THIS WOMAN’S WORK
Written by Julie Delporte.
Art by Julie Delporte.
Translated by Helge Dascher and Aleshia Jensen.
This Woman’s Work is Julie Delporte. Written by her, art, colors, and letters by her. About being a woman, through Delporte’s life, through art, her feminism. How these ideas are bound, sometimes in conflict, sometimes sympatico. Told as diary, anecdote, poetry. Let the sparse beauty and intensity resonate on the page.
Experience the page itself. Delporte’s comics are spare in both illustration and text, but what art there is sings. Delporte works in vivid color: ornate and deliberate cursive letters, simple and arresting figures, backgrounds sometimes and sometimes not, all textural works in pencil you can feel. This Woman’s Work is alive with smudges and paper grain and a million tiny touches of craft that make for an intimate bond between artist and reader.
This excerpt from the book deals with language and self image. Words and power, women and girls and boys and men. Identity and respect. Feeling big and little and growing and owning and power. Delporte is recognizing her decisions and how their cascading effects shape her world.
And she’s cool as hell. Her crayon et politique world has room for cult film reference to run a parallel point. Delporte’s bohemian lifestyle is a classic medium for the intersection of the domestic, love, art, and liberation. This Woman’s Work reaches beyond the sequential art literati, but it’s definitely rooted there.
The paperback edition of This Woman’s Work will see release March 6 at quality comic shops everywhere. Check out these preview pages Drawn and Quarterly has provided.
$24.95 | M | MARCH 6
From Drawn and Quarterly: This Woman’s Work is a powerfully raw autobiographical work that asks vital questions about femininity and the assumptions we make about gender. Julie Delporte examines cultural artifacts and sometimes traumatic memories through the lens of the woman she is today—a feminist who understands the reality of the women around her, how experiencing rape culture and sexual abuse is almost synonymous with being a woman, and the struggle of reconciling one’s feminist beliefs with the desire to be loved. She sometimes resents being a woman and would rather be anything but.
Told through beautifully evocative colored pencil drawings and sparse but compelling prose, This Woman’s Work documents Delporte’s memories and cultural consumption through journal-like entries that represent her struggles with femininity and womanhood. She structures these moments in a nonlinear fashion, presenting each one as a snapshot of a place and time—trips abroad, the moment you realize a relationship is over, and a traumatizing childhood event of sexual abuse that haunts her to this day. While This Woman’s Work is deeply personal, it is also a reflection of the conversations that women have with themselves when trying to carve out their feminist identity. Delporte’s search for answers in the turmoil created by gender assumptions is profoundly resonant in the era of #MeToo.
