Wysocki’s review of research/writing on graphic narratives was enlightening. I am not sure how the content was meant to be “less stimulating” when aimed at a working class readership, but I find the argument that these word/picture combos were aimed at “educating particular bodies toward passivity”(32). It seems important, generally, for the cited authors to establish a set of categories. Wysocki’s lit review/argument travels quite a bit, so I’ll try to at least point out some take-away threads. She starts with Hall’s assertion that, as she puts it, “we see ourselves in what we produce” (25). Ultimately, pitching words and pictures in the same work makes available more alternatives for how one can see herself in such media. Various authors did what they could to establish hierarchical categories that would stabilize the significance of images and neutralize any threat they might pose to norms as they perceive them. However, these categories can be worked across, disjuncted, and thus destabilized by putting the words at cross-purposes with the images, heightening awareness through satire in the image or meta-ish commentary on what is seen by the characters in the image as well as the reader.

“In Fun Home, the fraught household is described as resulting from the tensions of people trying to live as though “male” and “female” were cleanly defined by lists of dichotomous qualities like those I quoted some pages back” (40). The texts she’d cited had contributed to a discourse in which dichotomous thinking discouraged the characters from recognizing their less cleanly defined lived experience of gender and sexuality. I’m not sure I’m convinced that putting text in less predictable or more ambiguous places than adjacent to their respective, normative gendered images…I’m not sure this will do much to “dissolve” the dichotomy. I am convinced that Bechdel’s many drawings of different kinds of text has a lot to do with the story, the way the stories her parents told themselves/others about who they are seemed to matter more to them than their own lived experiences.

“The possible relationships of words and drawings in this book are also multiplied, not endlessly but well beyond the restraint of what word and picture or male and female can be in the lists from the beginning of this paper”(41). It seems that having a space in the comic to create multiple relationships between words and drawings is being offered to readers who can explore such relationships and “question identities available to them'(42). In making this suggestion, Wysocki seems draws some correlation between mediation, embodiment, and identity. I’m still unclear about how this works. I remember something about the simultaneous inside and outside of embodiment that premises mediation, but as I understood it identity was something that could be internalized from the external mediations of the subject/’s body, but that subtle distinction between conditioned and intrinsic seems to get lost here.