“Scrapbooking Caravaggio’s Medusa, Reconfiguring Blake: What It Is, One! Hundred! Demons! and Lynda Barry’s Feminist Intervention in the (Male) Artistic Canon”

Abstract

This article situates Lynda Barry’s graphic memoirs in the history of Western visual arts and demonstrates how they intervene in different traditions by incorporating and reconfiguring traits from them towards feminist ends. Through a close reading of excerpts from Barry’s work, it argues that its imperfect style, infused with intertextual references and collages, expands the boundaries of comics and conflates various gendered categories, destabilizing their hierarchies and allowing the visual representation of the child autobiographical avatar as gender ambiguous. Specifically, it demonstrates that the boundaries between self/monster-mother, male/female representations, and high (male) art/low, amateur (female) non-art are deconstructed through Barry’s mixing of Michelangelo Merici di Caravaggio’s Medusa and William Blake’s tradition of illuminated writing with the language of comics and the domesticated, feminized process of scrapbooking.