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Gender Queer is a graphic memoir written and drawn by Maia Kobabe and colorfully illustrated by eir sister Phoebe. The work is a charming blend of handwritten text and hand-drawn image. Kobabe’s abundant use of capitalization, italics, underlining, and integration of textual patterns with images (in the forms of spirals, slants, variably sized lettering, and so on) not only lends visual interest but also works to emphasize particularly resonant moments in the narrative. The styling of the words and images on the page always reflect Maia’s emotions—whether joy, frustration, shame, or excitement. Written in simple, conversational language even as it tackles profound topics like gender, adolescence, family relationships, and self-understanding, Gender Queer is a highly personal text that implicitly invites a similar degree of introspection from the reader. 

One formal technique in particular merits attention. As the reader first opens the book to the frame narrative in which Maia leaves for college, it is not clear whether the illustrated comic-style panels should be read from left to right across both pages, or up-down on the left page first and then up-down on the right. As it turns out, both strategies are possible, and each produces its own readerly effects. In this way, the book queers or reshapes even something as fundamental as the act of reading. While this technique may not carry through the full book, the reader is subtly cued here to question received categories, even those that seem fixed or natural, in favor of producing their own capacious meanings. The book’s interest in blurring boundaries and deconstructing binaries thus emerges as one of its great themes from the first page.  

Moments of metanarrative also periodically remind the reader that Kobabe is both author and subject, both observer and object of observation. At the end of the frame narrative that opens the book, Maia rips off the pieces of paper e had used to cover up an embarrassing comic in eir sketchbook. With the letters “ENDER UEER” now revealed, it becomes clear that this object of embarrassment is, in fact, Gender Queer itself. Near the end of the memoir, as Maia teaches junior high students how to write comics and shares techniques like “space affects time,” the accompanying illustration metanarratively functions as a comic within a comic. Finally, as the memoir ends, Maia resolves to come out to eir students “next time,” with the implication that Gender Queer itself is Maia’s ultimate act of coming out. Metanarrative moments like these are fitting for the self-reflective genre of the memoir, which is always negotiating the narration of biographical fact and memory with the creative liberties of storytelling.

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