COURSE: English 727 – Digital Humanities
MEDIUM: Graphic Essay
For this project I remade my essay “Lady in Red: The Performance and Liberation of Desire in Dana Rotberg’s Angel of Fire” into a graphic book.
In my paper, I examined the film’s visual excess, arguing that the proliferation of surreal and grotesque images enables a liberation of subversive desire. This book attempts to perform my paper’s argument through a spectacle of taboo images of subversive sexuality and abject bodies, also incorporating the “garbage aesthetic” of Mexican oppositional cinema. Encased in a red feathered egg, the book itself is an embodiment of the protagonist, Alma’s, desire.
I used Photoshop to modify the images, and InDesign to lay out the pages. I then paper-machéd a balloon to make the egg, covered it in red feathers, and made a binding out of wire.
