Representing the Unrepresentable in “Ducks”

Many scholars have argued comics are adept at representing unrepresented perspectives & traumatic events that resist narrative logic. In “Ducks,” Kate Beaton uses techniques specific to comics to make the trauma of rape powerfully visible. CW: depiction of sexual assault. 1/13

The very nature of trauma makes it challenging to represent. While sometimes caused by a specific incident, trauma manifests unpredictably. Its emotional & physical effects are complex and traumatic memories often resist being recalled. Trauma can fracture the mind & body. 2/13

Representing trauma related to rape is additionally challenging because of the gendered stigma around the crime. The ways rape culture blames victims for their own assaults often results in victims protecting themselves by denying what happened, sometimes unconsciously. 3/13

In addition, rape specifically attacks a victim’s subjecthood. As scholar Sharon Marcus observes, “rape is clearly neither sex nor simple assault… [it] could best be defined as a sexualized and gendered attack which imposes sexual difference along the lines of violence.” 4/13

Negotiating the gaze is a central challenge of representing rape in visual mediums. Live-action film & television often struggles to foreground the emotional effects of rape without also inviting titillation that can encourage rape fantasies and thus, further dehumanization. 5/13

But comics are not live-action. Frederik Byrn Kohlert argues that the “visual and fragmented” comics form “can function as a kind of visual scriptotherapy, which allows the author to displace trauma onto the page and create a narrative from a series of disjointed memories.” 6/13

Moreover, because “the material real-life author is embodied in the drawings on the page,” Kohlert argues that autobiographical comics can be “especially intimate and therefore highly capable of engendering empathy for (or identification with) autobiographical characters.” 7/13

Beaton represents two sexual assaults in her memoir. In both, she uses the comics form to foreground her subjectivity & the ways rape functions as an attack on subjecthood, using symbolism, fragmentation, and juxtaposition to engender empathy & communicate complex emotions. 8/13

Note the innocence of Beaton’s self-presentation when she faces the reader, and how the linework becomes fainter in the final panel, as though she is fading away. Beaton is also isolated in space & partly eclipsed by a dialogue balloon that literally overwrites her desires. 9/13

This is followed by a page of black panels, which can again represent loss of subjecthood and/or disassociation with a traumatic moment. On the next page, the repetition & silence of the empty hall emphasizes isolation & even the inevitability of this crime in this space. 10/13

After the assault, Beaton repeats the turn to the reader. Any interpretation of this gesture will be highly subjective, but arguably, the way her face is now cropped to take up more of the frame brings us closer into what is now a state of dissociative numbness. 11/13

In the second depiction of rape, Beaton literally disassociates, depicting herself becoming ghostly and stepping outside her body. She reassembles herself on a Cape Breton beach, preserving and indeed redrawing her subjectivity amid/in the wake of the assault on her body. 12/13

Because “Ducks” is autobiographical, Beaton must work through both how to represent her trauma to readers and how to represent it to herself. Her ability to turn this representational challenge into a central strength of her work reflects her mastery of the comics form. 13/13