From Hand-hold to Haunt-held: “Lesbian Continuum” Meets “Infection in the Sentence” in Emily Carroll’s Comics

Abstract

The article examines two works by Canadian (web)comics artist Emily Carroll, “A Lady’s Hands Are Cold” (2014) and “Anu-Anulan and Yir’s Daughter” (2011) in relation to a pair of second-wave feminism concepts, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “infection in the sentence” (from the 1979 The Madwoman in the Attic) and Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum” (from her 1980 “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”). What the analysis shows is that the two conditions of woman-identified relationships are not mutually exclusive, as it might be inferred from their definition and critical juxtaposition so far, but may actually be modalities of the same situation, depending on the variable of actual unmediated affection between two women. The article also focuses on how Carroll’s artistic innovations, transplanted from webcomics technology onto the printed page within the wider context of the new expressive possibilities cultivated by the hybrid enunciatory apparatus of sequential art, eloquently depict this continuum in both its infected and beneficent versions, visualizing the diachronically-relevant mechanics of this complex process of woman-to-woman identification.