Pockets of tenderness: Lesbian earth in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.

Abstract

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.