Alison Bechdel's recent graphic memoirs generate new strategies for negotiating feminist and queer literary theory's troubled relationship to metaphors of disability. Presenting a set of continuities ...between Alison's embodied experience of OCD and her adult drawing and writing techniques, Fun Home (2006) performs an intriguing revision of feminism's “madwoman in the attic.” In this way, the memoir stages a contemporary crip innovation in feminist literary form. Are You My Mother? (2012) extends this intervention by aestheticizing depression and its complex relationship to chronicity and care. Replacing the fantasy of artistic self-sufficiency with a model of creative interdependence, Bechdel thus opens spaces for theorizing new forms of feminist and crip collaboration.
Alison Bechdel's award-winning graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, has been widely recognized for its literary sophistication. Themes familiar in the memoir genre—the author's intellectual ...and sexual development and her relationship with her father—are invariably filtered through her adventures in reading. This essay presents the different modes of reading Alison's encounters: reading for identification, reading for parallels and symbolic meanings, reading for the sensual pleasure of language. Bechdel arrives ultimately at her own understanding of reading as an ongoing struggle. Bechdel teaches her readers to be attentive, in particular, to the often-overlooked materiality of reading: the book as object and the page in its spatial layout, language as sensuous sound and rhythm, and the experience of both writers and readers as embodied participants in the process.
This article reads Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) as a rewriting of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time . Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s assumption, which interprets In Search as a complex exercise in ...decoding signs, the article claims that Fun Home stages the attempt of its protagonists, Alison and her father Bruce, to understand the truth about each other. In particular, it addresses the issues of sexual identity, spatiality, and death as some of the crucial motifs in In Search that Bechdel retrieves in Fun Home . The protagonists’ “experiment in decoding” turns out to be a failure, due to the impossibility of understanding and deciphering the signs of each other’s intimate truths.
Alison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic novel,
(2006), intricately weaves together the author's coming-out story with her family's history, particularly the story of her father's closeted queer ...sexuality and possible suicide. In its exploration of family history, queer desires, and larger American historical events, Bechdel's novel deals with themes of trauma, memory, and historical narrative. The novel has been embraced for the queer way in which it approaches her family archive — it refuses to settle on one understanding of the truth of Bechdel's father, his sexuality, and the author's relationship to him, and instead insists on piecing together the past from a variety of angles. This article focuses on how the queer qualities of contingency and partiality that
produces around sexuality and the Bechdel family's history is an effect of the author's use of the visual possibilities of the graphic genre. Mapping Bechdel's coming-of-age story as a narrative about coming to see, this article traces the importance of vision in young Alison's gender identity, her relationship to her father, and her ability to posthumously “see” her father through family photographs. This article thus draws out the ways in which Bechdel represents the visual field as a source of both restriction and queer pleasure, the family as a site of both normalizing and queer looks, and the inevitable partiality of what she is able to see.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2012. isbn 9780618982509 Alison Bechdel made an auspicious entrance on the literary scene with her first graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragic Comic, in which she ...excavates her relationship with her father.
Hard to Say is an installation comprised of four artist’s books that are displayed in a fabricated living room environment that includes wood laminate floors, comfortable chairs, a coffee table, a ...rug, end tables, and warm lamplight. All elements of the installation were either bought second-hand or borrowed from local friends. The exhibition is named after the primary work in the show entitled Hard to Say, an illustrated memoir. The memoir illustrates the author’s personal history through eight separate sections that utilize handwritten text, photographs, and hand drawn elements. These elements were combined digitally and printed in an edition of twelve full-color hardback books. In addition, the installation featured an edition of 50 comic book style zines, a legal pad inspired participatory book of paper airplane instructions, and a hand assembled photo album of photos from the artist’s childhood.
Using the concept of "communities of practice," this essay recounts the impact of foregrounding representations of community in teaching Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. I argue that the work of ...collectively reading this text, which itself offers a nuanced perspective on being and belonging, fostered a classroom community self-conscious about its own expectations for membership. Our process reinforced the constant interpretive encounter in graphic narratives between writing and image, facilitating in our class a critique of dominant modes of discourse and fostering a reading practice that helped us probe the limits of communal identity. This was not a process of affiliation with Bechdel's persona, but a dialectic within the classroom of recognition and difference that ultimately binds communities of practice together. Moving beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion to a communal reading, our engagement with the text enabled members of the class to have both literary critical insights and deeply personal discoveries about the communities to which we willingly belong or into which we are placed. Ultimately, this essay recommends the generic affordances of the graphic narrative for this work, suggesting how communities of literary practice need to focus on texts that open modes of affiliation and recognition for diverse student populations.
Fun Home is an autographic narrative about memoirs, memory, and acts of autobiographical storytelling that mingles irony and pathos in the coming-out/coming of age story of young Alison in an ..."artistic, autistic" family who run a funeral home. Its multimodal text interweaves allusions to Modernist literary texts and feminist manifestoes with drawn photographs and diverse cartooning styles. This essay explores Bechdel's graphing of subjectivity at multiple interfaces, and examines her use of ambiguous "evidence" for a father-daughter coming-out story that is both indictment and posthumous homage.
Graphic women Chute, Hillary
2010., 20101116, 2010, 2010-11-22, 20100101
eBook
Some of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century are autobiographical comics by women. Aline Kominsky-Crumb is a pioneer of the autobiographical form, showing women's everyday lives, ...especially through the lens of the body. Phoebe Gloeckner places teenage sexuality at the center of her work, while Lynda Barry uses collage and the empty spaces between frames to capture the process of memory. Marjane Satrapi'sPersepolisexperiments with visual witness to frame her personal and historical narrative, and Alison Bechdel'sFun Homemeticulously incorporates family documents by hand to re-present the author's past.
These five cartoonists move the art of autobiography and graphic storytelling in new directions, particularly through the depiction of sex, gender, and lived experience. Hillary L. Chute explores their verbal and visual techniques, which have transformed autobiographical narrative and contemporary comics. Through the interplay of words and images, and the counterpoint of presence and absence, they express difficult, even traumatic stories while engaging with the workings of memory. Intertwining aesthetics and politics, these women both rewrite and redesign the parameters of acceptable discourse.
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