Visualizing the Jewish body in Aline Kominsky Crumb's Need More Love

This article discusses Aline Kominsky Crumb's graphic memoir Need More Love (2007), and especially her portrayals of Jewish identity in this work. Through close readings of several comics found in the memoir, as well as a discussion of the structure of the memoir as a whole, I show how for her, depicting the body visually and verbally is so inextricably tied to her location and status as a woman that the Jewish body is always inevitably a gendered body. Her graphic memoir questions the constructions that form and inform self-identifications (of woman, Jew or artist), the constructed boundaries between how we define ourselves and how others define us, and the ways that self-representation on the page, through the interplay of text and image, can inform, supplant or destabilize these various constructions. Her work demonstrates the possibility, through art, of inhabiting a liminal or in-between space; it is a space or a style that she continually redefines and rearranges as she negotiates the boundaries between self and other.