Modernism, Memory and Desire: Queer Cultural Production in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Abstract

Using what Barbara Christian has called the technique of “rememorying”—the deliberate reconstruction of memory to void fixed categories—Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic expands the perimeters of graphic memoir and creates a sense of queer canonicity in the process. Fun Home’s structure is recursive rather than linear, returning again and again to the same sites of emotional pain: the author’s coming out, her father’s suicide, the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, the always-impossible search for lost time. Like other graphic memoirs, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Fun Home tackles subjects rooted in trauma and memory. Fun Home offers a lesbian feminist counterpoint to texts such as Maus, adding queer autobiography to the purview of the growing canon of women’s alternative comic art. Moving freely from Marcel Proust to Roald Dahl, mixing memory and desire, Bechdel interrogates some comfortable perceptions of the autobiographical materials that constitute high culture.