Alison Bechdel Research Articles

Beyond Psychoanalysis: Resistance and Reparative Reading in Alison Bechdel'sAre You My Mother?

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirAre You My Mother? A Comic Dramapromotes a form of reparation for its author and its readers, making a case for the much-maligned idea that literature serves therapeutic aims. The book not only models a reparative reading practice by using comics form to engage the insights and limits of psychoanalysis and modernist literature but also elicits a reparative reading experience for a community of readers forged in the discovery of a common emotional struggle. Bechdel's memoir represents an autobiographical narrator's loving yet ambivalent relationship with her mother in ways that invite readers to acknowledge a shared affective history of complex mother-daughter relationships that merits public examination, empathy, and social inclusion.

The Political is Personal: Dual Domesticity in Dykes to Watch Out For

This essay examines the ways in which Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For creatively expresses national, domestic politics within the smaller, domestic spaces of homes and communities, focusing narrowly on several exemplary strips that powerfully illustrate Bechdel’s exquisite rendering of the political within the personal sphere.

Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature by Christopher Pizzino

Reviewed by: Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature by Christopher Pizzino Louie Dean Valencia-García (bio) Christopher Pizzino, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. University of Texas Press, 2016. 248 pp, $29.95, $90. Christopher Pizzino begins Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature with the premise that even though news stories have proclaimed the arrival of comics as legitimate literature for more than thirty years, comics are still a marginalized medium that resists legitimation, and will be for the foreseeable future. Pizzino argues, "while comics are less reviled now than they were in the worst years of censorship, the medium is still designated illegitimate by default" (3). The claim might surprise some, especially given forays into comics by the likes of acclaimed authors such as Margaret Atwood (Angel Catbird), Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club 2), and Ta-Nehisi Coates (Black Panther). This is to say nothing of MacArthur fellow Jonathan Letham and Pulitzer-Prize-winner Michael Chabon, who both draw heavily on comics in their novels, and have written comics as well. How can comics not be legitimate [End Page 257] literature? This question potentially threatens the legitimacy of the cultural producers of comics, the readers, the purveyors, and even the scholars. For Pizzino, works like these are considered exceptional, or transcendent. They do not legitimate comics as literature. To this end, he argues, the usage of the term "graphic novel" to describe a comic that "transcends" the medium functions to delegitimize comics as a whole. Ironically, in Spain, the word "comic" has replaced the Spanish word "tebeo," and is used in the way that "graphic novel" is used in the Anglophone countries to designate legitimacy. Pizzino argues against what he terms a "Bildugsroman discourse"—a narrative that contends that comics have grown into "a medium fit for adults; from crudely and functionally produced commodities, often the product of multiple and interchangeable creators, to aesthetically complex work created by self-directed writer-illustrators; from adventure-romance serials to closure-oriented narratives modeled after the novel—and thus, so goes the logic of this narrative, from despised medium with little to no credibility as an art form, a literature or a mode of literacy to a respectable kind of reading with an earned measure of cultural legitimacy" (30). Pizzino's claim that comics still hold an illegitimate position both in the popular press and in academia is a provocative one. He argues his is "a book about how cultural status, and the separation of high and low culture, art and pulp, sophisticated appreciation and vulgar consumption … still influence not only the status of the books we read, but also the value of the act of reading, and the cultural and social standing of readers" (4). For Pizzino, the simple act of reading comics can alter readers' status and respectability. Choosing to focus his study on critically acclaimed "graphic novelists"—Frank Miller, Alison Bechdel, Charles Burns, and Gilbert Hernandez—Pizzino explores what he describes as "autoclasm," or what can be described as the way comic authors "address status problems with extraordinary creative energy" despite its being "a divided and self-opposed energy, split by the pressure of the very problem it confronts" (4). Arresting Development argues that through this autoclasm "creators picture the disenfranchisement that, to one degree or another, comes with the very act of making comics" (5). Pizzino points to the ways that comic writers often have secondary jobs to support their artistic careers. By looking at ways in which acclaimed artists and writers of comics have encountered questions of legitimacy, Pizzino proves the existence of a Bildungsroman discourse, and shows how those who have found critical or financial success still struggle for legitimacy. Even Neil Gaiman has said, "I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter."1 In chapter three, Pizzino looks at Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) to argue that the work is not exemplary of a literary evolution of the genre, but rather that Miller embraces the "action-packed, lascivious stories" that "abetted the conviction of public figures of the 1950s that comics are unfit reading...

The Politics of the Diagram as Graphic Narrative: Chris Ware and Chad McCail

The Politics of the Diagram as Graphic Narrative:Chris Ware and Chad McCail Jesse Cohn (bio) Within the field of indie comics, politics are most visible–and most closely scrutinized–in the nonfictional genres of graphic journalism (e.g., Joe Sacco's Palestine), history (e.g., Art Spiegelman's Maus), and autobiography (e.g., Alison Bechdel's Fun Home). Discussion of these tends to foreground questions of representation and identification; apart from them, as in the film criticism of the Screen era, a certain formalism predominates. Here, the unselfconscious narration of concrete facts and experiences supposedly typifying works such as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons may be taken as a shortcoming, a failure to "lay bare the devices" and to foreground the medium, whereas a preoccupation with the possibilities of form is sometimes taken to have radical political significance in itself. For Daniel Worden, thus, formal experimentation suggests a break with the given, an "assertion of the comics form's ability to defamiliarize, rather than concretize and repeat, genre conventions and social norms," thereby "help[ing] us to think about and envision a better world" (Worden, "Politics of Comics" 69-70). Critical treatment of the works of American comics creator Chris Ware (b. Omaha, 1967) tends to take just this position. This praise of Ware's political radicalism might come as a surprise to those for whom one of his distinctions is his disinterest in politics (Dycus 127). It would be difficult to characterize Ware as any kind of engagé artist, let alone a radical. Ware's first comics outing, a dystopian graphic novel called Floyd Farland, Citizen of the Future (1987), which he has since disavowed, was about as political as Ware ever got, but even here, the gestures are primarily sardonic. His most directly political gestures, "disseminated between strips and often written in a tiny type," are almost literally marginal to his work–a series of sarcastic barbs, crammed into the "paratext[ual]" spaces of mock advertisements in his ACME Novelty Library series, aimed at the excesses of American jingoism and racism. Under the front cover of Acme Novelty Library #10 (1998), for instance, [End Page 33] we find a roughly 2-inch-wide advertisement for "Atomic Weapons" (alongside similarly-sized ads for "Childhood" and "Irony"): "Fun new technology actually allows you to burn up millions of people in enormous balls of flame who bother you […] Great at picnics, genocides" (3). Here, the blandly upbeat language of marketing highlights the casual cruelty of nuclear war–but only for whoever has taken the time to squint at this seemingly decorative detail in the front matter of the book before flipping the page. Even the full-page ad for "Juan Tanamo" ("Whether you're employing strict sensory deprivation, techniques of sexual disgrace, or just piling people into big human pyramids, leave your robust, richly coffee-colored prisoners with the security detail for a minute or two and take a moment to… relax") is relegated to a back page of ACME Novelty Library #19. Paolo Simonetti notes that Ware himself has described these "fake ads" as "throwaway" gestures, regarding them as "about as effective as composing a symphony with hopes that it would depose a despot" (Simonetti 293; qtd. in Simonetti 293). By contrast, the political commitments of the rather less well-known Scottish artist Chad McCail (b. Manchester, 1961) are highly visible in his works–veritable anti-despotic symphonies. Unlike Ware's often vanishingly small panels, McCail's 8-foot-tall prints, often mounted on billboards or the sides of entire buildings, often literally serve as advertising for an anti-authoritarian vision, even when sequestered in the more rarefied space of art galleries (Baetens; McCail and Sinclair 1-3; Luke). Where critiques of racism or sexism are presented obliquely in Ware's works, McCail's present a forthrightly anarchist denunciation of hierarchy, domination, and oppression (O'Brien, Fuller).1 Where Ware's works foster a "cult of difficulty," as Martha Kuhlmann and David M. Ball note, characterized by the modernist canons of "irony, self-reflexivity, [and] Brechtian alienation" (Miller 6), McCail, rejecting the elitist insularity of the art world, creates populist works that "show...

Tea with Winnicott, by Brett Kahr, with illustrations by Alison Bechdel, Karnac Books, London, England, 2016, 288pp.

Tea with Winnicott, by Brett Kahr, with illustrations by Alison Bechdel, Karnac Books, London, England, 2016, 288pp.

Are You My Mother? Understanding Feminist Therapy with Alison Bechdel

ABSTRACTThis article considers the ways that people might engage with therapeutic processes on the long road to self-actualization. It is also a call for those who can, to think of this labor as a form of activism. I ask that we reflect on some of the possible routes to achieving what might loosely be termed forms of affective knowledge. As part of this call, I first examine theories around graphic fiction, therapy, and possible connections between these fields. I then investigate a text that exemplifies the liberatory potential of therapy: Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? and its possibilities for explaining the therapeutic process.

Interpret or Describe?

In “Narrate or Describe?” (1936), Georg Lukács codified the aesthetic superiority of narration to description. Current debates around descriptive approaches in literary studies reprise this binary in a critical register, valorizing interpretation over description (or, less frequently, vice versa). Beginning with a reconsideration of Lukács’s essay, I propose the inevitable interdependence of interpretation and description. Brief readings of technical language in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and intertextuality in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012) exemplify that interdependence.

‘Posing for all the characters in the book’: the multimodal processes of production in Alison Bechdel’s relational autobiography Are You My Mother?

During the production process of her graphic novels, Alison Bechdel poses for all the characters (including her own former self), then makes a photo via a self-timer, and finally reproduces this photography via her hand drawing. As a consequence, her comics not only combine words and (drawn) pictures, but they also materialise various modes of experience: first, Bechdel performs a scene from the past with her own body, then she takes a photograph of that performance, then she reproduces the photograph in the mode of a handmade drawing, then that drawing is put into print via technical reproduction. Especially in the context of graphic auto/biography, this production process triggers certain questions concerning authenticity and self-staging. However, Bechdel not only performs her former self, but also re-embodies other people’s past experiences, which becomes particularly clear when she starts to learn her late father’s handwriting to be able to reproduce his letters to her mother. Against this background, the current article argues that Bechdel uses her own body as a medium of experience and interconnection that allows her to transgress the limited focalisation that the autobiographer is usually bound to, thereby working towards an intersubjective representation of the past.

Are You My Internal Object?

Are You My Internal Object? Sharif Youssef (bio) Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Pp. 304. $22.00 cloth, $15.98 paper. I remember hearing stories about how radical socialists who refused monogamy and family structure at the beginning of the 1970s ended that decade by filing into psychoanalytic offices and throwing themselves in pain on the analytic couch. —Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim (2000)1 Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? (henceforth abbreviated as AYMM) is heavily invested in the pleasure of the case study. Case studies depersonalize the most intimate details of a life while also staging a realistic interiority that reflects the reader's own perverse, mundane, and storied feelings. Bechdel punctuates her absorption in the mystery of the unconscious forces that shape her life with illustrations of herself curled up in bed, not with a novel, but with studies by Alice Miller, Carl Jung, and Adam Phillips, from which she models her own self-investigation. AYMM enfolds case study and memoir into one object in order to track and analyze the history of Bechdel's unconscious. She framed her first book as a "memoir about my father," and this curious overprecise phrasing is repeated in AYMM, which is described as a "memoir about my mother." Memoirs typically are autobiographical reminiscences, whereas memoirs about "X" tend to refer to personal reminiscences [End Page 513] of time spent in an institution. In writing memoirs about her parents, Bechdel purports not to write biographically of either parent (although she does), but instead to write testimonials about the relationship of their lives to her own. As regards her mother, this is a far more expansive relation than the one with her father detailed in Fun Home (2006). In the psychoanalytic literature, mothers recall a time when the distinction between subject and object does not yet exist for the infant. That literature also references work in structural anthropology that discusses women as objects of exchange within culture rather than as actors within it. Bechdel's relation to her mother, therefore, is not a relationship with a singular person; rather, it is a relation to a culture of liminality that she associates with figures like Donald Winnicott and Virginia Woolf, each of whom reminds her of her mother in different ways. This maternal relation is also defined, in part, by her mother's resistance to being objectified and circulated within culture through the medium of Bechdel's memoirs. Her mother is clearly a formidable person—an artist, a critic, a former teacher, a journalist in later life—and a narcissist. The strength of her personality so strongly suffuses Fun Home that a follower of Bechdel's work cannot help but look forward to a lengthier engagement with their relationship. Yet, her mother is no fan of the autobiographical impulse within literature. With the witty barbs and offhand provocations that Bechdel depicts as issuing from totally controlled and deadpan features (in one scene, she explains that her mother plucks her eyebrows to relax), it is clear that, as adults, they share a complicated and deep friendship even while at odds over the genre in which Bechdel writes. Because of this conflict—the mother's resistance to memoir and the daughter's resulting complexes—AYMM is rigidly structured around psychoanalytic concepts that transfer the focus from her mother's person to her significance to Bechdel as a site of impasse. The problem, as Bechdel elegantly lays out in the opening of AYMM is twofold and life-threatening. Employing a confounding strategy that she uses throughout her work, Bechdel begins with a depiction of herself driving to her mother's house to explain that she is going to be writing a memoir about her father. Yet, the scrolling caption narration describes a different hesitation altogether: how to find a starting point for a new memoir about her mother. The starting point is, of course, the moment when processing the association between her mother and memoir begins—that is, when caption, scene, and thought are first alienated from one another. Thought bubble, narrative caption, [End Page 514] and illustration scroll off track vertiginously, uniting when...

Alison Bechdel and Crip-Feminist Autobiography

Alison Bechdel’s recent graphic memoirs generate new strategies for negotiating feminist and queer literary theory’s troubled relationship to metaphors of disability. Presenting a set of continuities between Alison’s embodied experience of OCD and her adult drawing and writing techniques, Fun Home (2006) performs an intriguing revision of feminism’s “madwoman in the attic.” In this way, the memoir stages a contemporary crip innovation in feminist literary form. Are You My Mother? (2012) extends this intervention by aestheticizing depression and its complex relationship to chronicity and care. Replacing the fantasy of artistic self-sufficiency with a model of creative interdependence, Bechdel thus opens spaces for theorizing new forms of feminist and crip collaboration.

The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978–1984: A Graphic Memoir

WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 73 comics. To set themselves apart from the mainstream, and to signal a radical shift in vision, artists like R. Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman , Art Spiegelman, and others dubbed their work “comix” to indicate their X-rated, underground approach to the genre. The majority of these first-wave comix artists were men, but in the early 1970s a vibrant group of women artists emerged, mainly on the West Coast, in the pages of Wimmen’s Comix. Their subjects, too, were often X-rated and included sex, drugs, relationships, women’s liberation, gay liberation , politics, and trenchant satire of American cultural institutions. The two volumes of The Complete Wimmen’s Comix provide a rich and complete overview of the development of the Berkeley-based publishing collective from a 1970 incubator issue of “It Ain’t Me Babe: Women’s Liberation ,” which preceded the establishment of Wimmen’s Comix in 1972, through the seventeenth and final issue, in 1992. The names of familiar artists appear on many of these pages. Included are Trina Robbins, a major force behind “It Ain’t Me Babe” and creator of the first lesbian comix, and Aline Kominsky (later Kominsky -Crumb, yes, that Crumb), whose Goldie comix are autobiographical and hilarious. Alison Bechdel and Lynda Barry make brief appearances, but their inimitable styles are apparent in these early comix and presage their later successes. Also outstanding are Lee Binswanger, whose minimalist comix are both elegant and incisive; Diane Noomin, whose “Rubberware” takeoff on a Tupperware party is perfect X-rated parody; and everything by Lee Marrs, who can satirize almost any cultural phenomenon. With a rotating editorship and a mission to welcome new artists, the issues can be uneven in quality and drawing styles even while they give the reader a keen sense of the themes relevant to the historical moment, most especially women ’s liberation. Starting with Issue 7, a theme is stated on the cover—from “Outlaws ,” “Women at Work,” “International Fetish,” and “Disastrous Relationships” to the “Kvetch” issue—and the comix within loosely relate to the cover subject. No matter the theme, though, the comix within are liberated from any external or internal censorship—genitalia abound in these pages as do images of almost every imaginable kind of sexual encounter. Prudes were not invited to the women’s comix party, nor would they want to attend. Despite the unevenness and the somewhat dated, if historically accurate themes, every issue has its gems, and those are the ones that stay with the reader. The work is often hilarious and occasionally quite moving, as in the combined work of Trina Robbins and Sharon Rudahl in Issue 10 (1985), where they illustrate “The Partisan Song,” by Hirsh Glik, identified as the “poet of the Warsaw Ghetto.” The Yiddish words of the song have English translations beneath, and the Holocaust-themed illustrations are heartbreaking. This is a bold move that underscores the breadth of vision represented in these pages and the remarkable talents of these artists. These volumes invite the casual browser as well as the aficionado to marvel at the talented spirit and energy of an earlier moment in the history of Wimmen as well as comix. Rita D. Jacobs New York City Riad Sattouf. The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978– 1984: A Graphic Memoir. Trans. Sam Taylor. New York. Metropolitan Books. 2015. 153 pages. Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984: A Graphic Memoir may have a mouthful of title, but it’s a carefully worded one. Specifically, one would be hard-pressed to categorize this as either an autobiography—of Sattouf’s conspicuously well-remembered youth—or Alecos Papadatos, Abraham Kawa, and Annie Di Donna Democracy Bloomsbury USA A stunning follow-up to Papadatos’s Logicomix, Democracy mines similar territory of using a comics narrative to explore historical material—this time focusing on the birth of democracy in Athens. Both books excel in drawing out the “big questions”that haunt the subtext of their focus and make them painfully relevant to our time and place. Beautifully drawn, immaculately researched, and brilliantly executed. 74 WLT MARCH / APRIL 2016 as a...

Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory by Valerie Rohy

Reviewed by: Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory by Valerie Rohy Hannah Roche Valerie Rohy. Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. viii + 237 pp. In the introduction to Lost Causes, Valerie Rohy acknowledges that science “will never find the biological cause of homosexuality” (14). Yet biologists’ (and queer theorists’) inevitable failure to locate the origins of a diverse and indeterminate sexual identity—“homosexuality … is too heterogeneous to totalize”—is only one of the “lost causes” to which Rohy’s title refers. Etiology, or causality, has long been central to sociocultural and political analyses of homosexuality, with the question of whether or not one is born gay continuing to dominate discussions of queer selfhood and LGBTQ rights. Here, Rohy attempts to displace cause from the center of gay and lesbian debate by “reading causality against itself” (5); in other words, Rohy chooses not to ask what makes people gay but rather to consider how and why narratives of queer etiology have been constructed and communicated. The implications of this compelling new book are as numerous as those of its title. From the outset, Rohy’s appealingly fresh terminology—the idea that gay people may seduce and recruit unknowing heterosexuals, for example, is dubbed “homosexual reproduction” [End Page 565] (2)—marks Lost Causes as a bold endeavor to move forward from the wearied born gay versus made gay wrangle. Rohy swiftly outlines the history of biological determinism: the argument in favor of an essential, physiological homosexuality, she notes, has been advanced by gay and lesbian communities as a reaction against the growing “rhetoric of homosexual increase through influence” (1). However, in the 1990s, queer scholars began to observe flaws in studies of biological causation, accepting that the detection of a “pure and singular starting point” (Robert McRuer, qtd. in Rohy 3) would remain an impossible—and decidedly heteronormative—task. Causality is, in essence, a linear or straight process, but—as those who criticized etiology’s hetero-bias were biologists and social scientists—an examination of queer cause and effect as narrative form had, before Lost Causes, not been carried out. Rohy’s work thus addresses the need for a study of gay causality as story, dislocating (losing) homosexual etiology from the biological and social sciences (and from religious discourse, as in “God made me gay” [48]) by tracing both born gay and homosexual reproduction narratives in psychoanalysis and literature. The challenge that Rohy sets herself is an altogether exciting one. While she admits in her introductory chapter that her work will take in “largely canonical” (4) literary texts, Lost Causes nevertheless covers an expanse of not-so-obvious critical ground. Rohy situates her big queer novels—Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (chapter 3) and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (chapter 4)—alongside references to film (1995’s The Celluloid Closet [91]), popular culture (Cynthia Nixon’s 2012 coming out [187]), and works of contemporary memoir and fiction (Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home [104] and Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch [chapter 7]). In her neat assessment of psychoanalysis and literature as “the realms of the analyst and the detective” (9), Rohy summarizes her own methodology: in Lost Causes, broadly interdisciplinary and cross-cultural connections are detected and analyzed to surprisingly rewarding effect. For instance, Rohy marks a clear point of similarity—the articulation of homosexual identity via the act of reading—between figures as varied as Bechdel, Alberto Manguel, and Hall’s Stephen Gordon. By mapping parallels and relations in this way, exploring the numerous means by which narratives of cause and effect have shaped both fictional and nonfictional queer stories, Rohy establishes a rich new framework for homosexual etiology. Moreover, asking “what happens when we acknowledge and even embrace the abject tropes of homosexual reproduction,” Rohy introduces more positive methods of reading well-worn narratives of gay recruitment and “bad influence” (5). Having discussed the theoretical underpinnings and consequences of the born gay and homosexual reproduction arguments [End Page 566] in her first two chapters, Rohy devotes chapter 3 to a detailed and insightful reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Here, in many ways prefiguring chapter 7’s deft...

Vision and Precarity in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

What does it mean to survive, and when, and how, does matter? As the editors of this special issue have suggested, To is messy, elaborate, layered, contingent as it is on biological, political, and material conditions that support life or liveliness. claim for the renewed centrality of in modern times rests on the of widespread threats to human life, social, and physical environments brought about by political violence, social persecution, and ecological crises. Domestic violence, the right to abortion, and equal pay are only a few of the additional issues that disproportionately impact women's lives. Survival is always contingent on the unfolding of an event's horizon and is shaped by evolving circumstances rather than guaranteed. term itself is used in a variety of contexts: capital-S Survivor, situated historically, may refer to a person who survived the Holocaust; in popular contemporary culture, the term refers to a reality game show franchise where contestants must survive in seemingly difficult and exotic settings. Ranging from the profound to the superficial, survival is multiply inflected in contemporary culture, and more often than not, these inflections overlap and contradict one another. Survival is marked by precarity and persistence, two qualities that also mark the text under analysis in this article.With these permutations in mind, in this paper I explore the multiple modalities of in Marjane Satrapi's memoir, Persepolis (2003/4). Influenced by Art Spiegelman's Maus (1996) and David B.'s Epileptic (2002), Satrapi's comic skillfully addresses difficult subjects through an iconic visual style. Like both Spiegelman and B., Satrapi uses the comic form to explore the relationship between personal memories and cultural history. In this respect, I suggest that Persepolis significant-ly contributes to feminist cultural histories, because Satrapi's story is told through a female and Iranian perspective, two descriptors that have been-at least historically -infrequently linked within Western discourses, including feminist conversations.1Narrating Women's LivesI use the term in reference to Gillian W hitlock and Anna Poletti's neologism in a special issue of Biography. Leveraging Leigh Gilmore's conceptual term autobiographics in her landmark study on feminist self-representation (1994), Whitlock and Poletti broadly define autographics as [l]ife narrative fabricated in and through drawing and design using various technologies, modes, and materials (2008, v). As one mode of autographic writing, comics offer what I call here a frame of recognition for the subjects they portray. By frame of recognition, I mean first the physical frame-usually in the form of a line-that encloses images and words in comics, and second, the way that these frames are figuratively deployed to redress overdetermined narratives of marginalized subjectivities, including women's lives. In women's life writing, the work of comics is particularly significant because of the personalized field of vision that the form promotes. As Hillary Chute suggests, The types of challenges we see in women's graphic narrative are not found anywhere else-or anywhere else in a post-avant-garde horizon, and part of the political significance of these images lies in their complexity and avoidance of an obviously 'correct' feminist politics (2010, 4-5, emphasis in original). reader can observe the subtleties of narrating womanhood in Persepolis with its careful unraveling of cross-cultural codes and expectations.Since the 1970s, women's life writing has gained richness and depth from the production of graphic memoirs such as the underground anthology, Wimmen's Comix Collective (1972-1992), and more recently, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic (2006), Julie Doucet's My New York Diary (1999), and Aline Kominsky-Crumb's Need More Love (2007). …

Collective Reading and Communities of Practice: Teaching Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Using the concept of “communities of practice,” this essay recounts the impact of foregrounding representations of community in teaching Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. I argue that the work of collectively reading this text, which itself offers a nuanced perspective on being and belonging, fostered a classroom community self-conscious about its own expectations for membership. Our process reinforced the constant interpretive encounter in graphic narratives between writing and image, facilitating in our class a critique of dominant modes of discourse and fostering a reading practice that helped us probe the limits of communal identity. This was not a process of affiliation with Bechdel’s persona, but a dialectic within the classroom of recognition and difference that ultimately binds communities of practice together. Moving beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion to a communal reading, our engagement with the text enabled members of the class to have both literary critical insights and deeply personal discoveries about the communities to which we willingly belong or into which we are placed. Ultimately, this essay recommends the generic affordances of the graphic narrative for this work, suggesting how communities of literary practice need to focus on texts that open modes of affiliation and recognition for diverse student populations.

Women’s Work(s)

Women’s Work(s) Jack L. B. Gohn (bio) Broadway appears to be focusing more on women these days: female authors, directors, composers and subjects. And as I’m hardly the first to comment, female protagonists, particularly ones for whom a happy ending is untethered to a love plot and hence a man, are definitely receiving a heightened emphasis. In a recent swoop down to the vicinity of Times Square to sample this trend, I had plenty to choose from. My criterion of selection on this visit was that the productions be musicals focused on a female protagonist, adapted in whole or in part by women from women’s works. I chose musicals, because if there are broad tendencies in the larger society and in the theatrical ecosystem, they will surface strongly there. And sure enough, despite differences in tone and in subgenre, my choices turned out to be remarkably similar to each other and significantly dissimilar to what might have been commonplace even a decade ago. To mention the most obvious commonalities, in each play, the female protagonist is supposed to be of interest to the audience for her art, be it cartoons or pastry or songs, and her love life is incidental or an actual hindrance to her pursuit of that art. Not one of the heroines ends up with a romantic partner in sight. Triumph for these characters may be personal as well as professional, but it does not consist of what is traditionally meant by having it all. Consider Fun Home, the winner of the 2015 Tony for Best Musical. Fun Home adapts to the stage cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic [End Page 590] memoir of the same title. In the book and in the show, Bechdel confronts and tries to make sense of the strangeness of her family of origin, led by a father (portrayed by Michael Cerveris) who is a) a high school English teacher; b) a funeral director; c) a passionate restorer of old homes; d) very uncomfortably in the closet and e) an incipient suicide. Her mother Helen (Judy Kuhn) takes refuge from the difficulties of being married to such a man by looking the other way from Bruce’s increasingly impossible life and burying herself in her three children and her music, wasting the “days and days and days” of her own life in the process. Alison and her two siblings must try to thrive in this not-terribly-promising environment. In her adult phase (portrayed by Beth Malone) as “a lesbian cartoonist,” Alison attempts to make sense of what befell her and to determine what if any role her emergence into homosexuality at the beginning of her college years may have played in the death that brings the drama to its close. That said, depending on the source, describing Alison’s father Bruce as an incipient suicide may be overstating it. His intent to kill himself is a definite fact only in the musical. In the book, though it seems likely Bruce deliberately stepped backwards into the path of a truck, Bechdel acknowledges the possibility that her father’s death could have been an accident, albeit one perhaps contributed to by anxiety over the very issues that could also have led him to a more conscious choice to take his own life. This is not by any means the only respect in which Lisa Kron, author of the book and lyrics, has sculpted the original material. Another example: to the Alison of the book, it is powerful evidence in favor of Bruce having deliberately killed himself that Helen had just told him she wanted a divorce. That development is missing from the show and leaves Alison’s coming out as potentially the biggest new stressor on Bruce, sharpening the question for Alison whether that announcement (followed by Bruce’s fumbling failure to communicate adequately with Alison about it) was what drove him over the edge. What renders the question even sharper for her, both on the page and on the stage, was the feeling that her father never really looked at her or considered her—with the almost equally frightening consequence that her coming out might have had no...

Feeling With Real Others: Narrative Empathy in the Autobiographies of Doris Lessing and Alison Bechdel

Feeling With Real Others: Narrative Empathy in the Autobiographies of Doris Lessing and Alison Bechdel1 Leah Anderst (bio) In The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, the 16th century Spanish mystic includes a brief but curious record of her response to reading another important spiritual autobiography written some eleven hundred years prior: Saint Augustine’s Confessions. In her ninth chapter, Teresa describes a deeply emotional and empathetic reaction to Augustine’s narrative of his conversion, his experience of hearing an unseen child’s voice in a garden speaking the words “take it and read, take it and read” (Augustine 177). Understanding this voice as a sign, Augustine describes opening the Epistles of Saint Paul at random and finding words urging their reader to convert to Christianity. “All the darkness of doubt was dispelled,” Augustine writes (178). Prior to this experience and this scene in his Confessions, Augustine struggled with a conflict between his desire to embrace Christianity and his continued craving for “worldly” ambitions and experiences. At just this moment, Augustine describes the conflict as evaporating from him. Reading his Confessions, Teresa seems to experience what Augustine experienced; through his narrative telling, she feels what he felt with him. “When I began to read the Confessions,” she writes, “ I seemed to see myself portrayed there, and I began to commend myself frequently to that glorious Saint. When I came to the tale of his conversion, and read how he heard the voice in the garden, it seemed exactly as if the Lord had spoken to me. So I felt in my heart. For some time I was dissolved in [End Page 271] tears, in great inward affliction and distress” (69). Teresa attests to a profound internal upheaval while reading Augustine’s account of his conversion; in her own moment of grief, hesitation, and self-doubt, Teresa reads the experiences of another, and she feels what he describes with him. In other words, Teresa experiences and then represents, in her own autobiography, her narrative empathy with Augustine. Empathetic responses to others, whether experienced by readers of spiritual autobiographies, newspapers, or novels; by theater, film, or television audiences; or by real people in everyday life as they chat over lunch with a friend, watch the news, take public transit, or participate in studies in laboratory settings, have come to occupy an important place in research across many disciplines. Conceptions of empathy, its defining characteristics, its physical and emotional effects on those who experience it, and its possible effects in the world, continue to be varied and debated. To some, empathy is a spontaneous or a reflexive feeling with another being, an instinctive flinching when witnessing another’s sudden pain, or a baby crying when it hears the cries of another. To others, it’s far more broad and not necessarily physical or instantaneous. It’s an understanding that other beings have minds and an imaginative sharing of the perspectives, experiences, and feelings of those other beings.2 For many, empathy is a positive feature of the human experience; our capacity for empathy allows us to put ourselves in the other guy’s shoes, so to speak, to consider his needs and concerns while momentarily silencing our own. And for some literary theorists as well as mainstream commentators, the empathy of a reader for a fictional character, the reader’s feeling with a character, imaginatively taking her perspective over the course of an engaging novel, functions as a training ground of sorts for increased empathy and altruistic behaviors in the real world.3 The conception of empathy that guides my discussion of its construction in autobiographical narrative comes from Peter Goldie’s The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Goldie explains empathy in this way: “Empathizing with another person is an essentially simulationist approach, and involves imagining the experience of a narrative from that other person’s point of view” (178, emphasis original). Later, Goldie clarifies what he means by “a narrative”; it is “the thoughts, feelings, and emotions” of another (195). Goldie then proposes three requirements for empathy, requirements that allow him to distinguish it from related affective phenomena like sympathy, emotional identification, or emotional contagion. He writes, “First, it is...

Loss, Revision, Translation: Re-Membering the Father’s Fragmented Self in Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home is a rereading of a family history characterized by false appearances, composed many years after the suicide, or accidental death, of the author’s father; as is not uncommon in memoirs, it relies heavily on archives, but the use to which they are put in this graphic novel is quite singular. This paper analyzes Alison Bechdel’s peculiar autobiographical mode through a focus on a few of the photos in Fun Home , all of which have been redrawn by the cartoonist, whose hand holding them is often also drawn, so that, far from merely testifying to the veracity of the narrated events, as the author insists, they greatly contribute to the complexity of the graphic and narrative composition, combining syntagmatic and paradigmatic gestures (montage and juxtaposition, superimposition and substitution) that endow this attempt to recover the figure of the father, and the father-daughter lineage, with a powerful poetic expressiveness.

The Graphic Novel: An Introduction by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey (review)

Reviewed by: The Graphic Novel: An Introduction by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey Andrew J. Kunka (bio) The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, by Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey. Cambridge University Press, 2015, ISBN: 978-1-107-02523-3, ix + 286 pp., $75.00. As the title suggests, Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey’s The Graphic Novel: An Introduction offers readers an entry point into the history and study of graphic novels. The term has been with us in popular use since the late 70s (with earliest uses dating back to the early 1960s), and, for better or for worse, it has stuck in the popular lexicon. The term came about as a means of distinguishing “comic books,” and their attendant stigma of sub-literate juvenility, from more sophisticated, literary, and adult-oriented works in the same medium. By the early 2000s, “graphic novels” had become an official category in bookstores, at which point it seemed to be permanently, culturally entrenched. Today, the perusal of a graphic novel section in most bookstores will reveal that pretty much any square-bound, long comic book, whether it is a collection of periodical superhero comics or the original publication of a book-length autobiographical comic, will be shelved in that section. However, the term remains problematic for many. For one, it is misleading: “graphic” has connotations of explicit sex and violence, and “novel” refers to a book-length work of fiction. Many of the most significant and famous graphic novels fall within the nonfiction genres of autobiography, memoir, and history, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, making “novel” technically inappropriate. For another, the term originally came about due to a sense of cultural shame that comic books were for kids. Whereas, today, “Comics Studies” is a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry, and comics are regularly taught alongside traditional literary texts. Therefore, is the stigma that engendered the term “graphic novel” still relevant? Even in comics scholarship, some disagreement exists over whether to use “comics,” “graphic novels,” or the compromise term, “graphic narratives.” For the most part, however, with the advent of Comics Studies, the common academic parlance usually uses “comics” to refer to the overall medium of word-picture combinations in sequence, while the “graphic novel” is a particular format within the medium. In addition, the “comic book” is yet another format within the medium of comics, usually reserved for the periodical or serially published “pamphlet” style that readers traditionally think of when they hear the term. This brief history and taxonomy help to situate the historical and definitional arguments that Baetens and Frey make in this study. They argue that the “graphic novel” is itself a medium distinct from comics, and one that emerged from the historical context where more sophisticated, literary comics appeared following the watershed year of 1986, when Maus, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns all became [End Page 143] popular cultural phenomena that seemed to break many of the stereotypes associated with comics. However, this distinction between “comics” and “graphic novels” goes against the parlance common to Comics Studies and the publishing industry today. What, then, according to Baetens and Frey, distinguishes the graphic novel from the comic book? Both types, they argue, sit on a spectrum, with each as opposing poles. The authors identify four levels of “key features” that include “form,” “content,” “publication format,” and “production and distribution aspects” (8) which clarify the distinction. The identification of a spectrum here between comics and graphic novels makes such distinctions murky at best, however, because the authors do not always make clear at what point on the spectrum a work should be considered a comic and when it should be a graphic novel. The distinction made with works like The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen seems clear enough: these works began as serially published comic books and then became graphic novels once the individual issues were collected and published in a square-bound format. In fact, “publication format” functions as the primary distinction most commonly used in Comics Studies and publishing. In such a case, the content of the works...

On Psychotherapy, LGBT Identity, and Cultural Visibility: In Conversation with Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel is an acclaimed graphic novelist whose graphic memoirs have examined her closeted gay father's suicide, her own developing sexual and gender identity, and her experiences in psychoanalysis. The authors of this article interviewed Ms. Bechdel in order to explore her thoughts on the role of her early work in creating visibility for LGBT communities and the specific role of psychotherapy in her development and her artistic work. The article in turn examines Bechdel's work from the perspective of cultural representations of psychotherapy, development of gender identity and expression, and considers the implications of her work for the mental health practitioner caring for LGBT individuals.

Du côté de Fun Home : Alison Bechdel Rewrites Marcel Proust

This article reads Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) as a rewriting of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time . Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s assumption, which interprets In Search as a complex exercise in decoding signs, the article claims that Fun Home stages the attempt of its protagonists, Alison and her father Bruce, to understand the truth about each other. In particular, it addresses the issues of sexual identity, spatiality, and death as some of the crucial motifs in In Search that Bechdel retrieves in Fun Home . The protagonists’ “experiment in decoding” turns out to be a failure, due to the impossibility of understanding and deciphering the signs of each other’s intimate truths.