The Emotional Load: And Other Invisible Stuff - Emma - ★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Emma

TRANSLATOR: Una Dimitrijevic

SERIES: Un autre regard, #3-4

GENRE: Graphic Nonfiction

PUBLICATION DATE: March 3, 2020

RATING: 3.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: A graphic novel highlighting certain feminist and social issues in modern society. This volume collects books 3 and 4 of the author’s feminist comics series. The tone is much more aggressive this time and the content is also too text-intensive. While this raises some good points, I didn’t like it as much as the first volume.

Author Emma runs a podcast as well as creates comic strips aiming to generate insightful queries and discussions on contemporary societal culture. She has published four books in her “Un autre regard” series, the latter two of which are combined in this English edition.

I don’t really have much to add on this as most of my review for the first volume, "The Mental Load", is applicable to this volume as well.

The main content is divided into nine topic-wise chapters, with a much greater focus on feminism this time, even though the author makes it clear that she isn't trying to sound like a radical feminist.

The topics are as varied as earlier, including some topics I never expected to see in a feminist book, such as police corruption. Of course, a majority of the chapters are woman-oriented, highlighting common avenues where discrimination is still rampant such as in the corporate world.

Once again, a couple of chapters come in the form of true-life narrative stories, which are just as disturbing as those in the first volume. I try my best to be optimistic about humanity, and then I read such books and I return to cynicism.

The title not only establishes a semantic link between the two volumes, but it also continues the argument from the titular chapter of the first volume. I found this chapter the best one. It justifies the ‘mental load’ faced by woman, and also demonstrates convincingly why male ‘mental load’ isn't the same. I also loved the chapters focussing on “consent” and “gallantry” – brilliantly written.

The translator is the same as before, but this time, I didn’t find any issues with the translation. 

However, the text is a lot more dominant this time around. There are illustrations also, of course. But the accompanying text boxes are much larger on most pages and have big chunks of text and stats. As the tone of the book also feel more aggressive and strident in this volume, I felt like the book was yelling out the points at a greater volume, even thought the arguments themselves were not problematic.

Overall, this is a good book that advances discussion on some more relevant topics of modern society. It was more hostile in tone, which affected my appreciation of it. But there’s no doubt that the content is still important.