How "Gender Queer" Makes Use of Illustrations to Enhance Descriptions of Queer Experiences

     Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer is a memoir that catalogues every intimate detail of the author's life experience as e grew on eir gender journey and how e came to terms with eir identity while navigating some of the most challenging and impactful stages of life. Throughout the memoir, Kobabe articulates the depths of eir queer experience beautifully, utilizing language that is both profound and poetic while also being clear and unpretentious, and e balances eir heartfelt memoir with a good amount of humor to bring levity to otherwise heavy subjects. What most strikes me about Gender Queer, however, is the brilliant illustrations and Kobabe's excellent use of them to depict the aspects of eir gender journey that words simply cannot express on their own.

    One such illustration that Kobabe uses in eir memoir to amplify an experience e had is the illustration that accompanies eir first experience at the gynecologist. As a GNC (gender-nonconforming) person who was assigned female at birth, Kobabe explains in the pages prior to the visit to the doctor's office why having to do this is so traumatic and irreconcilable for em in eir mind when it comes to eir relationship with eir gender identity. Kobabe details how long e has tried to distance emself from eir assigned feminine gender and how at odds e feels with eir own body when e experiences things like eir first period, or when e started to develop the characteristics of an adult female body; having to still go to a gynecologist for health reasons puts em in an awkward position of having to acknowledge eir biologically female body when e does not wish to identify with its associated gender identity. This dysphoria is fully encapsulated by the illustration of the pin going through Kobabe's body when e has the speculum inserted into em. First, the oversized pin going through Kobabe's naked body demonstrates how personally violated e feels having now had the embodied experience of penetration. Second, the image of the pin fixing the author's entire being in place also illustrates how e feels that e cannot escape how eir biology can still trap em in traditional gender norms/ideas. E feels pinned into eir assigned gender by eir biology despite all eir attempts to "un-gender" emself, and the inclusion of this extremely personal moment from eir life and of this provocative and painful image demonstrates how Kobabe does not shy away from vulnerability in eir memoir.

    Kobabe makes full use of the "picture-book" genre in eir memoir Gender Queer. Kobabe blends together the joviality of a children's picture book, the didactic nature of a young-adult's "self-help" book about sex and gender, and the heartfelt purple prose typical of a full-length traditional memoir to amazing effect. Gender Queer is a book that can literally save lives, and the fact that it is so widely banned and slandered as nothing but pornography is honestly appalling and morally reprehensible. I hope that, even if they cannot read it themselves, that queer children looking for answers can at least know that books like Gender Queer are out there and that there are queer people like Kobabe who are living their lives out and proud. Hopefully, those queer kids will also be allowed to do so.