Female grotesques: Carnivalesque subversion in the comics of Julie Doucet

The comics of Julie Doucet can be productively interpreted in light of Mikhail Bakhtin's exploration of the carnivalesque and its aesthetic expression as grotesque realism. By employing subject matter and a visual style grounded in the grotesque, Doucet's comics challenge normative notions of the female body through a process of resignification based in parody and unruly embodiment. These ideas connect to theories of resistance and subversion as articulated by Judith Butler, among others, as well as to formalist theories of style and the ways comics produce meaning and identification. Close readings of Doucet's stories demonstrate how her comics perform a feminist critique by redeploying masculinist tropes belonging to ‘high’ culture as grotesque images in the ‘low’ form of comics. The combination of grotesque subject matter and an untraditional visual style serves to critically unsettle the visual pleasure associated with representations of women in comics.