Don L. Latham and Jonathan M. Hollister
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781496825773
- eISBN:
- 9781496825827
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496825773.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008 in mostly independent, alternative newspapers as well as online, had an important effect on ...
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Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008 in mostly independent, alternative newspapers as well as online, had an important effect on representing and shaping the LGBTQ, and especially the lesbian, community in the latter decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, a time of great change for the LGBTQ community. Within the world of the comic strip, information, information behavior, and the exchange of information play a key role in helping build and maintain community among the (mostly lesbian) characters. In turn, the identities of the individual members of that community are shaped by that evolving community. This essay will use Jaeger and Burnett’s theory of information worlds as a framework for examining how information and information behaviors help to form and maintain the information world of the lesbian community depicted in Dykes To Watch Out For. It will demonstrate that, as an insider in a marginalized community, Bechdel framed the information world of that community through her art and exported it to other communities outside of her world, thus helping to shape the information worlds of “real-world” lesbian communities over the quarter century that the strip was published.Less
Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008 in mostly independent, alternative newspapers as well as online, had an important effect on representing and shaping the LGBTQ, and especially the lesbian, community in the latter decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, a time of great change for the LGBTQ community. Within the world of the comic strip, information, information behavior, and the exchange of information play a key role in helping build and maintain community among the (mostly lesbian) characters. In turn, the identities of the individual members of that community are shaped by that evolving community. This essay will use Jaeger and Burnett’s theory of information worlds as a framework for examining how information and information behaviors help to form and maintain the information world of the lesbian community depicted in Dykes To Watch Out For. It will demonstrate that, as an insider in a marginalized community, Bechdel framed the information world of that community through her art and exported it to other communities outside of her world, thus helping to shape the information worlds of “real-world” lesbian communities over the quarter century that the strip was published.
Janine Utell (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781496825773
- eISBN:
- 9781496825827
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496825773.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
The Comics of Alison Bechdel is the first full-length volume dedicated to the comics art of Alison Bechdel, beginning with her early work on the long-running serial comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For ...
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The Comics of Alison Bechdel is the first full-length volume dedicated to the comics art of Alison Bechdel, beginning with her early work on the long-running serial comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and including original scholarship on her acclaimed memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother?. The volume is organized into three sections. The first looks at Bechdel’s place in lesbian comics and considers her work in the context of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. The second looks at kinship, affect, and trauma in Bechdel’s work, with a focus on interiority and the artist’s experiments with comics form. The third looks at place, space, and community, considering the significance of rural queer life, topography and mapping, and forms of LGBTQ community. Archival research and theories of the archive provide new insight into Bechdel’s art, including the composition of Fun Home and the development of the lesser-known Servants to the Cause, which appeared in The Advocate in the late 1980s. An introductory essay orients readers to Bechdel’s career—her childhood in Beech Creek, her involvement in LGBTQ activism and lesbian comix, her move inward towards life writing, and the mainstream cultural recognition prompted by the adaptation of Fun Home into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical—as well as to current trends in Bechdel scholarship.Less
The Comics of Alison Bechdel is the first full-length volume dedicated to the comics art of Alison Bechdel, beginning with her early work on the long-running serial comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and including original scholarship on her acclaimed memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother?. The volume is organized into three sections. The first looks at Bechdel’s place in lesbian comics and considers her work in the context of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. The second looks at kinship, affect, and trauma in Bechdel’s work, with a focus on interiority and the artist’s experiments with comics form. The third looks at place, space, and community, considering the significance of rural queer life, topography and mapping, and forms of LGBTQ community. Archival research and theories of the archive provide new insight into Bechdel’s art, including the composition of Fun Home and the development of the lesser-known Servants to the Cause, which appeared in The Advocate in the late 1980s. An introductory essay orients readers to Bechdel’s career—her childhood in Beech Creek, her involvement in LGBTQ activism and lesbian comix, her move inward towards life writing, and the mainstream cultural recognition prompted by the adaptation of Fun Home into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical—as well as to current trends in Bechdel scholarship.