Publication Date
March 2016
Abstract
The use of graphics in academic research is a relatively underexplored and underutilized medium through which social science researcher s can communicate and share the knowledge they’ve acquired with larger audiences. The graphic article attempts to disseminate the findings of sociological research to non-academic audiences in an effort to make more public and more accessible the information intended to help regular people in everyday life. This article will use autoethnography in addition to critical discourse analysis to expose the connections between the ways in which female-bodied people experience psycho-medical discourses in everyday interaction, and in more institutionalized settings (i.e. doctor’s offices). The character featured in this piece serves as an amalgam to tell the stories of many female-bodied people’s stories. Using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a guide through “hysteria” and “hypochondriasis,” this graphic narrative will explore the social exchanges of this fictional character as she asks questions about aging, reproduction, and gendered ideological frameworks set in motion by academic/medical discourses in her everyday life. Providing evidence of physio-biological changes in her body, her questions and stories prove to reveal responses in her interactions that are not only interestingly similar, but also strangely framed as comfort and dismissals of her embodied experiences.