Drawing infertility: an interview with Paula Knight, Jenell Johnson, Emily Steinberg, and Phoebe Potts

ABSTRACT

Although infertility is a gender-neutral health quandary, women are often blamed and stigmatised for the couple’s failure to reproduce. The valorisation of the maternal within the discursive constructions of womanhood engenders severe psychic harm to childless women. In such a context, the recent proliferation of graphic memoirs on infertility, where women recount the affective perceptions and sensed realities of their infertility experiences attains special significance. In this email interview, four graphic memoirists, Paula Knight, Jenell Johnson, Emily Steinberg, and Phoebe Potts, reflect on a wide range of issues centred on female infertility including the social pressures surrounding motherhood, liberative potential of comics and graphic medicine, readership and community building, and the significance of creating art and telling stories. The conversation illustrates how these graphic artists create contexts and generate a unique visual-verbal vocabulary to visibilize and thereby destigmatise female infertility. The interview is divided into two sections: in Part A titled Of Comics and Infertility, the authors respond to generic questions related to infertility, graphic memoirs among others and, in Part B titled Storytelling is my contribution. Otherwise, why am I here? Each of the authors responds to questions related to their respective infertility memoir.

KEYWORDS:

• Infertility
• motherhood
• graphic medicine
• graphic memoir
• comics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Infertility is ‘a disease of the reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a clinical pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse’ (WHO 2009) affecting ‘an estimated 48.5 million couples worldwide’ (Mascarenhas et al. 2012).

2. Fertility Fest is the world’s first festival of arts which is devoted to infertility, fertility and related issues concerning conception. The fest aims to create a platform for artists, professionals and patients to discuss fertility, infertility and the contemporary meaning(s) of reproduction and its impact on individuals and societies.

3.. Launched in 2009 by Nicola Streeten and Sarah Lightman, Laydeez do comics is the first graphic novel forum led by women and focuses on autobiographical narratives.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sathyaraj Venkatesan

Dr Sathyaraj Venkatesan is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli (India). His research concentrates on health humanities and graphic medicine. He is the author of four books and eighty research articles. His forthcoming co-authored book is Gender, Eating Disorders, and Graphic Medicine (Routledge, 2020). His articles have appeared in indexed journals including Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, American Medical Association Journal of Ethics (AMA), Health, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, The Explicator, International Fiction Review, INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society among others.

Chinmay Murali

Chinmay Murali is a PhD graduate student in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli (India). His research interests include literature and medicine, graphic narratives and visual culture, critical health humanities, and narrative medicine. His ongoing doctoral work concentrates on women’s reproductive disorders and graphic medicine. His research articles have appeared in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press), Journal of Medical Humanities (Springer), Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge) among others. He is currently working on his book Travails of Motherhood: Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine (contracted with Routledge).