Art & Creativity Quote by Julie Doucet

Doucet is pushing back on a polite kind of cultural confinement: the way “cartoonist” can function less like a craft designation and more like a ceiling. The line isn’t embarrassed about comics; it’s irritated by a gatekeeping reflex that treats drawing plus narrative as automatically lighter, lesser, or merely “pop.” Her wish is for scale and seriousness at once - not fame alone, but a larger audience willing to read her work with the same critical vocabulary reserved for painting, photography, or “contemporary art.”

The subtext is a double bind. If she embraces the cartoonist label, institutions can keep her in the side room: alternative press, zines, niche festivals, the “graphic” shelf. If she rejects it too loudly, she risks sounding like she’s disowning the very medium that made her singular. That tension is especially charged for Doucet, whose diaristic, bodily, unruly comics helped redefine what autobiographical drawing could look like - work that was never trying to be cute, clean, or easily merchandised. The “cartoonist” tag can also carry gendered expectations: “cartoons” are supposed to be charming or minor; women’s interiority is supposed to be digestible.

What makes the quote land is its weary clarity. “For the rest of my life” frames the label as a life sentence, not a brand. She’s naming how art worlds sort creators into categories that feel descriptive but behave like borders - and how recognition, in practice, is often just permission to be complex in public.