Alison Bechdel

In this article, I look closely at Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home to argue for the potential of empathetic responses from readers of these works and of autobiographical narratives generally. Much of the existing work on narrative empathy explicitly links readers’ strong emotional engagement to fiction alone rather than to all or many forms of narrative. In my examination of these two autobiographies, I link reader empathy with a reader’s horizon of expectation rather than with strict questions of genre or fiction vs. nonfiction, and I focus on two stylistic features that are commonly associated with narrative empathy: self-reflexivity (or metanarrative) and inside views into the mind or consciousness of “characters.” Autobiography allows readers intimate access into the mind of the writer and others around the writer, to experience and feel with another, and for many readers who return to the genre, it is precisely this intimate access combined with the work’s truth-value that brings them back.

My Bachelor’s Thesis investigates the position of women in today’s film industry. What has
been discovered is that many directors constantly put women in the same scenes and
situations, as if those are the only ones they can do. My goal here is to use the Bechdel
test (it is explained in Section 2) on a few movies that I have chosen, and see whether they
pass the Bechdel test or not. I will also use the research done by Geena Davis Institute on
Gender in Media to determine whether there is a bright future for women in the film industry.

To put forth a definition about any kind of a film outside of its dramatic genre might strike one as both pedantic and unnecessary, particularly the notion of defining something so visually self-evident as a Black film.  But the ideological complexity of our times, as well as, the increasingly socially acceptable cognitive dissonance that often requires us to hold on to two or more contradictory perspectives depending on the social context or the people with whom one is interacting, makes such a definition of a Black film necessary.  The ultimate goal of this particular definition of a Black film is so that critics, theorists, causal viewers and most importantly filmmakers can better discern when Black actors are merely being used as tokens to feign racial inclusiveness as opposed to when certain filmmakers are using Black actors to be critical of the status quo, encourage racial empathy, tolerance, diversity and/or attack the general power imbalance that exists along the lines of race and class within a highly stratified society.

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), an account of Bechdel's life with her father, is one of the most renowned contemporary autobiographical comics. Despite its relatively recent publication, it has already attracted much scholarly attention. Critics have highlighted the text's complexity, focussing particularly on Bechdel's diligent graphic attempt to reconstruct her family life, as well as her recurrent intertextual references, and the examination of gender roles entailed by her and her father's respective homosexuality.
This article will propose another point of access to Bechdel's intricately constructed family story: putting it in the context of the Gothic mode. At first glance, connecting the perceived authenticity of the autobiographic mode with the obvious artifice of Gothic fiction seems counter-intuitive. However, Fun Home offers more than one way of reading it as a Gothic narrative: not only are there distinctly Gothic elements in Bechdel's description of her family life and home, its basic structure circles around themes of death, trauma, Otherness and the past, ideas central to the Gothic.
In addition to analysing these parallels, the article will demonstrate how the very act of autobiographical remembrance and reconstruction can be perceived as Gothic. Here, special attention will be paid to notions of construction, artifice and art, which become important in a threefold way: as self-conscious thematic instances in Bechdel's narrative, as prevalent elements of understanding the self in postmodern autobiography theory, and as inherent traits of the Gothic mode. On this theoretical background, it will be suggested that the Gothic can be used as a valuable concept for investigating complex and self-aware life narratives, taking the formation, ambiguities and limits of their representation into account. This reading is especially relevant for the unique ways of self-portrayal within the medium of comics and applicable to other prominent graphic autobiographies, interpreting their multi-faceted representation of past traumata.

For a comic, the visual is obviously important, and no more so than in Alison Bechdel’s graphic autobiography Fun Home, because it is a graphic novel that uses visualisation to define identity The story is concerned with Bechdel’s father - his homosexuality and his suicide specifically – and how this has influenced the identity of Alison Bechdel’s. This is shown through her diary, and her use of the circumflex, to show how a visual aspect can convey identity, or confusion about identity. Bruce Bechdel’s identity is shown through the feminine stylistic qualities as an outlet for his homosexuality, and must be alluded to through the visual elements as, to quote Oscar Wilde, it is the ‘love that dare not speak its name’, and therefore cannot be written about.

The comic strip narrative format has recently been exploding into many new arenas. One emerging use of this format is the graphic memoir. Unlike text-only autobiographies, which usually focus on the actions and achievements of their authors, graphic memoirs commonly take the perspective of a child or disempowered person in the midst of traumatizing events. By portraying human life as sunk into an overpowering multi-generational narrative, graphic memoirs provide an intimate window into history as lived experience

Ce test facile et amusant est à appliquer sans modération pour comprendre la place des femmes dans notre culture cinéma. Lorsque vous regardez un film, amusez-vous à vous poser ces questions. Une œuvre réussit le test si les trois interrogations suivantes reçoivent une réponse positive :
Y a-t-il au moins deux personnages féminins identifiables (elles doivent être nommées) ? ;
Parlent-elles l’une avec l’autre ? ;
Parlent-elles d’autre chose que d’un personnage masculin ?

Dans le domaine de la bande dessinée, le rapport entre texte et image est conventionnellement en faveur de la seconde. L’image occupe la majeure partie du récit, et c’est par elle que l’essentiel des informations narratives sont portées ; le texte n’a qu’un rôle de complément, figurant dans les bulles de dialogue des personnages, et parfois dans des cartouches narratifs. L’existence d’un grand nombre de bandes dessinées muettes vient confirmer cette primauté de l’image narrative dans ce médium.
Fun Home, bande dessinée autobiographique d’Alison Bechdel (publiée en 2006) n’obéit pas à ces conventions. Au cours de cette communication, je me propose d’étudier les deux rapports entre texte et image dans cette œuvre : en quoi la hiérarchie entre texte et dessin se trouve presque inversée, et comment le texte est présent jusque dans le dessin lui-même.
Contrairement à la plupart des bandes dessinées, dans Fun Home, le texte domine en tant qu’agent narratif : contrôlant entièrement la narration, il ne permet à l’image que d’assumer un rôle illustratif, du moins en apparence. Il conviendra donc dans un premier temps de se pencher sur ce rapport de forces déséquilibré et d’analyser les relations entre texte et image au sein du récit, mais aussi en regard du corpus traditionnel de la bande dessinée.
En outre, Fun Home utilise également le texte de façon particulière : en effet, Bechdel fait figurer de nombreux documents écrits dans son œuvre, depuis la correspondance familiale à l’extrait de dictionnaire. Ces documents sont tous recopiés, c’est-à-dire intégrés à la case en tant qu’image et non simplement insérés (comme on pourrait par exemple reproduire une photographie au milieu d’un récit dessiné) : leur contenu est assimilé au reste du style graphique de l’auteur et bien souvent ne vaut plus que pour son aspect visuel. Dans un second temps, je me concentrerai donc sur cette appropriation du texte par l’image, venant en quelque sorte faire pendant à une « dénarrativisation » du dessin.
Le problème est donc inverse au premier axe proposé dans cette journée d’études : ce n’est pas l’insertion de l’image dans le texte qui est en question, mais l’exact inverse. Quelle fonction peut-on attribuer à une image d’habitude narrative mais ici assujettie au texte ? N’est-elle qu’illustrative, ou peut-elle revêtir d’autres aspects formels ? D’autre part, quelle valeur a le texte lorsqu’il se déplace des espaces énonciatifs (la bulle, le cartouche) vers les espaces représentatifs (le dessin) ? Les deux problématiques sont d’évidence liées et réaffirment la bande dessinée contemporaine comme champ d’exploration fécond des relations entre texte et image.

Famed cartoonist Alison Bechdel is best known for her graphic memoir Funhome (2006), a richly-detailed look back at her relationship with her closeted father, in the wake of his suicide and her coming out as a lesbian.  Are You My Mother?, as a memoir, in part, about the process queer memoir, enacts and theorizes a kind of “backward becoming”: in order to tell the story of her own queer childhood, Bechdel must first create the “queer child” of her memory retroactively, a tricky and ambiguous process that runs counter to the “truth” of autobiography. In her second book-length comic she shifts her focus, this time turning the lens on her mother, presenting an intricate, at times maddeningly meta-narrational, account of her ongoing relationship with the woman who raised her. Rather than resting in one place – the text is either “Winnicottian” or “Lacanian;” either “assimilationist” or “queer;” either a tale of “growing up” or “growing sideways” – Bechdel’s work explores the tensions between these characterizations.

Musing on the various implications of this second notion of “delay,” Stockton asks, "What kinds of thought about growth emerge when key material issues from childhood… intersect with theorized notions of words?" (4) We might expand this question to words and pictures, as the stuttering, reflective delays are here not only verbal, but also visual. Regressive and repetitive, the return to the same (… a kind of narcissism?) might seem to “thwart” the possibility of creativity. Infinite and proliferating, the stutter might be the creative impulse itself, creating an openness even as it fills one. Thus does the fictional, re-constructed figure of the gay child, “whose identity is a deferral (sometimes powerfully and happily so) and an act of growing sideways, by virtue of its future retroaction as a child" (11), particularly highlight the trickiness of memoir and memory explored by Bechdel in her second graphic memoir.

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.

We propose the concept of 'impromptu crowd science' to analyze the Bechdel-Wallace movement. We argue that the practice of using this test to evaluate movies generates a form of digitally distributed knowledge that reveals a challenging conceptual impasse. The current organization of the movement, mainly through blog and newspaper articles, quantitative analyses and wiki syntheses, does not encourage the formulation of theoretically innovative answers, remaining captive in a rhetorical style of balancing pros-and-cons. We propose that hybridizations between such impromptu crowd science and academic inquiries could stimulate crowd theorizing, and we extend this challenge as an invitation for HCI researchers.

Focus Features, The Kids Are All Right received much critical acclaim on the awards circuit after its release in July of 2010. Though there is much to celebrate about the film, the author of this study points out that The Kids Are All Right also displays much cause for concern from a queer media critic’s perspective. This essay argues that The Kids Are All Right, as a narrative, functions as a liminal journey of discovery in which a stable lesbian relationship is put into crisis and finally recuperated–without first offering spectators a series of contradictory messages which reinforce the dominant patriarchal order and male mythology. Further, the author argues that the implicit messages in The Kids Are All Right are accomplished through a mediated ritualized formula that follows the traditional sequence characteristic of rites of passage.

This article examines the representation of a transnational archive
of queer books in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? for the insights it provides into the role of
reading in making sense of the often difficult “felt experiences” of
lesbian life. In both memoirs, books serve an important narrative
function in the portrayal of Alison’s lesbian identification and its
complex emotional entanglements with the lives of parents who are trapped—killed even, in the case of the father—in the wastelands of patriarchy and heterosexual expectation. The article argues that in this complex family dynamic in which “sexual identity” itself is a problem and emotions remain largely unspoken, books act as fragile conduits of feelings, shaping familial relationships even as they allow Alison to contextualize her life in relation to historical events and social norms. Reading books allows her to understand the apparently U.S.-specific history of her family in relation to a wider queer history in the West.

KEYWORDS lesbian, Alison Bechdel, Fun Home, Are You My
Mother?, books, graphic memoirs, feelings, cultural politics, family,
queer history

Pour évaluer la pertinence critique d'une notion comme celle de « confession graphique », appliquée aux bandes dessinées de l'artiste américaine Alison Bechdel, il convient sans doute d'envisager la ou les confession(s) non pas tout à fait comme un genre littéraire autonome, exemplifié par les oeuvres canoniques respectives d'Augustin d'Hippone et de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, mais plutôt comme l'une des grandes catégories de l'imaginaire culturel et moral de la modernité.

At the beginning of the 21st century, comics are a medium ‘on the rise’ in scholarship and in schools. This collection of essays, which emerged from a graduate student conference at TU Dortmund University, demonstrates their immense medial, artistic, and cultural potential. Authors from different academic perspectives - Applied Linguistics, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Narratology, and Postcolonial Studies - take readers on an engaging trip through the world of contemporary comic books ranging from widely popular series to exclusive avant-garde auteur works.

Alison Bechdel is both a driver and beneficiary of the welcoming of comics into the mainstream. Indeed, the seemingly simple binary of outside/inside seems perpetually troubled throughout the career of this important comics artist, known for Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and Dykes to Watch Out For. This volume extends the body of scholarship on her work from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives.

In a definitive collection of original essays edited by Janine Utell, scholars cover the span of Bechdel’s career, placing her groundbreaking early work within the context of her more well-known recent projects. The contributors provide new insights on major themes in Bechdel’s work, such as gender performativity, masculinity, lesbian politics and representation, trauma, life writing, and queer theory.

Situating Bechdel among other comics artists, this book charts possible influences on her work, probes the experimental traits of her comics in their representations of kinship and trauma, combs archival materials to gain insight into Bechdel’s creative process, and analyzes her work in community building and space making through the comics form.

Ultimately, the volume shows that Bechdel’s work consists of performing a series of selves—serializing the self, as it were—each constructed and refracted across and within her chosen artistic modes and genres.

Contributions by Michelle Ann Abate, Leah Anderst, Alissa S. Bourbonnais, Tyler Bradway, Natalja Chestopalova, Margaret Galvan, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Katie Hogan, Jonathan M. Hollister, Yetta Howard, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Don L. Latham, Vanessa Lauber, Katherine Parker-Hay, Anne N. Thalheimer, Janine Utell, and Susan R. Van Dyne

This "intro to philosophy" syllabus anchors philosophical questions about knowledge and being in the theme of comedy.  Assignments include analysis of the film "The Diving Bell & the Butterfly," two episodes of "Mad Men," and a reflective project on Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home."

Je souhaite ici me concentrer sur la présence de l'archive en bande dessinée, plus précisément dans Fun Home d'Alison Bechdel (2006). Au sein de cette œuvre autobiographique, Bechdel fait en effet figurer de nombreux documents écrits, depuis la correspondance familiale à l’extrait de dictionnaire. Ces documents sont tous recopiés, c’est-à-dire intégrés à la case en tant qu’image et non simplement insérés (comme on pourrait par exemple reproduire une photographie au milieu d’un récit dessiné). D'autre part, l'auteure n'hésite pas à travailler à partir d'archives visuelles, qu'il s'agisse de photographies de ses parents ou de clichés qu'elle prend elle-même pour travailler un détail visuel. Il s'agira donc d'interroger ce double rapport à l'archive, en soulignant à cet égard la particularité de la bande dessinée, c'est-à-dire l'hybridité de son langage, entre texte et image. Si ce langage aurait pu permettre une simple reproduction de l'archive, Bechdel choisit de la réécrire, révélant ainsi un souci certain de construire son récit, et son discours par rapport à elle-même.

A theoretical exploration of the ‘architectural unconscious of the page’, namely, the structural similarities that obtain between the façades of residential buildings and the classic page layouts of American comics, Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, and Japanese manga.

This paper analyses two impromptu crowd science movements, comparing the TVTropes wiki community with the Bechdel Wallace test movement. Impromptu crowd science contributors engage in methodical knowledge creation, in absence of academic scientists' involvement. The two examples illustrate the potential of these movements to create data, analyses and concepts relevant for social and humanistic disciplines, and to inspire scholarly research.

This is an undergraduate course in American literary studies.
The term ‘autobiography’ was first used in 1809 and soon received the meaning it still has today: the biography of a person written by that person. A ‘memoir,’ in contradistinction, covers a briefer period of time and tells of a significant event in the writer’s life. While both forms of life narratives focus on their writers’ identities, they also reveal how individuals construct the America of their time. – Oftentimes, life narratives are conceptualized as a democratic genre, allowing also marginalized subjects to tell their stories.
In this class, we will practice the analysis and interpretation of such texts, using the techniques and terminology that you have been introduced to in the “Introduction to Literary Studies.” In the course of the semester, we will read key works in the history of American life writing from the 18th century to the present day, beginning with The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Following the narrative of the self-made man established by Franklin's autobiography, we will study the structures and motifs of 19th century slave autobiographies, such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In our readings of autobiographies and memoirs from the 20th century, we will strongly focus on the intersections of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. Texts that we will read include Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior: Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975) and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980). In the final sessions of this course we will then investigate the graphic novel as a recent medium for life ‘writing’ (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel) and discuss how we can critically frame Facebook’s call to “present” our biographies online.

The Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project is an ongoing digital research project that explores different theoretical arenas within postcolonial studies. “Postcolonial Studies” encapsulates a series of theories and methodologies that have impacted disciplines as diverse as history, literature, anthropology, sociology and political economics. Its roots stem from an intellectual imperative to radically reinterpret the histories, cultures and representation of formerly colonized peoples, a call pioneered in the 1980s by critics such as Edward Said, V.Y. Mudimbe, and members of the Subaltern Studies group. The Project is an effort to document recent trends in the history of postcolonial studies across a variety of fields and disciplines. The Project is indexed in the Modern Language Association‘s database of scholarly websites. To learn more about our work, please visit the Project Guide on the website. You can follow our discussion of current projects on Twitter through our Twitter account @RSCpostcolonial, and by using the hashtag #stocktonpostcolonial. If you would like to contribute to this project please email the Project Director (Adeline Koh, Ph.D.) with your proposal.