Abstract
Most Her Own, Yet Most Taken Away:
Sexuality and Desire in Phoebe Gloeckner's The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Comic Books and Graphic Novels: Feminist Approaches
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Annual Convention
Christine Hoff
Kraemer,
Phoebe Gloeckner's
semi-autobiographical The Diary of a
Teenage Girl is a boundary-crossing work in more ways than one. Its form is
hybrid: it uses a combination of first-person prose; third-person comic strip
sequences; illustrations attributed to the narrator, fifteen-year-old Minnie;
and illustrations that appear to reflect the perspective of the adult Gloeckner. Further, the story contained in this unusual
form is one that is still very much taboo in early twenty-first century
American society. Diary is a tale of
the sexual and artistic maturation of a teenage girl, one that touches not just
on the tabooed subject of adolescent girls' sexual desire, but also on sexual
abuse, homosexuality, drug use, and incest. To use the words of Catharine
MacKinnon, in Diary, Minnie's
sexuality is that which is most her own, yet most taken away. Although often
exploited and abused in her search for love, affection, and her own identity,
Minnie's journey through the counterculture of 1970s
In this paper, I will argue that Minnie's story reveals the inadequacy of cultural scripts surrounding sexuality, particularly the sexuality of adolescent girls. Using the sexuality research of Deborah Tolman, I will suggest that the silence surrounding adolescent female sexual desire helps to reinforce the virgin/whore dichotomy that has plagued women throughout most of the history of Western culture.