Spoken Doodle: Bianca Xunise & Friends Highlight Disability, Mental Health, & Community Through Comics

Last Friday (April 21st, 2024), 3Arts/ Bodies of Work Residency Artist Bianca Xunise (they/them) joined the University of Illinois at Chicago to showcase their recent work alongside three local alternative comic artists – Eileen Chavez (they/them), Mariah-Rose Marie (she/her), and Sage Coffey (they/them).  The nearly two-hour event featured readings from each artist, celebrating a wide breadth of

comics in subject, presentation & style – each connected through an exploration of mental health, community, and heritage.

The event began with Eileen reading a section of their 2017 self-published zine, Your  Inner Landscape, exploring “heavy mental states” and re-connecting with their culture as a form of healing.. Mariah-Rose read from their 2021 comic, Roots to  Fruits: Meditations on when you think you found the people who owned your people via DNA  test, a brutal (yet also often funny) account of searching for her ancestry as a mixed-race person

in the wake of chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide. Sage rounded out the guest speakers'  readings with one of their newest zines, If It Were Socially Acceptable, which follows a cartoon snake with legs through a deeply personal reflection on ableism, shame, and neurodivergent  world-imagining cheekily framed as a children's book. Bianca, as the headlining speaker, shared  two pieces – one a gorgeous and honest reflection on self-doubt and self-love throughout their residency with 3Arts/BOW, and a second piece reflecting on childhood instability, music as a  stabilizing force, and “being the weird Black kid”.

These comics link us, the audience, to family and kinship - whether immediate or distant or seemingly unknowable. Each of these pieces also evoked some of the primary pillars of disability justice, defined by Sins Invalid and Project LETS as a framework built by disabled  QBIPOC communities centralizing the needs and experiences of folks experiencing  intersectional oppression under racialized, ableist capitalism. These shared works provided space for recognizing the wholeness of those situated as mentally ill beyond narratives of  “overcoming” disability, commitments to collective access, and demands for collective liberation through storytelling, heritage tracing, and world-making.

Perhaps most importantly, this event was filled to the brim with joy. Too often there is an expectation that disability arts and culture require a touch of trauma porn to be “approachable”  for audiences; instead, Bianca’s work – and the works shared by Eileen, Mariah-Rose, and Sage  – find humor and color in the day-to-day. The event was a phenomenal showcase of QBIPOC  and trans disabled voices in Chicago comics.

If you are interested in learning more about each artist (& we hope you are!) you can find them on their individual Instagram accounts:

Biance Xunise: instagram.com/biancaxunise

Mariah-Rose Marie: instagram.com/biophonies

Eileen Chavez: instagram.com/sloris227

Sage Coffey: instagram.com/sagemcoffey

You can also support the featured artists and their peers by attending upcoming  alternative comics events here in Chicago, such as the Zine Not Dead Reading Series on May  6th, and the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) June 3rd and 4th. Accessibility  information for these events can be found on their individual websites.

Kora Dzbinski (they/them) is a Mad-Queer care worker, poet, educator, and Disability/Gender & Women’s Studies graduate student living in the occupied homelands of the Council of the Three Fires. Their debut chapbook, strawberry hole, was published by Bottlecap Press in 2021. You can find links to their various publications at linktr.ee/koradzbinski.