Assembling Crip Archives: Disability and Illness in Autobiographical Graphic Narratives

Assembling Crip Archives offers the first sustained study of how autobiographical graphic narratives of disability and illness function as archives of embodied knowledge. Bringing together disability studies, crip theory, and comics theory, Coral Anaid Díaz Cano examines how cartoonists use the formal affordances of comics to document, contest, and reimagine lived experiences of illness, impairment, and care.

Through close readings of Tangles, Stitches, Marbles, and Dancing After TEN, the book shows how graphic memoirs assemble alternative records that challenge the authority of medical and scientific narratives. These works do not simply depict illness or disability; they produce generative acts of recordkeeping, preserving affective traces, relational encounters, and bodily knowledge that resist biomedical objectivity. Díaz Cano argues that comics’ interplay of word, image, repetition, and absence enables the creation of ‘crip archives’ that foreground vulnerability, dependency, collaboration, and non-normative temporalities.

Attentive to questions of race, gender, care, and authorship, Assembling Crip Archives situates graphic life writing within broader debates about visibility, access, and epistemic authority. The book makes a major contribution to comics studies and disability humanities, demonstrating how drawn self-representation becomes a powerful method for thinking about embodiment, memory, and the politics of knowledge.