Sarah's Response

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#462

After reading and re-reading, I’m still trying to figure out what my issue was with this piece. I was hoping Wysocki would answer her questions a little more deeply for us here, instead of  touching on conversation points. Like Shona mentioned in her response, I too, “did not pick up on a response to the questions on the first page.” Even if that wasn’t the point, it was somewhat disappointing. There is something ironic about having difficulty with an article that wants the reader to disrupt the traditional ways we communicate through writing.

Nevertheless, some of the points Wysocki brings up were thought-provoking in terms of identity construction and how we embody  through traditional media . While reading this piece, I immediately thought of a comic-type blog called Hyperbole and a Half.

https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/10/menace.html.

Written by Allie Bosh, this blog combines words and pictures to construct identity, where the pieces are very much focused on character depictions of the physical body to tell a successful story. Maybe a few of you have heard of it, because her book recently made the New York Times’ best sellers list, and her blogs have definitely made the rounds on the internet. The idea is pretty similar to Fun Home, because her stories are at once reminiscent and relatable (if only because I too, am a white woman who had awkward experiences). Before I started verbalizing the word “embodiment” for this class, I think I’ve associated many of Wysocki’s ideas with this comic.

What’s interesting about the way Bosh constructs her identity in Hyperbole, is that she doesn’t represent the physical body as purely as Bechdel, but rather, as a bizarre-looking blob of a figure that she draws in Microsoft Paint. Her blob-body contributes something very important to the storyline that wouldn’t come across if she just used words. It’s something about how we think others see our physical bodies as we grow up, and in turn, how we construct ourselves when we don’t quite know who we are. In the story I linked to above, Bosh describes a pivotal moment in her childhood where she realizes that we can discover pieces of ourselves by taking on different forms (with costumes). The acute expressiveness of her drawn face and thereby, the ease of emotion related in the images, always speeds her stories up to a climax in a way that words don’t.  Bosh has certainly considered (subconsciously or not), how we work across words and pictures to construct new identities and thereby, how we embody these narratives. Wysocki would be proud.

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