Servants to What Cause

Through these characters and the broad range of The Advocate’s intended audience, Bechdel is able to reflect on subjects of relevance to the gay community at large—like AIDS and associated activism—that often don’t make it into the strips of the fairly idyllic world of DTWOF. By analyzing Servants to the Cause, the chapter not only unravels its narrative structure and grassroots contexts, but also examines the production of the strip itself through drafts of the comic and letters that Bechdel exchanged with her editor at The Advocate. In this analysis and in research across the essay, the chapter draws upon grant-funded archival research of Alison Bechdel’s papers held in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, Firebrand Book Records held in the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University, and periodicals collections at the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. To connect Bechdel to the larger world of queer comics culture, the chapter considers the significance of The Advocate’s support of the field of queer comics, juxtaposed against large feminist publications like Ms., which often spurned women’s comics. This positive attitude creates a set of conditions through which not only Bechdel but other queer cartoonists flourish, particularly in the 90s, allowing them to make a living outside of the more conservative comics publishing world through self-syndication in queer periodicals.

Decolonizing Rural Space In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

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.

“It Both Is and Isn’t My Life”

From the perspective of autobiography studies and theory, the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s important graphic memoir Fun Home is a fascinating case study. What of one’s life and experiences can one represent in words and in images? How much “fiction” might creep in given the imprecise nature of memory? How can one sign one’s name as the sole author of one’s life story when the often myriad people surrounding one contributed important pieces within one’s life—when all life writing is in fact relational? How, then, do these questions shift, in what new light can we see them, when an autobiographical text is adapted into another medium, by new writers, and performed nightly by actors? In particular, how does the musical and theatrical performance, experienced collectively, communicate experiences and feelings to an audience differently than does a book that one consumes alone? By comparing particular scenes and songs from the musical with their “source” scenes in Bechdel’s graphic memoir, this chapter will explore these questions paying close attention especially to scenes and strategies in each text that seem to call out for affective response and emotional connection from the audience and the reader.

Bechdel’s Men and Masculinity

In both Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel draws avatars of herself as a butch lesbian who has an admiration for “masculine beauty,” while preferring the company of women and the politics of Leftist lesbian feminism. In the “Cartoonist’s Introduction” to Dykes to Watch Out For, she describes how as a child she had “a curious fixation with the iconography of masculinity” and drew only male figures until years later she asked herself, “What if I stopped drawing guys and started drawing dykes?” (Essential Dykes viii, xiii). But she did continue drawing men as well, centering Fun Home on the depiction of her father’s dilemmas as a closeted gay man trying to fit American ideals of manhood. So Bechdel gives us sad past and potentially optimistic future visions of masculinity and sexuality. This chapter analyzes Bechdel’s men both externally and internally, first with attention to the ways in which she draws the repressed Bruce Bechdel, Alison’s father in Fun Home, and outgoing Stuart, progressive partner to one of Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, then to considering what she shows us of their thoughts and emotions in the social environments they inhabit.

The Hospitable Aesthetics of Alison Bechdel

The birth of queer studies as an academic discipline is defined by its break from LGBT politics, with the goals of marriage and military service pitted against radical queer liberation. In broad strokes, LGBT studies produces sexual orientation as a category, while queer studies seeks to upend categorical thought. Alison Bechdel’s unique insight into that tension arises from her complex and nuanced attempts to represent marginalized identities in a form that has been itself marginalized. Her politics of the outsider cannot be cast off in a dismissive reading of her popularity in the cultural imagination, nor hewn from the longer history of her formal innovation. Taken as a whole, the paradoxical and yet co-constitutive relationship between the queerness of her forms and the mainstream popularity of her texts performs a sort of queer world-building. To the extent that her work cultivates empathy or community, it does so not only, perhaps, in the service of identity-based movements or bald market capitalism, but also by modeling a more radical, relational aesthetic that illuminates the ongoing power of queer critique.

Inchoate Kinship

To illuminate Bechdel’s inchoate kinship, this chapter turns to Are You My Mother?. Bechdel refuses to position Are You My Mother? as an Oedipal rival or heteronormative complement to Fun Home. In fact, neither text is compositionally “finished” within the narrative present of Are You My Mother?. Throughout the memoir, Bechdel struggles with articulating a framework for her life writing that does not recapitulate heteronormative logics of similitude based on sexual difference or Oedipal plots of exclusivity, which demand the substitution of the mother by another love object. This chapter contends that Bechdel turns to relational psychoanalysis, and D.W. Winnicott in particular, to develop a queerer narrative for kinship; in this narrative, the mother is not a taboo love object but an object to be used, played with, even affectively assaulted with anger and disappointment. Through this “mutual cathexis,” Bechdel is ultimately able to forge a relation with her mother that is not defined by their absolute similitude or radical difference. But more importantly, Are You My Mother? figures a queerer narrative for the psychoanalytic narration of kinship itself—a narrative in which the child’s and parent’s stories can exist in productive tension, even opposition, without being legitimated by or finally resolved in an external reality.

Generational Trauma and the Crisis of Après-Coup In Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoirs

This essay suggests that Bechdel’s two autographic memoirs are indicative of the potential that exists in graphic narrative to provoke new dialogues with regard to how we approach, how we interpret, and how we interact with generational and familial trauma that stems from dysfunctional relationships with parental figures. Specifically, it examines how Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? builds upon the juxtapositions of the father-daughter bond in Fun Home by shifting the focus towards Bechdel’s traumatic relationship with her mother. This chapter argues that by explicitly weaving the narrative around a backdrop of psychology and psychoanalysis (D. W. Winnicott, Freud, Jung, and Lacan), Bechdel intentionally situates the “reader in the position of the analyst” (as quoted in The Paris Review). Drawing on Bechdel’s theory-rich content, this essay examines the figure of the mother as a shifting entity that mutates and molds itself onto substitute transitional objects and experiences, including Bechdel’s therapists and romantic attachments. Alternating among transcribed audio dialogues, diary entries, counseling sessions, dreams, letters, photographs, and memories, Are You My Mother? is an illustration of the Freudian concept of “afterwardness,” or, as Lacan coined it, après-coup—a retroactive understanding and re-visitation of earlier trauma.