Thursday, October 24, 2024 2:00 PM - 3:20 PM (ET)
Adrienne Unger631-632-9983adrienne.unger@stonybrook.edu
Bishakh Som/Indian-American trans-femme cartoonist and architect. She will discuss her graphic narrative Spellbound, on October 24, 2024 from 2:00-3:20pm in 1008 Humanities. Part of the "Pressing Matter" lecture series.
A memoir in graphic novel form Spellbound explores the concept of identity by inviting the reader to follow Bishakh Som as she moves through life as she would have us see her – as she sees herself. With a candid autobiographical narrative, this book provides unique insights on the themes of gender and sexuality, memory and urbanism, love and loss.
Bishakh Som is an Indian-American trans-femme cartoonist and architect based in Brooklyn. Som describes her work on her website as investigating “the intersection between image and text, figure and architecture, architecture and landscape.” She continues, “I am inspired by the grammar of comics and graphic novels but am seeking to expand the vocabulary of the narratives traditionally presented in this medium by exploring themes of gender, sexuality, memory and urbanism, among other things. On a formal level, some of my pieces conflate the tools of architectural representation with those of sequential narrative in order to question these very methods and offer new means of representing space, time and the role of the body in both simultaneously.” In 2020, she published two graphic narratives, Apsara Engine, a collection of eight short stories (Feminist Press), and Spellbound, a graphic memoir (Street Noise Books). Som’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, We’re Still Here (the first all-trans comics anthology), Beyond, vol. 2, The Strumpet, The Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, VICE, Buzzfeed, Ink Brick, Hi-horse, (a four-person comics anthology of which she was a co-editor and contributing artist), Blurred Vision, Pood, the academic journal Specs, The Brooklyn Rail, Volume 3 of the acclaimed Graphic Canon series from Seven Stories Press. She received a Xeric grant in 2003 for her comics collection Angel.