Graphic Narrative's Potential for Representation: Nódoa Negra and Female Pain
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/rlec.4690Keywords:
graphic narrative as communication, graphic narrative as language, representation, gender issues, female painAbstract
Graphic narratives' success and popularity in the late decades make them powerful communication and expression media objects. Closely associated with popular and mass culture, entertainment and easy reading, it is interesting to realise their ability to address complex issues, such as the representation of pain in women, which is often culturally and scientifically neglected. Thus, the analysis of Nódoa Negra (Bruise; Lopes et al., 2018), a comic book volume curated by Dileydi Florez featuring graphic narratives by women around the theme of pain, is particularly relevant here. This article explores the potential of graphic narratives to represent female pain based on several narratives included in Nódoa Negra. The dual semantic code of text-image, typical of the graphic narrative language, allows for the multiplication of discursive resources, promoting a broader range of representations. By saying what cannot be shown, showing what cannot be said, and encouraging the construction of meanings in the interstitial space between text and image, the graphic narrative allows for greater detail and expressive depiction of pain in its abstraction and materialisation between the sayable and the unsayable. The theoretical-methodological framework adopted focuses on culture and communication studies, critical discourse studies and medical humanities.
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