Publications by Chase Gregory
Studies in Comics, 2012
Comix illustrate queerness, literally, both in the comics 'gutter' (the space between panels), an... more Comix illustrate queerness, literally, both in the comics 'gutter' (the space between panels), and in the 'stutter' of the repeated frame. The gutter in comics makes clear that narrative can continue (in the form of reproductive futurity) only inasmuch as we continue to suture together gaps in narrative (the gaps of queer jouissance) through the 'imperative of figuration' and the compulsion to create meaning. The gutter and repetition stand in relation to deconstructionist ideas about the slippage inherent in meaning, but also have implications for our understanding of Lacanian orders (see David Ault's work on comics and Lacan). The comics medium, with its unique spatial/temporal relation, provides a visual metaphor for time, and in doing so offer ways for readers to envision time and space differently; because queerness is placed in opposition to institutions of linear time (family, heterosexual futurism, reproduction, capitalism), it challenges 'reproductive temporality' and instead posits new temporalities - ones that refuse forward movement through the institutions of generational inheritance and instead fuck with the family tree. Queer/comix temporalities fold back, repeat, stutter, and offer new ways of relating to time that are not driven by a reproductive imperative. In the literal illustration of the gutter/closure, the meaning/nonmeaning relation through the mechanisms of panel, gutter, and frame, comics make visible the queer element in all artistic media, and thus make visible the instability of any symbolic investment.
Conference Presentations by Chase Gregory
Famed cartoonist Alison Bechdel is best known for her graphic memoir Funhome (2006), a richly-det... more Famed cartoonist Alison Bechdel is best known for her graphic memoir Funhome (2006), a richly-detailed look back at her relationship with her closeted father, in the wake of his suicide and her coming out as a lesbian. Are You My Mother?, as a memoir, in part, about the process queer memoir, enacts and theorizes a kind of “backward becoming”: in order to tell the story of her own queer childhood, Bechdel must first create the “queer child” of her memory retroactively, a tricky and ambiguous process that runs counter to the “truth” of autobiography. In her second book-length comic she shifts her focus, this time turning the lens on her mother, presenting an intricate, at times maddeningly meta-narrational, account of her ongoing relationship with the woman who raised her. Rather than resting in one place – the text is either “Winnicottian” or “Lacanian;” either “assimilationist” or “queer;” either a tale of “growing up” or “growing sideways” – Bechdel’s work explores the tensions between these characterizations.
Musing on the various implications of this second notion of “delay,” Stockton asks, "What kinds of thought about growth emerge when key material issues from childhood… intersect with theorized notions of words?" (4) We might expand this question to words and pictures, as the stuttering, reflective delays are here not only verbal, but also visual. Regressive and repetitive, the return to the same (… a kind of narcissism?) might seem to “thwart” the possibility of creativity. Infinite and proliferating, the stutter might be the creative impulse itself, creating an openness even as it fills one. Thus does the fictional, re-constructed figure of the gay child, “whose identity is a deferral (sometimes powerfully and happily so) and an act of growing sideways, by virtue of its future retroaction as a child" (11), particularly highlight the trickiness of memoir and memory explored by Bechdel in her second graphic memoir.
Since their advent onto the academic scene, comics have been theorized as a "disruptive" medium: ... more Since their advent onto the academic scene, comics have been theorized as a "disruptive" medium: comics hybridize text and image, and their “lowbrow,” paraliterary status means they are often considered unworthy of critical attention. These associations grant comics both a disadvantaged position (as a popularly discounted art form) and, paradoxically, a privileged position (as a medium capable of "outsider" or "subversive" power) within critical discourse.
For this reason, many theorists see comics as particularly well-suited for what Alicia Freedman calls "a historically dense and sophisticated vocabulary for pain language” (Freedman, 382). The “subversive” formal structures of comics – stuttering (Groensteen), gaps (McCloud), and disorientation (Cohn) – recall the language of concussion, pain, or chaos. Thinking alongside themes of "concussion," I want to explore the relationship of comics to trauma, disruption, and disability by focusing on representations of disability and sexuality in David B.'s graphic memoir Epileptic.
Previous discussions of David B.'s much-celebrated memoir have focused on its reparative or redemptive aspects – praising, for example, the graphic novel's capacity to foster "a connection to the experience of neurocognitive illness and disability " (Squier, 149). Such accounts, however, ignore the strong anti-relational impulse in Epileptic, and in comics themselves. David B's attempts to portray his experience of his brother Jean-Christophe's epilepsy often fail to grasp the "connection" hopefully anticipated by his readers; what is left is fantasy, morbidity, and a repetition compulsion that mimics the repetitive violence both of Jean-Christophe's seizures and of David B.'s inability to escape the familial trauma of illness. With this in mind, I propose a formal reading of Epileptic that acknowledges these repetitive failures, gaps, and recurrent scenes of violence as disrupting the book's redemptive epilogue as complicating the book's redemptive epilogue. Following Anna Mollow's recent theorizations of the "disability drive" as it relates to the negative turn in queer theory (Mollow, 287), I want to examine the previously under-discussed intersection of sexuality and disability in David B.'s work (B. and Wivel, 116), as well as the implications of thinking disability alongside comics more broadly.
response given for Rey Chow book talk, Duke University, 10/27/14
In Mad for Foucault, feminist and queer theorist Lynne Huffer returns to the early work of Michel... more In Mad for Foucault, feminist and queer theorist Lynne Huffer returns to the early work of Michel Foucault – specifically History of Madness, first published in France in 1961—in an attempt both to re-evaluate the ways in which queer theory uses Foucault, and to find a new way of doing queer theory. Using Madness as a guide, Huffer theorizes a new “erotic of the archive” through which we can approach a new style of queer critique.
But what is “queer critique?” In phrasing the question this way, I deliberately allude to the question Foucault asked in a lecture presented nearly twenty years after the publication of Madness, but nonetheless, I think, informed very much by Foucault’s original fascination with madness as a topic: the lecture “What is Critique?”, presented at the French Society of Philosophy in 1978. Here, Foucault defends critique against philosophy, reversing the privilege usually afforded to serious philosophy and granting it instead to the “virtue” of critical practice. In doing so, Foucault creates a kind of paradox: critique is useful by virtue of its frivolity, its dependency, and its dispersion.
In examining the question of “queer critique,” I want to draw parallels between the version of “critique” laid out by Foucault in his 1978 lecture, and Lynne Hugger’s call for a Foucault-inspired “erotic of the archive” outlined in Mad for Foucault. Thinking through Foucault’s model of critique – one which traces eventualization – alongside Huffer’s own project of a new kind of erotic, affective relation to queer theory’s intellectual archive, I move away from the traditional reading of citation as an vertical, Oedipal relation (Bersani, Edelman, Derrida, etc.) and towards an understanding of citation as a node of linkage in intersecting and shifting horizontal vectors of intellectual production.
Taking as my object the Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les guérillères, I mean to explore the diffic... more Taking as my object the Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les guérillères, I mean to explore the difficulties of ambiguously “utopian” science fiction, especially with regard to the intersection and tensions between French “postmodern” and “feminist” political strategies in the early seventies. Les guérillères’s three-part, dialectical structure, as well as its status as radical feminist science fiction, at first suggests a utopian vision of a future synthesis born of a revolutionary women’s struggle, and indeed it has been read that way (Chisolm, Nelson-McDermott, etc). But the circles marking the beginning of each section, as well as Wittig’s statement about how the text “should” be read – that is, with the chronological end of the narrative at the locational beginning of the book – makes it hard to find a beginning or an end at all, calling to mind the “always already” of deconstruction. In fact, both a dialectical and deconstructive readings of Les guérillères are possible, and coexist in tension. Wittig manages to blur the line between two camps –that of the dialectical revolution and that of the deconstructive revolution – and thus serves to parody both. Rather than proclaiming a vision of utopia, Les guérillères pushes back against the very idea of a "future" to be eventually arrived at, challenging rhetorics of revolution based on progression towards a common, collective goal. Wittig's narrative of revolution doubles back on, contradicts, and undoes itself… presenting a myriad of different strategies, Wittig allows the political goals of Les guérillères to shift as often as the referent of its ubiquitous pronoun, elles, also shifts. Taking seriously the question of space-time explored in Julia Kristeva’s “Women’s Time,” as well as questions raised by Wittig’s own descriptions of the “shape” of her novel, I want to ask the question: what shape is the narrative in Les guérillères, and what does that mean for its understanding of the “future”? I will argue that the shape of Les guérillères isn’t a circle, but a Möbius strip; the future is here presented as a paradox without beginning or end, where two sides actually become one.
Papers by Chase Gregory
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2022
Taking as my object the Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les guérillères, I mean to explore the diffic... more Taking as my object the Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les guérillères, I mean to explore the difficulties of ambiguously “utopian” science fiction, especially with regard to the intersection and tensions between French “postmodern” and “feminist” political strategies in the early seventies. Les guérillères’s three-part, dialectical structure, as well as its status as radical feminist science fiction, at first suggests a utopian vision of a future synthesis born of a revolutionary women’s struggle, and indeed it has been read that way (Chisolm, Nelson-McDermott, etc). But the circles marking the beginning of each section, as well as Wittig’s statement about how the text “should” be read – that is, with the chronological end of the narrative at the locational beginning of the book – makes it hard to find a beginning or an end at all, calling to mind the “always already” of deconstruction. In fact, both a dialectical and deconstructive readings of Les guérillères are possible, and coexist in tension. Wittig manages to blur the line between two camps –that of the dialectical revolution and that of the deconstructive revolution – and thus serves to parody both. Rather than proclaiming a vision of utopia, Les guérillères pushes back against the very idea of a "future" to be eventually arrived at, challenging rhetorics of revolution based on progression towards a common, collective goal. Wittig's narrative of revolution doubles back on, contradicts, and undoes itself… presenting a myriad of different strategies, Wittig allows the political goals of Les guérillères to shift as often as the referent of its ubiquitous pronoun, elles, also shifts. Taking seriously the question of space-time explored in Julia Kristeva’s “Women’s Time,” as well as questions raised by Wittig’s own descriptions of the “shape” of her novel, I want to ask the question: what shape is the narrative in Les guérillères, and what does that mean for its understanding of the “future”? I will argue that the shape of Les guérillères isn’t a circle, but a Möbius strip; the future is here presented as a paradox without beginning or end, where two sides actually become one.
Studies in Comics, 2012
Comix illustrate queerness, literally, both in the comics 'gutter' (the space between panels), an... more Comix illustrate queerness, literally, both in the comics 'gutter' (the space between panels), and in the 'stutter' of the repeated frame. The gutter in comics makes clear that narrative can continue (in the form of reproductive futurity) only inasmuch as we continue to suture together gaps in narrative (the gaps of queer jouissance) through the 'imperative of figuration' and the compulsion to create meaning. The gutter and repetition stand in relation to deconstructionist ideas about the slippage inherent in meaning, but also have implications for our understanding of Lacanian orders (see David Ault's work on comics and Lacan). The comics medium, with its unique spatial/temporal relation, provides a visual metaphor for time, and in doing so offer ways for readers to envision time and space differently; because queerness is placed in opposition to institutions of linear time (family, heterosexual futurism, reproduction, capitalism), it challenges 'reproductive temporality' and instead posits new temporalities-ones that refuse forward movement through the institutions of generational inheritance and instead fuck with the family tree. Queer/comix temporalities fold back, repeat, stutter, and offer new ways of relating to time that are not driven by a reproductive imperative. In the literal illustration of the gutter/closure, the meaning/nonmeaning relation through the mechanisms of panel, gutter, and frame, comics make visible the queer element in all artistic media, and thus make visible the instability of any symbolic investment.
differences, 2019
Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012) presents an interesting c... more Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012) presents an interesting challenge to literary critics: as an object that extensively theorizes itself, it leaves little room for interpretation beyond its surface-level claims. This article reads against the grain of Are You My Mother? ’s own analysis in order to make room for readings that resist taking the text at its word. Although Are You My Mother? proclaims loyalty to the psychoanalytic theories of Donald Winnicott, Bechdel employs the metaphor of the mirror and the formal qualities of comics to complicate the reductive assertions of her avatar’s own narration. Ultimately, despite all its surface-level attachments to Winnicott’s version of mental and emotional health, Are You My Mother? ’s formal strategies end up revealing Bechdel’s deep ambivalence toward concepts like reparation, authenticity, and psychic wholeness.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
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Publications by Chase Gregory
Conference Presentations by Chase Gregory
Musing on the various implications of this second notion of “delay,” Stockton asks, "What kinds of thought about growth emerge when key material issues from childhood… intersect with theorized notions of words?" (4) We might expand this question to words and pictures, as the stuttering, reflective delays are here not only verbal, but also visual. Regressive and repetitive, the return to the same (… a kind of narcissism?) might seem to “thwart” the possibility of creativity. Infinite and proliferating, the stutter might be the creative impulse itself, creating an openness even as it fills one. Thus does the fictional, re-constructed figure of the gay child, “whose identity is a deferral (sometimes powerfully and happily so) and an act of growing sideways, by virtue of its future retroaction as a child" (11), particularly highlight the trickiness of memoir and memory explored by Bechdel in her second graphic memoir.
For this reason, many theorists see comics as particularly well-suited for what Alicia Freedman calls "a historically dense and sophisticated vocabulary for pain language” (Freedman, 382). The “subversive” formal structures of comics – stuttering (Groensteen), gaps (McCloud), and disorientation (Cohn) – recall the language of concussion, pain, or chaos. Thinking alongside themes of "concussion," I want to explore the relationship of comics to trauma, disruption, and disability by focusing on representations of disability and sexuality in David B.'s graphic memoir Epileptic.
Previous discussions of David B.'s much-celebrated memoir have focused on its reparative or redemptive aspects – praising, for example, the graphic novel's capacity to foster "a connection to the experience of neurocognitive illness and disability " (Squier, 149). Such accounts, however, ignore the strong anti-relational impulse in Epileptic, and in comics themselves. David B's attempts to portray his experience of his brother Jean-Christophe's epilepsy often fail to grasp the "connection" hopefully anticipated by his readers; what is left is fantasy, morbidity, and a repetition compulsion that mimics the repetitive violence both of Jean-Christophe's seizures and of David B.'s inability to escape the familial trauma of illness. With this in mind, I propose a formal reading of Epileptic that acknowledges these repetitive failures, gaps, and recurrent scenes of violence as disrupting the book's redemptive epilogue as complicating the book's redemptive epilogue. Following Anna Mollow's recent theorizations of the "disability drive" as it relates to the negative turn in queer theory (Mollow, 287), I want to examine the previously under-discussed intersection of sexuality and disability in David B.'s work (B. and Wivel, 116), as well as the implications of thinking disability alongside comics more broadly.
But what is “queer critique?” In phrasing the question this way, I deliberately allude to the question Foucault asked in a lecture presented nearly twenty years after the publication of Madness, but nonetheless, I think, informed very much by Foucault’s original fascination with madness as a topic: the lecture “What is Critique?”, presented at the French Society of Philosophy in 1978. Here, Foucault defends critique against philosophy, reversing the privilege usually afforded to serious philosophy and granting it instead to the “virtue” of critical practice. In doing so, Foucault creates a kind of paradox: critique is useful by virtue of its frivolity, its dependency, and its dispersion.
In examining the question of “queer critique,” I want to draw parallels between the version of “critique” laid out by Foucault in his 1978 lecture, and Lynne Hugger’s call for a Foucault-inspired “erotic of the archive” outlined in Mad for Foucault. Thinking through Foucault’s model of critique – one which traces eventualization – alongside Huffer’s own project of a new kind of erotic, affective relation to queer theory’s intellectual archive, I move away from the traditional reading of citation as an vertical, Oedipal relation (Bersani, Edelman, Derrida, etc.) and towards an understanding of citation as a node of linkage in intersecting and shifting horizontal vectors of intellectual production.
Papers by Chase Gregory
Musing on the various implications of this second notion of “delay,” Stockton asks, "What kinds of thought about growth emerge when key material issues from childhood… intersect with theorized notions of words?" (4) We might expand this question to words and pictures, as the stuttering, reflective delays are here not only verbal, but also visual. Regressive and repetitive, the return to the same (… a kind of narcissism?) might seem to “thwart” the possibility of creativity. Infinite and proliferating, the stutter might be the creative impulse itself, creating an openness even as it fills one. Thus does the fictional, re-constructed figure of the gay child, “whose identity is a deferral (sometimes powerfully and happily so) and an act of growing sideways, by virtue of its future retroaction as a child" (11), particularly highlight the trickiness of memoir and memory explored by Bechdel in her second graphic memoir.
For this reason, many theorists see comics as particularly well-suited for what Alicia Freedman calls "a historically dense and sophisticated vocabulary for pain language” (Freedman, 382). The “subversive” formal structures of comics – stuttering (Groensteen), gaps (McCloud), and disorientation (Cohn) – recall the language of concussion, pain, or chaos. Thinking alongside themes of "concussion," I want to explore the relationship of comics to trauma, disruption, and disability by focusing on representations of disability and sexuality in David B.'s graphic memoir Epileptic.
Previous discussions of David B.'s much-celebrated memoir have focused on its reparative or redemptive aspects – praising, for example, the graphic novel's capacity to foster "a connection to the experience of neurocognitive illness and disability " (Squier, 149). Such accounts, however, ignore the strong anti-relational impulse in Epileptic, and in comics themselves. David B's attempts to portray his experience of his brother Jean-Christophe's epilepsy often fail to grasp the "connection" hopefully anticipated by his readers; what is left is fantasy, morbidity, and a repetition compulsion that mimics the repetitive violence both of Jean-Christophe's seizures and of David B.'s inability to escape the familial trauma of illness. With this in mind, I propose a formal reading of Epileptic that acknowledges these repetitive failures, gaps, and recurrent scenes of violence as disrupting the book's redemptive epilogue as complicating the book's redemptive epilogue. Following Anna Mollow's recent theorizations of the "disability drive" as it relates to the negative turn in queer theory (Mollow, 287), I want to examine the previously under-discussed intersection of sexuality and disability in David B.'s work (B. and Wivel, 116), as well as the implications of thinking disability alongside comics more broadly.
But what is “queer critique?” In phrasing the question this way, I deliberately allude to the question Foucault asked in a lecture presented nearly twenty years after the publication of Madness, but nonetheless, I think, informed very much by Foucault’s original fascination with madness as a topic: the lecture “What is Critique?”, presented at the French Society of Philosophy in 1978. Here, Foucault defends critique against philosophy, reversing the privilege usually afforded to serious philosophy and granting it instead to the “virtue” of critical practice. In doing so, Foucault creates a kind of paradox: critique is useful by virtue of its frivolity, its dependency, and its dispersion.
In examining the question of “queer critique,” I want to draw parallels between the version of “critique” laid out by Foucault in his 1978 lecture, and Lynne Hugger’s call for a Foucault-inspired “erotic of the archive” outlined in Mad for Foucault. Thinking through Foucault’s model of critique – one which traces eventualization – alongside Huffer’s own project of a new kind of erotic, affective relation to queer theory’s intellectual archive, I move away from the traditional reading of citation as an vertical, Oedipal relation (Bersani, Edelman, Derrida, etc.) and towards an understanding of citation as a node of linkage in intersecting and shifting horizontal vectors of intellectual production.