“The Complexity of Loss Itself”: The Comics Form andFun Home’s Queer Reparative Temporality

Abstract

AbstractThis article assesses the queer world-making potentiality of the comics form as demonstrated in Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home. By deploying the temporal openings of the graphic form, Fun Home challenges the putative fixity of heteronormative family time and the temporality of kinship lines more broadly. Bechdel represents this queering of generation and kinship as a constituent part of the young Alison’s coming-of-age as a queer comics artist; this temporal reworking simultaneously makes possible a queer reparative web of affiliation. Building on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s model of reparative reading, I demonstrate how Fun Home’s form produces a version of reparation that emerges from a shared artistry and embraces ambivalent affective responses to the past. Ultimately, Bechdel produces a queer feminist reparative reading that understands futurity’s potential as complex and grounded in both the pain and pleasure of the queer body.