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Charles Burns Black Holes Essay

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When one hears the terms “violence” and “horror,” one typically imagines horrible crimes and serial killers; rarely would one think of everyday suburban life. However, this is the exact landscape of violence depicted in Charles Burns’ Black Hole. In Black Hole Burns draws attention to the implicit assumptions about “normal” and “other” made in everyday life by exposing the objectification of women and through the male gaze. The male gaze is a phrase used in film and gender studies to describe the lens through which audiences view popular culture from a heterosexual male perspective. According to Laura Mulvey, the film theorist who coined the term, the male gaze is so ubiquitous that it often goes unrecognized and is considered the norm. …show more content…

However, when Eliza recounts the story of her sexual assault later, it becomes clear that this graffiti is more than a joke; it is a form of symbolic violence against her. In fact, Eliza later tells Keith that she was sexually assaulted by her roommates the night that these notes were written on her door, and the men used the same markers to write on her art and her body. When Eliza’s roommates write on her drawings of the mutation and her body, they visually equate her with the disease, and the notes on the door mock her for her attempts at gaining authority over her mutation. Further, by drawing graffiti on Eliza’s body her roommates symbolically connect her to the door and the art, reducing Eliza to an object and refusing to recognize her humanity. This graffiti not only represents the symbolic violence of the male gaze or the physical violence of assault, but also a narrative violence that associates Eliza with objects. These notes do not recognize Eliza’s autonomy, but reduce her to a physical mutation and objectify her through her infection. By using this graffiti to equate Eliza with her illness, Burns draws attention to the objectification of women through the male gaze and how this symbolic violence can be used by men to justify physical violence as well.
The layout of the panel depicting Eliza’s door also supports this reading of the graffiti as a form of symbolic violence against

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