Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Women Comics 1. Scratching the Surface: "Ugly" Excess in Aline Kominsky-Crumb 2. "For All the Girls When They Have Grown": Phoebe Gloeckner's Ambivalent Images 3. Materializing Memory: Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons 4. Graphic Narrative as Witness: Marjane Satrapi and the Texture of Retracing 5. Animating an Archive: Repetition and Regeneration in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home Notes Works Cited Index

Scholarly and fascinating. -- Colette Bancroft St. Petersburg Times The graphic novel industry isn't a boys club. Time Out Chicago Graphic Women is a text that will appeal to anyone with an interest in contemporary women's literature and trauma studies, as well as those with a budding or established interest in the rich world of comics studies. -- Tahneer Oksman Contemporary Women's Writing An absorbing book written with dedication, impressive documentation, and a very sharp eye for detail. -- Mihaela Precup Biography ...an essential book for those who are interested in autobiography, visual studies and comics in general as it initiates a beginning in the study of women's graphic memoirs. -- Olga Michael Scadinavian Journal of Comic Art

An exciting and theoretically sophisticated gender and genre study, the kind of book that interpellates its reader, defines its territory, and stakes its claims immediately. -- Bella Brodzki, Sarah Lawrence College Elegantly written and profusely documented, Chute's breakthrough Graphic Women is a remarkable and original book that relentlessly pursues verbal/visual details of graphic narrative. Through constant invention/intervention of powerful interpretive strategies, the volume reveals how gender, trauma, and autobiography are uniquely embodied in the fundamental material dimensions of the comic book form. It will become a new starting point for future comics studies. -- Donald Ault, founder and editor of ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, University of Florida The strange alchemy of comics is inspiring new ways of thinking about gender, trauma, and life narrative. Graphic Women captures the state of the art in this rapidly growing field. -- Gillian Whitlock, author of Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit In the pages of her Graphic Women, Hillary L. Chute shows, in engaging, unflinching prose, the accomplishment of five key figures from a generation of women graphic novelists who have used this medium to record history, testify about the cross-currents of life and memory, and draw and write against silence about abuse, dislocation, and sexuality. We have today no more important or gifted writer on the graphic novel than Chute: read the book and you will be plunged headlong into the riveting world of comics today. -- Peter Galison, Harvard University If you are not yet convinced that comics is the avant-garde genre par excellence and that it has provided feminist writers with a prime medium for telling life narratives, then read this book. Read it also to learn a critical vocabulary with which to appreciate and discuss the layered sophistication of this hybrid form and to discover a powerful and diverse tradition of 'graphic women' whose haunting works are beautifully elucidated in this powerful book. -- Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University