Assembling crip archives : disability and illness in autobiographical graphic narratives / Coral Anaid Díaz-Cano

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Díaz-Cano, Coral Anaid, author.

Series:

Liverpool studies in health, disability, culture & society

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Autobiographical comic books, strips, etc--History and criticism.

Autobiographical comic books, strips, etc.

Narrative art--Themes, motives.

Narrative art.

Graphic novels--History and criticism.

Graphic novels.

People with disabilities in comics.

People with disabilities in literature.

Sick in art.

Sick in literature.

Authors with disabilities.

Artists with disabilities.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Other Title:

Disability and illness in autobiographical graphic narratives

Place of Publication:

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2026

Summary:

"Assembling Crip Archives offers the first sustained study of how autobiographical graphic narratives of disability and illness function as archives of embodied knowledge. Bringing together disability studies, crip theory, and comics theory, Coral Anaid Díaz Cano examines how cartoonists use the formal affordances of comics to document, contest, and reimagine lived experiences of illness, impairment, and care.Through close readings of Tangles, Stitches, Marbles, and Dancing After TEN, the book shows how graphic memoirs assemble alternative records that challenge the authority of medical and scientific narratives. These works do not simply depict illness or disability; they produce generative acts of recordkeeping, preserving affective traces, relational encounters, and bodily knowledge that resist biomedical objectivity. Díaz Cano argues that comics’ interplay of word, image, repetition, and absence enables the creation of ‘crip archives’ that foreground vulnerability, dependency, collaboration, and non-normative temporalities.Attentive to questions of race, gender, care, and authorship, Assembling Crip Archives situates graphic life writing within broader debates about visibility, access, and epistemic authority. The book makes a major contribution to comics studies and disability humanities, demonstrating how drawn self-representation becomes a powerful method for thinking about embodiment, memory, and the politics of knowledge"-- JSTOR

Contents:

Introduction. Crip archives as generative recordkeeping : disability, illness, and the comics form

A repository of relational lives : illness and crip potentiality in Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles : A story about Alzheimer’s, my mother, and me

An archive staring back : reinscribing a cripistemology of cancer and disability in David Small’s Stitches

The self-surveilling archivist : cripping embodiment in Ellen Forney’s Marbles : Mania, depression, Michelangelo, and me

Tactile assemblages : visual impairment and crip collaborations in Vivian Chong and Georgia Webber’s Dancing after TEN

Conclusion. Archival appendages : crip attachments beyond panels and frames

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Online resource; title from PDF title page (JSTOR, viewed September 30, 2026)

Other Format:

Print version: Díaz-Cano, Coral Anaid Assembling crip archives

ISBN:

9781805969211

1805969218

9781805969228

1805969226

OCLC:

1586887455

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license