ABSTRACT
This chapter expands critical approaches to comics studies in part by exploring the potential for semiotic theoretical perspectives as a model of quantum atomic behavior—the ability to be more than one thing at once. The author examines Lauren Redniss’s acclaimed graphic narrative Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout (2010) and the means it uses to situate women in science. In particular, the chapter examines how the idea of an empirical gaze, as connected to Michel Foucault’s construction of a clinical gaze in Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1994), can be brought to bear on this work, or, in other words, how Redniss’s Radioactive can be read as reconstructing a scientific mode of thinking. Ultimately, the intellectual and artistic contexts of Radioactive provide an anchoring point for considering the hidden work of women in science.
