Navigating a doctrinal grey area: Free speech, the right to read, and schools

“Old Father, Old Artificer”: Queering Suspicion in Alison Bechdel’s <i>Fun Home</i>

Previous articleNext article No AccessPublic Conversation: Alison Bechdel and Hillary Chute May 19, 2012Lisa RuddickLisa Ruddick Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 40, Number 3Spring 2014Comics & Media, edited by Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/677373 Views: 777Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reservedPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Mihaela Precup “He was there to catch me when I leapt”: Paternal Absence and Artistic Emancipation in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, (Feb 2020): 59–82.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36218-8_3Shoshana Magnet Are You My Mother? Understanding Feminist Therapy with Alison Bechdel, Women & Therapy 40, no.1-21-2 (Oct 2016): 207–227.https://doi.org/10.1080/02703149.2016.1213607Robin Bernstein “I’m Very Happy to Be in the Reality-Based Community”: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home , Digital Photography, and George W. Bush, American Literature 89, no.11 (Mar 2017): 121–154.https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-3788741 LGBTQ Representation in Comics, (Aug 2016): 310–318.https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315851334-44

An Interview with Alison Bechdel Hillary Chute (bio) Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic takes place in the tiny, rural town of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, and meditates on her closeted father's suicide in 1980 (a few months after Bechdel herself came out as lesbian). It provoked an enormous critical response upon its publication in June 2006. The book also received the kind of public admiration that few literary graphic narratives since Maus have garnered: Fun Home earned a spot on the New York Times bestseller list, and two separate, rave book reviews from the Times. It is sure to soon become an important reference point in academic discourse on graphic narrative. Fun Home takes on as thematic and narrative filters Albert Camus' A Happy Death (the book Bruce Bechdel was reading when he died), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Henry James's Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady, Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Oscar Wilde's TheImportance of Being Earnest, and Colette's Earthly Paradise, among other literary references and allusions. Before Fun Home, Bechdel was best known for her ongoing serial Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–present). Here she talks about her research, her methodology, and her influences. CHUTE: What did you think of the Times review by Sean Wilsey ["The Things They Buried," June 18, 2006]? He actually drove to Beech Creek, visiting places you drew, and he reports on how accurate your drawings are. [End Page 1004] BECHDEL: The really weird thing is I've heard from two other people who have gone [to Beech Creek] since the book came out. So it wasn't just that Times reviewer. I think that's partly the result of the fact that I put maps in the book—you really can go see it. One thing Sean Wilsey said that I really liked was that if this book had been fiction—if I had made this story up—it really would be meaningless. The whole allure of the book, the reason it's interesting, is because these things really happened. So to have maps, and an actual place you can verify, is kind of cool. And Fun Home is very much about place: this particular part of rural central Pennsylvania, on the edge of the Allegheny Front, where Route 80 got blasted through the isolated valleys in the sixties and seventies. The construction of the interstate during my childhood felt kind of mythic. It was just over the ridge from us, and it ran from New York to San Francisco. Of course I didn't think then of New York and San Francisco as gay poles, but now I see that was part of it. CHUTE: Can you tell me about the research you did for the book? BECHDEL: I did all kinds of research. A lot of reading in particular. I haven't talked so much about that; people are interested more, I think, in the image research. One whole strand of the book is my father's love of literature, and the particular novels and authors that he liked. As I worked on the book I found this material creeping more and more into what I was writing. I was quoting Camus and Fitzgerald and eventually I realized that the book was sort of organizing itself around different books or authors; each of the chapters has a different literary focus. That meant doing a lot of reading. Re-reading things I had read before, like Portrait of the Artist or Ulysses; those are big sources for Fun Home. The first and last chapters reference Joyce, like bookends. I read a lot of biographies of the people my dad admired: Camus, both Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde—a great biography of Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann—and a great biography of Proust. I never actually read all of Proust; I just skimmed and took bits that I needed. I really liked doing all this wandering about in books. My dad pressured me a lot to read certain things when I was growing up and I had always resisted it. In some ways...

“Self-portrait by Alison Bechdel,” Courtesy of the author Transat: How has Fun Home’s reception been different in nature from the reactions to Dykes to Watch Out For? Alison Bechdel: Fun Home has had a very different reception than Dykes to Watch Out For. It’s a very different type of book. I don’t want to downplay DTWOF—I’m very proud of the series, and I think it’s been a worthy contribution to queer culture as well as to the comics genre. But Fun Home was a real creative leap for me. Cre...

“Seeing in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies, 28.3_84 (2013), Alison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic novel, Fun Home (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 Fun Home 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.

Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home Ann Cvetkovich (bio) Placing Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home alongside other graphic narratives, most notably Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1993) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003) , that explore intergenerational trauma and the role of the child as witness, seems both obvious and potentially inappropriate, even presumptuous.1 In writing about the Holocaust and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, respectively, Spiegelman and Satrapi take on histories that have been formative for global politics in the past century. In Fun Home, by contrast, there is no mass genocide or the same obvious connection to political debate, and the single death, that of Bechdel’s father, someone who might be categorized (however problematically) as a pedophile, suicide, or closet homosexual, raises the possibility that there are some lives that are not “grievable,” certainly not in a public context (Butler 2004, 20). But a queer, even perverse, sensibility not unlike Bechdel’s draws me to idiosyncratic or shameful family stories and their incommensurate relation to global politics and historical trauma. I want to risk inappropriate claims for the significance of Bechdel’s story, to read it in the context not just of Maus and Persepolis but also efforts to redefine the connections between memory and history, private experience and public life, and individual loss and collective trauma. Fun Home confirms my commitment (in An Archive of Feelings [2003]) to queer perspectives on trauma that challenge the relation between the catastrophic and the everyday and that make public space for lives whose very ordinariness makes them historically meaningful. And although Fun Home’s critical and popular success obviously provides many entry points for readers (and warrants its sustained attention in this issue of WSQ), Bechdel’s narrative of family life with a father who is attracted to adolescent boys has particular meaning for me because it provides a welcome alternative to public discourses about LGBTQ politics that are increasingly homonormative and dedicated to family values. [End Page 111] I write more as a specialist in queer studies than as one in graphic narrative, but I hope nonetheless to articulate how Bechdel uses this insurgent genre to provide a queer perspective that is missing from public discourse about both historical trauma and sexual politics. The recent success of graphic narrative, a hybrid or mixed-media genre, and also a relatively new and experimental one, within mainstream literary public spheres suggests that providing witness to intimate life puts pressure on standard genres and modes of public discourse. I seek to juxtapose Fun Home with other prominent graphic memoirs such as Maus and Persepolis to show how its queer sensibility extends their treatment of the relation between individual and historical experience, so central to second-generation witness, especially through a more pronounced focus on sexuality. But I also want to situate Fun Home as part of other insurgent genres of queer culture, such as memoir, solo performance, women’s music, and autoethnographic documentary film and video, including the traditions of lesbian feminist culture within which Bechdel’s long-running Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip circulates. Standing at the intersections of both contemporary LGBTQ culture and public discussions of historical trauma, Fun Home dares to claim historical significance and public space not only for a lesbian coming-out story but also for one that is tied to what some might see as shameful sexual histories. Witnessing Sexuality Dori Laub’s claim, in the context of Holocaust testimony, that trauma is an “event without a witness” (in part because the epistemic crisis of trauma is such that even the survivor is not fully present for the event) takes on a different resonance in Bechdel’s story about her father, who was run over by a truck while crossing the highway outside the house he was restoring (Felman and Laub 1991, 80).2 In a literal sense, his death is an event without a witness (other than the truck driver, who thinks that her father might have jumped back into the road); and Bechdel and her mother’s hunch that it is a suicide, or somehow connected to his complex sexual history, is ultimately only speculation. While the moment of...

Alison Bechdel's 2006 memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, makes a strong and explicit claim for the power of graphic narrative as witness. Employing the straightforward visual developed over more than twenty years as creator of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, in Fun Home Bechdel explores her relationship with her father, Bruce, who died when she was in college. Although his death was declared an accidenthe was hit by a truck while working outdoors near their family's home in rural Pennsylvania-Bechdel is convinced it was a suicide, a sign of his deep unhappiness. event occurs shortly after she comes out to her parents as a lesbian, an announcement that is followed by the revelation that her father, too, has struggled with his sexuality. In the memoir, Bechdel seeks to understand the connections between her father's life and her own and to work through the trauma that can accompany queer identity. Created in the shadow of a father who his skillful artifice to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not (2006a, 16), however, Fun Home bears witness only to Bruce Bechdel's trauma and its effect on his family, but also to the artist's effort to claim the authority to represent their story.1 Bechdel's comic may at first seem almost invisible behind her exploration of mediums, particularly photography and literature.2 Photographs and texts are critical to her effort to uncover her family's history, and she relies on them extensively in structuring Fun Home. Hillary Chute notes that a family photograph drawn by Bechdel appears at the beginning of every chapter (Bechdel 2006b, 1009), and these are carefully paired with phrases from works of literature relevant to this story of two English-teacher parents and their well-read daughter. In this context, what Bechdel has called the usual cartoony style she uses to draw most of the book seems to exist in service to the real documents and images it is used to explore (1009). Yet, as Ann Cvetkovich observes in her essay for this issue, the contribution of literature and photographs to understanding the story of a life are interrogated within the memoir, their usefulness as documentary evidence or narrative models held up to careful scrutiny (see pages 116 and 122, this volume). Photographs prove difficult to decipher, while overidentification with literature by and about people threatens to throw lives off course. By framing each of her chapters with words and images that bear a complex relationship to each other, Bechdel reminds us that it is in the space between existing visual images and familiar storylines where we make meaning of our individual lives. Here, that is precisely the space described by comics. And while Fun Home casts doubt on our ability to interpret the visual and textual worlds around us, it also invests a particular faith in its author's chosen medium. Cvetkovich rightly identifies Fun Home as a work of what Marianne Hirsch has called postmemory (see page 113, this volume), a term for how the memory of trauma belonging to one generation can shape the memories of the next (Hirsch 1997, 22). In her ongoing study of postmemorial visual art, Hirsch has stressed the importance of of identification that are nonappropriative, through which artists may communicate the memory of transmitted trauma without claiming to know it fully (2002, 88). This is accomplished most successfully, Hirsch maintains, by work that allows for a historical withholding that does absorb the other but is also able to expand the circle of postmemory in multiple, inviting, and open-ended ways (88).3 Consistent with these ideas, Cvetkovich shows how Bechdel admits to being unable to truly know her father's trauma and thereby preserves the specificity of his story. Additionally, however, Bechdel relies upon the visual element of comics to bring the reader into her complex family history. As Hirsch has argued in Family Frames, The individual subject is constituted in the space of the family through looking (1997, 9), and throughout Fun Home, Bechdel highlights moments of perception that offer illuminating forms of knowledge crucial to her development as a woman, a lesbian, and an artist both within and outside the visual field proscribed by her father's watchfulness. …

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 essay distinguishes itself from previous work on Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (2007) by virtue of its attention to the material and medial qualities of this text. Based on a reading of materiality in Fun Home, I argue that comics scholars need to pay greater attention to how material and technological parameters shape the experience of reading comics. Fun Home foregrounds questions of typography (specifically the difference between handwriting and typewriting) and of the physical form of books. By doing so, it self-reflexively calls the reader's attention to its own typography and its own physical appearance. As such, Fun Home exemplifies the usefulness for comics studies of what Katherine Hayles calls ‘media-specific analysis’. My reading of Fun Home thus illustrates the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue between comics studies and media studies.

Abstract: 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 of comics 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.

This article explores a series of visual-textual devices used in the representation of father figures in the poetry collection The Father (Sharon Olds, 1992) and the graphic memoir Fun Home (Alison Bechdel, 2006). I argue that literature can contribute to undo the conflation of paternity and patriarchy by portraying fathers as complex, fallible, and above all real individuals, as opposed to the disembodied abstract principle that has been prevalent in Western cultures. I will contend that the subsuming qualities of the dominant fiction can be subverted via a series of formal mechanisms related to the visual field that seek to foster reader engagement. In doing so, both The Father and Fun Home provide alternatives to traditional representations of the father figure.

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.

Lasse Gammelgaard: "Udspring og fald i Alison Bechdels grafiske erindringsværk: Fun Home. A Family Tragicomic"AbstractLasse Gammelgaard: “Coming Out and Falling Down: Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoir Fun Home. A Family Tragicomic”Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir about the author’s own coming-out story and her father’s homosexuality and (probable) suicide. It endeavors to give an accurate account of the past, but the telling is simultaneouslyreplete with fictionalising elements. This article probes that oscillation and describes some of the salient verbal-visual-contingent stylistic features and potentialities, which emerge as a consequence of the work’s multimodality.

The subfield of rural queer studies and the concept of lesbian earth encourage scholars to explore the significance of rural place, nature, and climate change in queer texts. Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family TragicComic, presents nature as a source of familial conflict, creativity, and mutual support and as under threat due to strip mining. The climate change novel, 2 Degrees, focuses intensely on the realities of climate change and lesbian relations with the earth. These two texts are drastically different, yet they both convey a lesbian earth sensibility, featuring main characters who practice an open, vulnerable, interdependent stance with themselves and the more-than-human world.

This essay considers the significance of the Siren figure to Dante's Purgatorio and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home with a focus on the figure's relation to tropes of knowledge, specifically self-knowledge as manifested in the reading, writing, and speaking of the self. The Siren's call pertains not only to the classical notion of a woman's vocal allure, answered by those men for whom it signals the possibility of ultimate experience, but also to the allure of intertextual discourses as a means of foregrounding correlations of subjectivity and desire. Derived from Homeric epic and reinterpreted by philosophers and writers such as Boethius and Cicero, the Siren brings to the narrative a self-reflexive awareness of subjectivity manifest in subject/object positions: the self as it desires and as it knows that it desires what it desires. The Siren operates as a trope of queer subjectivity, complicating the narratives' engagement with issues of subjectivity and desire. In bringing these two texts together in comparison and juxtaposition, I hope to show, via their reciprocal critical lenses, how each draws upon, and contributes to, discourses elucidating subjectivity and its signatures in Western literature and culture.