ABSTRACT Cultures around the world are replete with images of women as the
epitome of love, kindness, patience, and similar virtues, owing to their ability to give
birth. Consequently, those who cannot give birth due to medical conditions are stig-
matized and made to feel inadequate and deviant. Although infertility is a gender-neu-
tral health predicament, it is women who encounter severe abjuration. Cultural scripts
that glorify childbearing and stigmatize infertility impact the afflicted adversely as they
destabilize their identity and aggravate their suffering as a patient. Graphic medical nar-
ratives on infertility, such as Paula Knight’s The Facts of Life (2017), Emily Steinberg’s
Broken Eggs (2014), and Phoebe Potts’s Good Eggs (2010), reflect on these issues and,
in the process, illuminate how infertility fractures women’s identity in a pronatalist
society. This essay explores three graphic pathographies on infertility through three
major themes: pronatalism and the social construction of motherhood, the absolutism
of science, and alternatives to motherhood. The essay argues that the use of comics
and graphic medicine, by combining visual and conceptual modes, presents the social,
personal, and medical features of infertility with new force and urgency.
I
N A HEART-WRENCHING TEDX Beacon Street talk entitled “A Journey Through
Infertility: Over Terror’s Edge” (2014), Camille Preston narrates her traumatic
*Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India.
*Correspondence: Sathyaraj Venkatesan, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and So-
cial Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India, PIN 620 015.
Email: sathya@nitt.edu.
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, volume 61, number 4 (autumn 2018): 609–621.
© 2018 by Johns Hopkins University Press
609
Critical Assessment
Infertility Comics and
Graphic Medicine
Sathyaraj Venkatesan* and Chinmay Murali*