ABSTRACT
While graphic novels more equitably balance visual and verbal elements, images still depend on text for authority. Moreover, conventional use of gutter space between frames and panels preserves normative performativity and maintains rhetoric of distance. In texts, rhetoric of distance is detachment between authors and their ideas through the use of third-person voice that invokes omniscient authority and affects godlike objectivity. In graphic novels, rhetoric of distance appears in the gutter. However, Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi’s unconventional use of gutter space at strategic points in their graphic memoirs disrupts rhetoric of distance, emphasizes gendered transgression, and intensifies an already subversive modality through revised visual-verbal boundaries that reframe culture and language. Hybrid signifiers emerge in their work, extending Hélène Cixous’s concept of écriture feminine in new visual directions that resist phallogocentrism.
