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.
This article troubles the definitive boundaries between text and paratext, and questions the distinctions made between adaptations and transmedial texts. It conceives of a point of view in which it ...is possible to experience texts such as Fun Home as a series of distinct, separate texts and (para)texts, while simultaneously comprehending them as a complete, transmedial whole. This point of view is then used to examine the ways in which Fun Home interrogates and uses concepts of high and low culture, and ultimately its role in the negotiation of dominant culture. It brings together theory from adaptation and transmedia studies with theatre and performance studies to begin to theorise the complexities of intertextual connections made by the reader/viewer/spectator of the transmedial text, particularly those aspects of text made available at least in part via new media.
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.
This essay historicizes Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir
in the context of the presidency of George W. Bush. Bechdel created
from 1999 through 2005—dates that corresponded with Bush’s campaign, ...election, and presidency. As Bechdel frequently laments in her serialized comic strip
, the Bush presidency posited truth as unknowable, facts as infinitely flexible, and faith as constitutive of reality.
never mentions the president (nor any historical figure or event after the mid-1980s), but the memoir uses newly available digital technology to resist Bush-era “truthiness.” In
, Bechdel combines digital photography, her body in performance, and hand drawing to create a new form of graphic narrative. This essay draws out
s political engagement with the Bush administration and simultaneously claims the proliferation of digital photography as a watershed event in the history of graphic narratives.
Following Lynne Huffer's work on queer feminism, this abridged essay centers the figure of the lesbian in order to develop a dyke ethics that engenders nuanced thinking about both monogamy and ...embodiment. The essay reads Alison Bechdel's comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, to elaborate a "dyke ethics of anti-monogamy." Grounded in notions of friendship, community, and social justice, this ethics decenters the sexual dyad in a way that polyamory does not. It also insists upon a theoretical and ethical disposition of respect for the simultaneously political and embodied nature of desire. In so doing, it offers first a way of re-thinking the story of monogamy's nature as a naturecultural tale about mononormative desire and further places that desire in a field of relationality that renders its significance as a feature of humanness and an object of scientific inquiry strange.
In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel recounts a version of her family's history through moments of meaningful textual exchange. This paper takes up one such moment, when Alison's father Bruce offers his ...daughter a queer text, which she uses both to understand her own sexuality and to broach the the queer connection she has just learned they have. I read this exchange as a case study for considering what happens when we share our meaningful books with others. Here I map the way literary works function in this text both developmentally, following Grumet's reading of Winnicott, and erotically, following Bechdel's own narration. I read the act of sharing books as an act of love that helps build the world worth noticing, core relationships, and individual identities, reading too how literature functions as 'currency' in the difficult father-daughter relationship at hand in this graphic memoir.
This article considers the ways that people might engage with therapeutic processes on the long road to self-actualization. It is also a call for those who can, to think of this labor as a form of ...activism. I ask that we reflect on some of the possible routes to achieving what might loosely be termed forms of affective knowledge. As part of this call, I first examine theories around graphic fiction, therapy, and possible connections between these fields. I then investigate a text that exemplifies the liberatory potential of therapy: Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Are You My Mother? and its possibilities for explaining the therapeutic process.
By examining Alison Bechdel's Fun Home through the lens of metamodernism and queer theory, this essay argues that the graphic memoir reanimates the socioethical imperatives of queer modernity. ...Bechdel uses modernist literature to examine her relationship with her father and represent her sexual and artistic discovery. However, in its deployment of modernist tropes and allusions, Fun Home calls forth new models of queer subjectivity and supplants patriarchal genealogies with queer kinship structures that honor affinity rather than filiation. The queer temporal structure of the narrative engenders an enduring sense of queer futurity that persists in spite of her father's death.
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