lb_lee | Apparently AllFam was in a Symposium!

About once a year, I summon the intestinal fortitude to Google myself, in case anybody has made a cool review of my work that I can put in my C.V. (Alternately, sometimes I get a surge in sales that makes me think someone must be saying nice things about me SOMEWHERE.) Well, today I found out that my book All In the Family was apparently part of a June 2024 Symposium on Auto/Bio/Fictional Graphic Narratives, associated with Goldsmiths University of London! Apparently my work made it all the way to India, improbably! (How? Mr. Tarun, HOW DID YOU FIND ME???)

[D1-P5] Athmika Tarun
Documenting Dissociative Identity Disorder: History, Experience and Authenticity

Although Sybil and the lesser-known Michelle Remembers—both narratives about Multiple Personality Disorder (or Dissociative Identity Disorder aka DID) written by psychologically distressed women—were debunked in the 90s for being misrepresentations and fraudulent, there has been a mushrooming of DID narratives regardless. What has accompanied the popularity of DID texts, alongside other mad narratives, post-Sybil is a hermeneutics of suspicion, i.e., a general scepticism among the public regarding the validity of some of the medical diagnoses—not least DID. Add to this, the first-person narrative account, in general, by patients with mental disorders is notoriously treated as unreliable by physicians and the public. In the post-Flexnerian world, the patient’s narrative is viewed with discomfort by physicians who have come to depend more on ‘impartial’ clinical data obtained from various technical manipulations of the Foucauldian clinical gaze and on their positivist scientiﬁc expertise. In such an economy of suspicion, DID narratives such as L. B. Lee’s graphic memoir All in the Family are invariably forced to engage with the question of authenticity. In this paper, I will show how Lee’s memoir uses the visual and verbal tracks of comics to establish the authenticity of their subjective experience. I will also demonstrate that by engaging the history of MPD/DID—referring to historically specific judicial cases, individuals and organizations which were instrumental in delegitimizing victims of childhood sexual abuse and their recovered memories—Lee’s memoir not only lends a sense of authenticity to the narrative but also functions as a critique of an entire ‘truth regime’ which favours the scientific over the subjective.

Keywords: madness, narrative, graphic memoir, dissociative identity disorder

Athmika Tarun is a PhD student in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Delhi. He is researching representations of madness in contemporary literature through the frameworks of narrative theory, medical humanities and mad studies. He graduated from the University of Hyderabad with a Master’s degree in English in 2020.

Making comics, we only ever figured the people who'd buy them were (A) other multis/weird-brained people, (B) their associates, (C) diehard buyers of local stuff, and (D) people who are fans of us in particular. It's been surreal to discover a small academic cohort who seem to mention our work... even as far away as India!

It's also kinda funny to think that, back when I first started doing this, waaaaaay back in 2007, I chewed on my arm being like, "Why would any higher-ups pay attention to my crazy ass? I don't have any credentials!" Now here I am, many years later, having apparently fallen ass-first through the back door by accident! I don't know how the academics found me, if it was from the graphic medicine panels I've done over the years, local comics academic Hillary Chute (who we met in person) putting in good words for me, or that Vulture article, or what. I guess the lesson here is, sometimes you achieve things by accident.

At least they're finally citing something besides MPD for You and Me!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

acorn_squash

Wow, that's really cool!

dismallyoriented

Oh, congratulations! Also desperately curious about how this guy found you; maybe he's reachable by email about it. Most academics are pretty dang stoked when the author whose work they're covering comes to talk to them about it.

lb_lee

Believe it or not, this is the THIRD Indian academic to cite us! (The other two worked together and cited MPD for You and Me because my comics webpage went in chronological order so it was at the top. I actually changed that just for that reason.) The others were from the National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli, in a different state and a good distance away.

I dunno, I am kinda intimidated to talk to a guy halfway across the world who studies this stuff that deeply!