Comics, Voice(s), and Ethics of Care in M. K. Czerwiec’s Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit

Abstract

This article examines how M. K. Czerwiec’s Taking Turns, a work of graphic medicine and oral history, embodies an ethics of care in its structure, discourse, and visual representation. The book transcends conventional graphic memoir by minimizing the author’s voice to foreground the oral histories of patients, nurses, and volunteers on Chicago’s Unit 371 during the AIDS crisis. The analysis shows how Czerwiec’s cartooning style emphasizes similarity over difference, deliberately blurring the visual border between caregivers and patients to resist their Othering as mere objects of suffering. Ultimately, Taking Turns uses the perspectival richness of comics to articulate a reciprocal, mature ethics of care, memorializing the lives lost and affirming the endurance of the queer community through communal action and ethical remembrance.