In comparison to the U.S. market, the trend for autobiographical sequential art arrived late within the history of the francophone bande dessinée. Its rising popularity throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium coincided, and to an extent connected, with another belated development in the French-language industry however: that of the growing presence of the female artist. This article considers the strong presence of life narratives in bandes dessinées created by women, before presenting a case-study examining the manipulation of the medium to an autobiographical end in Québécoise artist Julie Doucet's 1998 Changements d'adresses ['Changes of Addresses']. It considers how, in this coming-of-age narrative set first in Montreal and then New York, Doucet utilises the formal specificity of the bande dessinée to emphasise both the fragmentation and then reintegration of her hybrid enunciating instances. It further examines Doucet's usage of the life-narrative bande dessinée to oppose her representation from that of the disruptive male figures in her life, whose sexual presence in her personal evolution is often connected to images of dysfunction and death, finally suggesting via this examination of Julie Doucet and Changements d'adresses the particular suitability of female-created life narratives to feminist reappropriations of the francophone bande dessinée.
Fates Worse Than Death
Destruction and Social Attachment in Timor-Leste
Gabriel Tusinski
importance of bodily injury and death over the destruction of material architectural structures. Despite the fact that house destruction has featured prominently in Timorese repertoires of violence—indeed, 5,000–8,000 houses were destroyed in violence between
Waiting
Anticipation and Episodic Time
Cheryl Mattingly
waiting for? Second, what kind of temporal horizon does this open up? My first question may seem odd. I have already announced that she is waiting for death and, soon after she joined the study, the oncologist delivered a definite time frame: two months
John H. Gillespie
has been fascinating to discover the number of references to ‘la Mort de Dieu’ [the Death of God] 2 in various documents during a key period of his intellectual development (1943–1952). In this article we examine the significance of these references
The Death Throes of Sacrificed Chicken
Triggering Critical Reflexive Stances on Ritual Action in Togo
Marie Daugey
the notion of ‘critical reflexivity’. As in neighboring societies, Kabye blood sacrifices begin with a brief divination act that consists in reading in the death throes of a sacrificed chicken whether the recipient divinity accepts or refuses the
The Algebra of Souls
Ontological Multiplicity and the Transformation of Animism in Southwest China
Mireille Mazard
deceased. Through transformations enacted in death and fire, the deceased and his or her belongings become ontologically other. This process of metamorphosis entails a geographical movement as well, as they set off for the land of the dead ( mhade ). Lañi
Repaying the Debts of the Dead
Kinship, Microfinance, and Mortuary Practice on the Paraguayan Frontier
Caroline E. Schuster
“We didn’t know, they never told us that we had insurance in the case of a death,” Lourdes 1 said with apparent exasperation, relating the troubles that her microcredit group had experienced recently in their cycles of borrowing and repayment. It
Jeanne Favret-Saada’s Minimal Ontology
Belief and Disbelief of Mystical Forces, Perilous Conditions, and the Opacity of Being
Theodoros Kyriakides
cognitive, affective, and relational states of confusion, ambiguity, and ultimately death. In short, through Favret-Saada’s treatment, belief and disbelief are transformed from a state of certainty to one of uncertainty ( Severi 2007 ). I argue that the
The Death of Maternity?
Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death
Christie McDonald
Contrasting the view of motherhood in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex with the description of her mother's illness and death in A Very Easy Death, this essay examines the revelation of feelings previously unexplored in the relationship to her mother. Faced with a life-shattering experience, Beauvoir revisits issues not only about motherhood and maternity from her philosophical and sociological study, but her own feelings about her mother and disturbing ways in which doctors and families withheld knowledge from the dying in the mid-twentieth century.
Grave Matters and the Good Life
On a Finite Economy in Bosnia
Larisa Jasarevic
This article outlines how the good life and a decent death in contemporary Bosnia are underwritten and undermined by informal forms of debt. Such debts finance pursuit of a pleasurable life in a post-conflict, post-socialist economy but inspire daily anxieties, not least about dying indebted. The article runs through household budgeting, everyday splurges, bodily discomforts, ordinary death and a funeral marketplace, suggesting a 'finite economy' of vernacular practice incited and limited by an habitual fixation on existential finitude.