ABSTRACT
Within the context of illness experiences, narrating the suffering or pain is an act of meaning-making as well as therapy because it heightens self-understanding. However, most often, verbal expressions are not sufficient to convey the impact of psychological agonies. Interestingly, through comics, a productive intersection of verbal and visual media, graphic medicine enhances the expressivity of ineffable subjective experiences and emotions. In this context, by drawing theoretical insights from George Lakoff, Elizabeth El Refai, and Ian Williams, and by close reading the verbo-visual metaphors of eating disorders in Shivack’s Inside Out, Fairfield’s Tyranny , and Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow, this chapter investigates how creative metaphors help female graphic pathographers in representing various underexplored dimensions of their eating disorder experiences.
