“After all, we must be our own heroines”

In Totalnie Nie Nostalgia: Memuar [“Totally Not Nostalgia: Memoir”], illustrated by Jacek Frąś, Wanda Hagedorn tells the story of her childhood and adolescence in communist Poland of the 1960s and 1970s. The memoir is examined as a feminist transnational text in the perspective of four key issues: (1) Western and Central European feminisms and the difference between the younger “experiencing-I” and the mature “narrating-I” who discovered feminism, as both theory and practice, after emigrating to Australia; (2) intertextual relations with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and the functioning of the graphic memoir genre in Poland; (3) self-portrayal and visual representation of the “beautiful/ugly” body which has been presented in the memoir as an integral part of growing feminist awareness; and (4) visual metaphors of trauma and “limits of representation.” It is explained how Hagedorn engages in the feminist practice of making the personal political, demonstrating the power of female vision in comics.