Professor Darby Kurtz recommends Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag. "Pregnant Butch is a wonderful read with an insightful perspective on pregnancy. The main character, Teek, is a pregnant lesbian who identifies as butch and shares her experiences, both serious and comical, as someone who presents as masculine navigating the traditionally ultra-feminine spaces society has created for persons who are pregnant. While in some senses the text is historical, highlighting the struggles of LGBTQIA+ families prior to marriage equality in the early 2000s, in many ways Teek's experiences still resonate today, providing a voice to the often-silenced experiences of nonbinary people navigating the binary realms of American society, health care, and pregnancy. I would also suggest reading the author's introduction because in it they acknowledge and confront dated ignorance and biases in their story that they no longer hold."
One of the most widely accepted definitions of graphic medicine is that it is "the intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare" (Williams, n.d.).
As you can see from the definition above, 'graphic medicine' is a broad term used to describe a growing field of narrative healthcare combining the use of words and pictures to tell the stories of illness and health in an attempt to create a sense of empathy and understanding. Dr. Ian Williams, the term's originator, states that the graphic medicine definition is kept purposefully broad so that it may include "graphic memoirs of illness, educational comics for both students and patients, academic papers and books, gag strips about healthcare, graphic reportage and therapeutic workshops involving comic making, as well as many other practices and source material, both fictional and non-fictional" (Williams, n.d.).
Graphic medicine may come in many forms, from longer graphic novels that have been published in book format to shorter comic strips that live on a webpage or have been printed out for patient education in the clinical setting. The UNMC graphic medicine collection is focused primarily on the graphic novel format and the telling of personal accounts of illness and healthcare from the patient, patient family, or healthcare provider perspective. This is our primary focus because we seek to foster empathy in our current and future healthcare workforce by promoting understanding of what healthcare experiences are like as well as the difficulties of navigating various diagnoses from numerous perspectives and backgrounds.
References
Williams, I. (n.d.). What is "Graphic Medicine"? Graphic Medicine. https://www.graphicmedicine.org/why-graphic-medicine/
