Comic Resilience: Reducing the Risk of Triggering Survivors in Sequential Art

Abstract

This doctoral research-creation project examines how comics can lower “the risk of triggering reception,” that is, the psychological risk readers with PTSD face when exposed to (both fictional and nonfictional) testimonies of trauma in comics. By combining autoethnography, textual analysis, and comic creation/an original graphic novel, this research suggests that implementing distancing narrative features, aesthetic devices that provide readers with psychological or emotional distance, can lower the risk of triggering reception. To begin, a variety of comics containing depictions of sexual violence in comics created by women were read. Based on embodied responses to these representations, the comics were then separated into two categories: triggering and non-triggering. Patterns observed in the non-triggering comics became the basis of the distancing narrative features explored in this project. Building on supporting evidence from other academics, distancing narrative features were exemplified through close readings of three chosen texts: Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan, Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa’s Jokes and the Unconscious, as well as Una’s Becoming Unbecoming. The distancing narrative features discussed in this project include 1) obvious fictitiousness; 2) preventing overidentification; 3) empowerment; 4) avoiding triggering details; 5) indirect communication; 6) avoiding permanent victimhood; 7) cathartic release; and 8) slowing down the reading process. For the creative portion of the work, these distancing narrative features were applied in the form of an autobifictional graphic memoir based on the author’s sexual violence experiences. Since the nature of trauma and comics are both fragmented, the book features small narrative fragments woven together with a larger metanarrative that is based on the creation of the comic. Drawing the comic enabled the distancing narrative features to be tested from a creator’s perspective. While the distancing narrative features may have helped prevent the artist from being triggered when drawing, they did not completely mitigate the emotional impact of examining one’s trauma. However, the distancing narrative features effectively prevented triggered states while reading.