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This chapter examines self-representation in comics, with emphasis on the intertextuality of Alison Bechdel’s created self as well as the conflation of allusion and confession in her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home. Known for its depictions of homosexuality and an artist’s coming of age and coming out, Fun Home highlights the intersections of comics, art history, and literature. By participating in a tradition of contemporary lesbian memoir, Fun Home extends an American literary confessional genealogy dating back to Puritan conversion and African-American captivity narratives. This chapter analyzes the literary allusions in Fun Home, particularly its use of allusive confessions that straddle the personal and the public, the lived and the literary.

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?. This 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. The chapter focuses on the themes of intimacy and the self in Bechdel’s work.

This chapter focuses on Alison Bechdel—now a bona fide cultural phenomenon, and one of the most famous lesbian artists in America. The adaptation of her first graphic memoir, Fun Home, debuted as a musical on Broadway in New York in April 2015, and won five Tony Awards in June of that same year. Subtitled “a family tragicomic,” this is an autobiographical text. It tells Alison's story of growing up and coming out, and of her relationship with her family, and above all with her father, a queer man who may have committed suicide, and who apparently lived a closeted, unhappy existence.

For Alison Bechdel, autobiography and biography were twinned in drafting her groundbreaking queer graphic memoir Fun Home. She recognized that unless she could write the story of the father who defined her childhood and adolescence, she could not create the narrative of her own queer becoming. The archives for Fun Home, part of the Alison Bechdel collection held by Smith College, offer unparalleled access to her creative process and to Bechdel’s struggle to understand her father’s sexuality in relation to her own in order to write a queer family history that could include them both. This chapter proposes that Bechdel’s autobiographical subject is constituted through recurring writing strategies that try to inhabit her father’s consciousness, first through entering his language by transcribing his letters to her at college, and later, toward the end of her lengthy drafting process, by drawing father and daughter as mirror images of each other.

Fugitive and fictive testimony though a photograph may be, photographs, or images of photographs have come to play a critical role in the particular form of the graphic narrative that is the graphic memoir. At once personal memento and material witness, at once familial relic and visible evidence, the photographic snapshots “drawn and quartered” on the pages of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir offer a vestigial glimpse of all that photography still means within the affective economy of the historical work that is remembrance. Rendered and, at the same time, withheld, the reproduced and drawn photographs of her graphic memoir intimate the history and inheritance of the “pencil of nature” that was William Henry Fox Talbot’s photography, staking a claim to its evidential status even as they challenge its forms and its terms. Moreover, in ways that exceed the largely playful retrospective link forged between the contemporary practice of taking pencil in hand to draw photographically and Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, Talbot’s album, like Bechdel’s memoir, holds within it photographs, portraits of a sort, that may bear equivocal witness to something as ineffable as desire.

To think of choreography as a theorization of identity allows for a conception of movement in which bodies are more than the object of theory; bodies become the active subject, the Merleau-Pontian point of view in the world in which they move. Bechdel choreographs memory structurally through the complex relationship between chapter title panels and the chapter contents. Another way in which Fun Home embodies the act of remembering is through the myriad interactions Bechdel the creator has with Alison the character in the text. Multimodal narrative makes this type of interaction visible to the reader. “Dancing with memory” in Fun Home means traversing narrative lines where much of the meaningful dialogue between past and present becomes visible only through the relationship between text and image. Multimodal narrative allows for creators and audiences alike to witness from the outside in more explicitly the implicit affective responses to the very act of remembering through storytelling. Some of the most potent instances of embodied reading in Fun Home are those in which we see Bechdel the creator in dialogue with Alison the character. Excavating past selves to follow the trajectory of past movement is part of the work of autobiography and artistic expression of memory. The textual and visual choreography operates on multiple temporal levels, and through multiple modes of communication. Reading a graphic memoir is an embodied performative act. Considering the ephemeral nature of performance alongside the ephemeral nature of memory in Fun Home illuminates new ways of understanding both.

The birth of queer studies as an academic discipline is defined by its break from LGBT politics, with the goals of marriage and military service pitted against radical queer liberation. In broad strokes, LGBT studies produces sexual orientation as a category, while queer studies seeks to upend categorical thought. Alison Bechdel’s unique insight into that tension arises from her complex and nuanced attempts to represent marginalized identities in a form that has been itself marginalized. Her politics of the outsider cannot be cast off in a dismissive reading of her popularity in the cultural imagination, nor hewn from the longer history of her formal innovation. Taken as a whole, the paradoxical and yet co-constitutive relationship between the queerness of her forms and the mainstream popularity of her texts performs a sort of queer world-building. To the extent that her work cultivates empathy or community, it does so not only, perhaps, in the service of identity-based movements or bald market capitalism, but also by modeling a more radical, relational aesthetic that illuminates the ongoing power of queer critique.

This essay suggests that Bechdel’s two autographic memoirs are indicative of the potential that exists in graphic narrative to provoke new dialogues with regard to how we approach, how we interpret, and how we interact with generational and familial trauma that stems from dysfunctional relationships with parental figures. Specifically, it examines how Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? builds upon the juxtapositions of the father-daughter bond in Fun Home by shifting the focus towards Bechdel’s traumatic relationship with her mother. This chapter argues that by explicitly weaving the narrative around a backdrop of psychology and psychoanalysis (D. W. Winnicott, Freud, Jung, and Lacan), Bechdel intentionally situates the “reader in the position of the analyst” (as quoted in The Paris Review). Drawing on Bechdel’s theory-rich content, this essay examines the figure of the mother as a shifting entity that mutates and molds itself onto substitute transitional objects and experiences, including Bechdel’s therapists and romantic attachments. Alternating among transcribed audio dialogues, diary entries, counseling sessions, dreams, letters, photographs, and memories, Are You My Mother? is an illustration of the Freudian concept of “afterwardness,” or, as Lacan coined it, après-coup—a retroactive understanding and re-visitation of earlier trauma.

This chapter compares two different modes of deploying intertextuality in autobiographical writing by analyzing the relationship between textuality and experience in Alison Bechdel’s comic autobiography Fun Home and Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!. It first considers the tensions in Bechdel’s sophisticated use of intertextuality, focusing on her awareness of the way her chosen intertexts work imperfectly as a means of describing and understanding her own experiences. It then offers a reading of One! Hundred! Demons! and Barry’s technique in depicting suicide, as well as her notion of texts as magic lanterns. It also explores Barry’s use of intertextuality as a means of interpolating the reader, of modeling textual engagement and turning readers into writers.

Although not done deliberately, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home intervenes in rural queer studies by showing how geography, sexuality, and gender are vital to understanding the complexities of rural queer lives. Based on Bechdel’s experiences growing up in Beech Creek in the 1960s and 70s, Fun Home unwittingly resonates with the aims of rural queer studies by exploring, among other things, complex queer attachments to rural place—with a particular focus on the author’s father, Bruce Bechdel. Bruce was raised on a dairy farm, where he had his first same-sex experience with a farmhand. When he became an adult, his non-normative sexual activity was an open secret, until his arrest for providing an alcoholic beverage to a minor, the younger brother of one of his upper-class high school students. Bruce’s arrest threatens his reputation, livelihood, marriage, and family in an unprecedented way, and Alison Bechdel believes it drove him to suicide. Because Bruce is white, male, and college educated, and belongs to a family with a long history in Beech Creek, he escapes prison and is instead ordered to begin sessions with a psychiatrist for his “disorder.” Contrary to the impression given of Bruce in Fun Home scholarship, and even in Fun Home itself, in many ways life in Beech Creek suits him.

This chapter explores the numerous and heretofore overlooked physical, personal, and psychological areas of overlap between Mo Testa in Dykes to Watch Out For and Linus van Pelt in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Many of Mo’s signature traits and hallmark qualities are ones she shares with Linus: from her insecurity and intellectualism to her philosophical nature and her role as reflective commentator for the group. Indeed, even Mo’s penchant for striped clothing can be seen as taking a sartorial cue from Linus, who is always clad in a t-shirt with strikingly similar horizontal stripes. While Bechdel never identified Schulz as an inspiration for her work nor the Peanuts gang as a model for her DTWOF crew, the suggestive echoes between Mo and Linus seem too numerous to be merely coincidental. Exploring the similarities between Mo and Linus reveals a compelling kinship between Bechdel’s work and one of the most well-known strips in the history of American comics, while it also sheds new light on the relationship that DTWOF has to its socio-cultural milieu.

Before Alison Bechdel became widely read with the publication and subsequent Broadway adaptation of Fun Home (2006), her work reflected non-mainstream-oriented queer experience and the alternative comix legacy exemplified in Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008). In this spirit, this chapter takes Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012) as its subject, but does so by thinking alternatively about how the book works as a graphic narrative pertaining to queer erotics and its associated relational contexts. What this essay will conceptualize as the text’s avant-garde aesthetics of interiority refers to qualities of the text that deploy representations of interiority that exceed and complicate the explicitly clinical or strictly psychoanalytic approaches to Are You My Mother?; an aesthetics of interiority, this chapter will show, more readily accommodates the formations and disruptions that accompany the queer “self” in—and as—the text. “Interiority” as defined here thus signifies textual-spatial instances of queer constructions of the “self.” This chapter contends that interiority is infinitely open-ended, resists closure, and ultimately provides a way out that the text uses as its own beginning and/or revision of a conclusion.

Utilizing Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, this chapter examine how Alison Bechdel’s work mobilizes representational regimes to orient, disorient, and reorient the reader toward a politics of location. Interweaving comics and cartography, Fun Home and Are You My Mother? demonstrate how comics may be used to construct alternate maps for queer and feminist-oriented landscapes of the self. These works do not merely write the self, they locate the self, as a form of autotopography. The rhetorical power of comics as a visual medium is vested in the possibility for juxtaposing different representations of space within the same space of representation. Including maps in panels or as structuring elements of panels, Bechdel’s comics contextualize the map as but one representational apparatus, itself predicated upon numerous constituent techniques (such as gridding, perspective, toponyms, scale, etc.).

This chapter explores how Dykes to Watch Out For establishes a playful and deprecating relationship with queer theory that is simultaneously a hallmark of Alison Bechdel’s individual craft and something made possible by the unique formal properties of comics. Specifically, this chapter considers instances where Bechdel uses the gutters of the comic to represent how knowledge can be lost or obfuscated as it moves through (everyday, public) time that is teeming with distractions. As a result, the collected DTWOF is stirring, instructive even, for anyone invested in critical theory’s capacity to affect meaningful and sustained change. The method developed in the chapter draws on the significance of the gutter as identified in comics criticism; it advocates placing one’s attention on the gutters and focusing on how information is shown to be successfully, or unsuccessfully, transmitted across them.

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 20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st 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.