"Lolita is Set Free: Questioning and Re-inventing Constructions of Adolescent and Pre-adolescent Female Beauty in Phoebe Gloeckner’s Graphic Memoirs"

Abstract

This essay investigates Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs, A Child’s Life and Other Stories (2000) and The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (2002), which negotiate the status of the girl protagonist as a sexual spectacle available under the adult male gaze. It argues that by borrowing from the canon and the counter-canon of male art and literature which normalizes the objectification and the silencing of the adult and underage female body, the graphic memoirs reproduce the association of female beauty with sexual objectification. Simultaneously, they also introduce subversive forms of adolescent and pre-adolescent female beauty that set the female subject free from the restrictions of the male gaze. Even though Minnie’s outside appearance becomes a factor that causes her continuous sexualization and sexual suffering and her premature familiarization with her status as a sexual spectacle, some of her visual depictions are shown, in this essay, to demonstrate a feminist take on adolescent and pre-adolescent beauty that ignores the male spectator all together through feminist uses of the grotesque and the carnivalesque.