Stranger in a Strange Land: Self-Creation and Self-Exile in Vanessa Davis’s Make Me a Woman

This article examines the portrayal of selfhood in the American cartoonist Vanessa Davis’s graphic narrative, Make Me a Woman (2010). Characterized by multiple artistic styles and a general lack of clear-cut panel divisions, her collage-like memoir incorporates sketches alongside narrative and diary comics. The text visualizes the struggle of responding to preconceived notions of the self—especially what it means to be a secular Jewish American woman—and frames these intersectional identities as continually revisable and deeply individual processes of becoming. Formally and textually, Davis’s memoir reveals the ways that graphic narratives offer potentially complex, expansive, and anti-essentialist ways of representing and reading Jewish identity.