Alison Bechdel's 2012 autography Are You My Mother? makes visible the power of a feminist poetics of revision. In this graphic memoir, Bechdel uses women's writing and texts, and the intertextual, ...intersubjective relationships they engender, to show and tell the story of the subject as revisable. To tell the story of such a revisable self, a self revised through reading and writing, is a form of feminist practice, and to tell it in comics is to render that practice uniquely visible. Close attention has yet to be paid in readings of Are You My Mother? to another feminist lesbian woman writer who was preoccupied with the process of re-visioning the subject through reading and writing: Adrienne Rich. Rich is a touchstone for Bechdel's parallel self-narratives of erotic discovery and development as an artist and a writer. Bechdel learns re-visioning the subject, through writing and revising, as a feminist practice, from Rich. Evidence of this process and practice may be found in Bechdel's intertextual engagement with Rich's work along with the artist's comments on Rich, as well as archival materials such as drafts of Are You My Mother? and letters to her mother, Helen.
Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs--Fun Home, Are You My Mother? and The Secret of Superhuman Strength--explore the relationship between word and image, both in their form, as comics, and narratively, ...via Bechdel's musings on self- expression, sexuality, psychoanalysis, and exercise. On each of these sites, she is deeply concerned with the pervasive dichotomies of subject/object, self/other, and past/present. The fraught dichotomy between words and images forms the organizing force for how she writes and draws about all dichotomies, as she disrupts the hierarchy between word and image of Lacan's symbolic order without, as many feminists scholars have, deeming the symbolic order of language inherently patriarchal. Drawing from Julia Kristeva's theorizing of Lacan's symbolic order, Hillary Chute's comics theory, as well as W.J.T. Mitchell's work on the relationship between word and image, I analyze each book sequentially. In her memoirs, Bechdel disrupts the very distinction between word and image. When she recreates book passages and letters, these are not simply transcriptions, but drawings of physical pages, treating words as images. Chute and DeKoven's definition ofcomics focuses on it as a dual medium, but in Bechdel's memoirs, the relationship between word and image is not as stable as duality. It is a collaboration requiring constant renegotiation.
Scholars across disciplines have recognised the symbolic and practical importance of information infrastructures in queer lives - from archives to the contemporary Internet. This essay builds on this ...work to argue that crucial to understanding this fact is what it says about the place of structure and order in queer history and theory. While these ideas have tended to be maligned in queer thought, and imagined primarily as manifestations of Foucauldian power, the approach taken here is to highlight their specifically queer affordances. The essay focuses on a range of high-profile lesbian memoirs from the U.S. that prominently thematise the place of libraries and information access in lesbian lives: anthologies of coming out stories, Audre Lorde's Zami and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Libraries in these texts are lifelines, workplaces and romantic scenes: they become imbued with lesbian meaning. But they are also complexes of standardisation, order and classification. The texts' attachments to ordered information systems and to specifically lesbian identities are at odds with queer thought's long-standing aversions to both classification and identity. But this essay takes this tension as the occasion to interrogate core assumptions of queer studies that place queer lives only in opposition to all structure and order.
Compared to other genres, Graphic memoirs offer both the textual and visual representations of the relationship between a moment of significance in the author's life and the effective as well as ...affective construction of that memory for the reader. This duality is why McCloud describes the work of meaning transmission between the author and the reader as a dance between "the seen and the unseen." My aim in this paper is to ascertain the impact of using graphic conventions on the effective and affective construction of meaning and identity in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) and how the use of "The Gutter" from a comic's visual structure becomes of even more significance in graphic memoirs. I aim to show that despite the use of panels, which at times can fracture the flow of the narrative into sequenced segments, it is in the alternating of the textual/visual with the blank spaces of the gutters that the narrative comes alive for the reader. These blank spaces, in Cvetkocich's view, are meant to represent an effort to redefine the "connections between memory and history, private experience and public life" via a written account and the "act of witness" represented by a combination of the visual and the verbal. Using this mix of image and text, Bechdel creates an almost palimpsestic effect as a majority of the panels in Fun Home show items layered over other images, indicating a blending between the narrative of Bechdel's real life experience and the representation of that life experience in the text. For the reader, this implies a way to address the gaps in knowledge not only for them, but also for Bechdel herself, making the reader a participant observer of the memories within the narrative and not one who is always standing outside it.
Alison Bechdel's 2006 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, often described as a 'proustian' comic, is made up of a rich tapestry of cultural reference and a collection of archival material. This article ...attempts to understand the role this collection plays in the book and how it determines its proustian nature. Deleuze's reading of Proust as an apprenticeship in the decoding of signs serves as a starting point, as both Alison and Marcel are driven by the same desire to understand the people around them, to decipher them as signs. The combination of archival material and cultural reference is the textual embodiment of this proustian curiosity in the comics form. References to books and their authors, queer history and thought, as well as Bechdel's reproduction of documents, photographs, maps, pages from dictionaries or books, and other materials represent Alison's attempts to decode the sign that is her father. Both she and Marcel fail in this quest, but Bechdel's archival impulse translates Marcel's curiosity into the graphic novel.
This Teaching Note describes the process of forming a panel of straight students to answer questions from Martin Rochlin's Heterosexual Questionnaire. The activity highlights heterosexism and ...heterosexual privilege, provides an opportunity to talk about satire and queer humor, and is a useful way to engage with concepts from class readings in introductory LGBTQ Studies and Women's Studies courses.
Prior to her pregnancy, Bechdel's mother wrote poetry; she would not write another poem until her husband was dead and her children were grown and had moved away. In an interview with John Killacky, ...Bechdel explains, "Virginia Woolf figures into my book because she talked about how the experience of writing about her parents in To the Lighthouse was a way of getting them out of her head" (Killacky 44). Bechdel draws her mother standing in a field of shadow, head tilted downward, hair in an elegant bun (136). Demonstrating the modernist possibilities of the graphic novel to create simultaneous visual and thematic connections while emphasizing the fragmentation of memory and slippage within time, Bechdel juxtaposes crucial developmental scenes from childhood and her emerging adulthood.
Alison Bechdel’s renown has been building since the success of
(2006). While scholars have focused on her contemporary production, her comics work within grassroots periodicals, including her ...long-running strip,
(1983–2008), has received comparatively little attention. By focusing on the grassroots context of
, this essay demonstrates how Bechdel’s participation in grassroots periodicals shaped her work. Through the development of new reading practices and the notion of queer comics archives, I show how queer communities influenced Bechdel’s visual rhetoric in the pages of
, the grassroots periodical where Bechdel first published her work and participated as a member of the collective. Informed by archival research, this analysis embraces grassroots contexts as an overlooked venue for exploring queer histories and tracing the development of queer comics.
A reviewer for The Wall Street Journal dismisses what he calls the 'cartoonish lumps' of the Medieval St. Albans figures at the Getty Center. He accuses the artist of childishness: as if the artist ...did not yet know, developmentally, how to draw. 'Their creators hadn't yet figured out how to make human beings look human. Their faces are expressionless and dumb (eyes are white circles with black dots in the middle) ... Their attenuated bodies ... are devoid of musculature or fat'. Such a critique defends against the amplified affective states conjured by these images. Drawing on psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu's theories of the 'skin-ego' and surface, this article reflects upon the childlike 'simplicity' of the lines shared by these 'cartoonish' figures, and the bold, spare lines of Alison Bechdel's graphic narratives. Bechdel summons affective regions conjured by the flattened surface of the seeming two-dimensional figures, layered against bubbled, staccato scripts. The childlike simplicity of Bechdel's renderings of the human figure allows an affective resonance and, ironically, a longing for the transcendent, enigmatic, and impenetrable realm invoked by the gaze of the Medieval figure.
While the tropes and structures of the Hero's Journey—the pattern identified by Joseph Campbell as corresponding to the progression of the adventures undertaken by the protagonists of heroic ...narratives—have become increasingly familiar to readers and consumers of literature, films, and other popular cultural texts, it is worth noting that individual texts seldom present the pattern in its entirety. In chapter three of The Hero with a Thousand Faces , Campbell writes “When the hero‐quest has been accomplished … the adventurer must still return with his life‐transmuting trophy” (193); it is in this way that they become “Master of Two Worlds,” achieving the balance and growth that they set out to find when they first crossed the threshold into the belly of the whale, and thus are afforded “Freedom to Live,” the final stage of the pattern. If the monomyth is about the movement of the individual toward becoming what they are ultimately meant to be, as opposed to what they were before their journey, then it must follow that the achievement of a single goal (however big) cannot signal the end of the process. In Fun Home— Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, or “family tragicomic” as the author herself subtitles the text—the protagonist (a younger version of Bechdel) has already both moved out of the house where she grew up and come out as a lesbian when the events that propel her toward investigating her father's past occur. By leaving home, she has heeded the call to adventure and crossed the threshold into the belly of the whale. Her understanding and acceptance of her sexuality corresponds to apotheosis, in as much as it signals the death of her old self and her resultant rebirth into her adult persona. Ultimately, her announcement of this sexuality can be interpreted as representing the granting of the Ultimate Boon. As The Hero with a Thousand Faces explains, though, in order to benefit from this boon, Bechdel must first take it home with her, both physically and temporally.
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