Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology (NIT) Trichy, Office Room # 310 | Lyceum Building, Trichy, Tamilnadu, 620 015, India.
J Med Humanit. 2022 Mar;43(1):27-42. doi: 10.1007/s10912-019-09571-z.
Comics has always had a critical engagement with socio-political and cultural issues and hence evolved into a medium with a subversive power to challenge the status quo. Staying true to the criticality of the medium, graphic medicine (where comics intersects with the discourse of healthcare) critiques the exploitative and unethical practices in the field of healthcare, thereby creating a critical consciousness in the reader. In close reading select graphic pathographies such as Gabby Schulz's Sick (2016), Emily Steinberg's Broken Eggs (2014), Ellen Forney's Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me (2012) and Marisa Marchetto's Cancer Vixen (2009), the present article delineates how graphic medicine interrogates the larger than life forces in the field of healthcare. Drawing specific instances from the aforementioned graphic texts, the essay demonstrates that graphic medicine scrutinizes the political economy of health under capitalism. In so doing, the article illustrates how the pharmaceutical corporations, insurance companies, medical technology, and healthcare corporations marketize and commoditize health in the neoliberal era. Finally, the article attempts to theorize how graphic pathographies, mediating subjective experiences, generate a new critical literacy through the conflation of the personal and the political in the verbovisual medium of comics.
漫画一直与社会政治和文化问题密切相关，因此演变成一种具有颠覆性力量的媒介，可以挑战现状。为了保持媒介的批判性，图像医学（漫画与医疗保健话语交叉的领域）批评医疗保健领域中剥削和不道德的做法，从而在读者中引起批判意识。通过仔细阅读 Gabby Schulz 的《Sick》（2016）、Emily Steinberg 的《Broken Eggs》（2014）、Ellen Forney 的《Marbles：Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me》（2012）和 Marisa Marchetto 的《Cancer Vixen》（2009）等精选图像病理学作品，本文阐述了图像医学如何质疑医疗保健领域中比生命更大的力量。本文从上述图像文本中提取具体实例，论证了图像医学如何审查资本主义下的卫生政治经济学。通过这种方式，本文说明了制药公司、保险公司、医疗技术和医疗保健公司如何在新自由主义时代将健康市场化和商品化。最后，本文试图通过在漫画的视觉语言媒介中融合个人和政治，来理论化图像病理学如何通过调解主观经验来产生新的批判素养。
