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.
Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama promotes a form of reparation for its author and its readers, making a case for the much-maligned idea that literature serves ...therapeutic aims. The book not only models a reparative reading practice by using comics form to engage the insights and limits of psychoanalysis and modernist literature but also elicits a reparative reading experience for a community of readers forged in the discovery of a common emotional struggle. Bechdel's memoir represents an autobiographical narrator's loving yet ambivalent relationship with her mother in ways that invite readers to acknowledge a shared affective history of complex mother-daughter relationships that merits public examination, empathy, and social inclusion.
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.
In “Narrate or Describe?” (1936), Georg Lukács codified the aesthetic superiority of narration to description. Current debates around descriptive approaches in literary studies reprise this binary in ...a critical register, valorizing interpretation over description (or, less frequently, vice versa). Beginning with a reconsideration of Lukács’s essay, I propose the inevitable interdependence of interpretation and description. Brief readings of technical language in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and intertextuality in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012) exemplify that interdependence.
This article assesses the queer world-making potentiality of the comics form as demonstrated in Alison Bechdel’s
graphic memoir
. By deploying the temporal openings of the graphic form,
challenges ...the putative fixity of heteronormative family time and the temporality of kinship lines more broadly. Bechdel represents this queering of generation and kinship as a constituent part of the young Alison’s coming-of-age as a queer comics artist; this temporal reworking simultaneously makes possible a queer reparative web of affiliation. Building on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s model of reparative reading, I demonstrate how
’s form produces a version of reparation that emerges from a shared artistry and embraces ambivalent affective responses to the past. Ultimately, Bechdel produces a queer feminist reparative reading that understands futurity’s potential as complex and grounded in both the pain and pleasure of the queer body.
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.
