Anna Hamilton's NERVOUS SYSTEMS comic validates my life as a woman with "invisible' disabilities

Anna Hamilton is another great writer I met through FWD. I just found their graphic memoir NERVOUS SYSTEMS, hosted on their blog, Too Much Tea. I surprised myself by really liking their basic confessional art style. I generally prefer consciously arty, carefully drawn and colored comics. But these simple pictures, paired with their well-read insight into growing up disabled, managed to break through into my feelings. There are excellent disability studies footnotes. AND, you can learn a bunch without reading any of them. I particularly appreciate the parallels they expose between marked bodies, both "woman" and "disabled."

As Anna says in their afterword:

One aspect of academic writing, and theory, that has confused me for a long time is the expectation that both will be—and should be—written in a style that is inaccessible to all but a comparatively select few. Part of my reason for choosing a format—the graphic novel—that is not looked at as “serious” was to make some very important theoretical concepts accessible to a non-academic audience. Additionally, my own theoretical project of examining women’s chronic physical pain in contemporary culture relates a lot to my own life experiences, and I have had trouble writing about these experiences “academically enough.”

The art is 48 print pages, broken into three web-pages, plus complete image descriptions — which make it very convenient for me to quote the comic-as-text:

( 700-word sample and links )

Content notes: disability slurs; divorce; emesis; CP, anaphylaxis, fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, sexism, normate bigotry

[ETA corrected Anna’s pronouns 12 Mar 2024]

Lakeside serenity

A great day to hang by Lake Monona

Puffy clouds piled high above a small lake wind-ruffled to a gray green. Near shore features tall prairie flowers, human-height scrubby bushes, and a very weather-beaten oak -- all frame the fifteen-story and smaller buildings on the far shore (our State Capitol pokes up among them).

( image here )