cover, together with Nabokov's, a period beginning in the nineteenth and ending towards the end of the twentieth century, and they present adolescent and pre-adolescent girls in sexual relationships with much older men or sexually violated youth in the family domain and beyond (see Michael ‘The Other’ 2018).

18 For example, Egan and Hawkes (2008) criticise the APA Task Force Report, further discussing other bibliography on the discourse of sexualisation.