The Story’s Not Over: Jewish Women and Embodied Selfhood in Graphic Narratives

Examining through text and image what it means to be a woman, a Jew, and an artist.

This comprehensive collection considers Jewish women graphic novelists and the richly figured ways in which Jewish identity is complicated by gender, memory, generation, and place: the spaces--emotional, geographical, psychological--that women inhabit. Through the intersections and juxtapositions of word and image, authors capture the complexities and anxieties of gender and Jewishness in navigating memory, identity, and embodied self-expression.

Jewish women graphic novelists are preoccupied often with embodied memory, memories of loss, memories of personal and collective histories, and memories of transformative moments of self-reinvention. Here, memory materializes in the drawn shape of the body as an expression of the weight of personal and collective histories. The innovative and fluid conventions of graphic narrative panels, gutters, spaces of separation, bleeds, and juxtapositions of text and image embody the self. The diverse forms and structures of graphic narratives discussed in this volume by a range of international scholars demonstrate the ways in which Jewish women’s graphic narratives reach into the past by way of stories and histories, both individual and collective, that provide a touchstone for the shape of identity.

Victoria Aarons is distinguished professor of literature at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She is the author or editor of twelve books, including Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women’s Graphic Narratives (Wayne State University Press). Aarons is series editor for Rowman & Littlefield’s Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature and serves on the editorial board of several peer-reviewed publications, including Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Women in Judaism.