Ever since its rise in the 1970s, feminist theory has defined its field, and often its methods, by a series of dualities that have provided clarity and momentum to feminism even as they have been ...widely disputed. At first, the category “woman” proposed a gender binary (man/woman); later, the gay rights movement emphasized the binaries of hetero/homo and in/out. Although identifying as a member of any of these categories was an initially liberating action, many women eventually felt limited by those binaries. The dissertation explores the implications of lesbian comix for these problematic binaries. The introduction discusses how outing someone as (for example) lesbian fails to fully recognize the myriad aspects of any subject and offers framing as an alternative. Instead of being reduced to a single side of a reductive binary, subjects can be framed as many things simultaneously and move among several frames. Chapter One discusses framing as a way of understanding the particularity of this material and its dependence on the frames it invokes as comix. Chapter Two focuses on what it means to frame any text, including comix, as lesbian. Whereas the first two chapters outlined problems, histories, and theories with the help of sequences, the following two use sequences to illustrate two key modes of resistance prominent in lesbian comix: gender representation and violence. An analysis of a panel from Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For poking fun at Judith Butler's landmark Gender Trouble focuses Chapter Three's discussion of gendered performativity through drag in lesbian comix. Chapter Four uses this discussion to foreground a reading of a rape-revenge sequence from Diane DiMassa's Hothead Paisan, whose use of the comix medium makes readers complicit in Hothead's revenge. The conclusion reviews the effects of using lesbian comix to raise questions about framing beyond comix in a world where binaries no longer suffice even though the dominant ideology tells us that there are no other options to explain who and what we are, as subjects and as people.
Graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel is no longer trying to outrun death. The fate of an author who grew up in a funeral home may be that every book she writes becomes a contemplation of mortality. That ...certainly seems to be the case for Bechdel, the cartoonist who shot to literary fame with the 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, named after the family funeral home where she spent her formative years. That book dealt with Bechdel's coming out during college, the subsequent revelation that her father had had sexual relationships with men, and his untimely death, which Bechdel believes to have been a suicide. Her next book, Are You My Mother?, sought to unpack Bechdel's complicated relationship with her mom. She pitched The Secret to Superhuman Strength as a humorous account of her lifelong obsession with exercise, but the resultant book is hardly a breezy read: the cartoon version of Bechdel turns to physical activity in an attempt to outrun death in her younger years. Then, after she's accepted the inevitable, she exercises in an effort to achieve enlightenment.
Strange Summer: 'The Fantastics' Schneider, Richard, Jr
The Gay & lesbian review worldwide,
07/2020, Letnik:
27, Številka:
4
Magazine Article
The first addresses Beardsley's early life and career, starting with the lifelong tuberculosis that surely influenced his frenetic drive to push the cultural envelope. To start with a living legend, ...cartoonist and graphic novelist Alison Bechdel is in the business of creating worlds to the artist's own specifications, as Dykes to Watch Out For surely did. The queenly king and his "mignons" created a world of extremes that took the theatricality of the French court to new levels.
Book Bag Patchett, Ann
Newsweek,
06/2011, Letnik:
157, Številka:
24
Book Review, Magazine Article
FUN HOME, Alison Bechdel I met Alison in a car going to the airport after a writers' conference, and she kindly sent me her graphic memoir about growing up in a funeral home with her gay father who ...later commits suicide.
"Fun Home" contains a romantic subplot -- albeit a lesbian one -- but otherwise Alison Bechdel's powerfully poignant 2006 comic-book memoir about the suicide of her homosexual father couldn't be less ...traditional, and the decision of Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori to turn Ms. Bechdel's "family tragicomic" (her phrase) into a musical will likely strike many theatergoers as little short of lunatic.
