The Comics of Alison Bechdel

From the Outside In

Janine Utell, Janine Utell

• Editore: University Press of Mississippi
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781496825797
• Argomento: Letteratura
• Categoria: Critica letteraria di fumetti e graphic novel

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 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, 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.

Part I

IN AND/OR OUT

Queer Theory, Lesbian Comics, and the Mainstream

THE HOSPITABLE AESTHETICS OF ALISON BECHDEL

VANESSA LAUBER

Over the past three decades, Alison Bechdel’s body of work has spanned from fringe, single-frame cartoons aimed at representing gay life to a critically acclaimed long-form graphic memoir that has become a referent text for understanding queer comics and the graphic memoir form. Throughout, Bechdel is a presence both in the narrative voice of her work and as the object of her own self-reflexive representation, balancing the tensions of her interests in radical politics and normativizing representation. In an early interview, she professed a goal to “show actual things” and “to reach a broader audience while staying radical politically” (Metheny). She has succeeded in reaching that broader audience: in the past decade, her graphic memoir Fun Home has become the darling of critics, scholars, and, in its adapted form, even theatergoers on Broadway and beyond.

It is harder to locate radical politics in the success of her work. Fun Home’s mainstream academic and cultural popularity can be read as a self-damning celebration of the capitulations of gay and lesbian identity politics to assimilation, against which Bechdel’s comic strip dykes have wrestled through various presidential regimes. In March 2016, Samantha Power, US ambassador to the United Nations under President Barack Obama, took seventeen ambassadors on a Broadway outing to see the musical adaptation of Fun Home. Power celebrated the musical’s ability to “humanize” LGBTQ individuals, hoping to engender greater support for LGBTQ rights internationally and emphasizing the importance of “a sense of empathy and community” (Mattila; Meyers). It is easy to imagine Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For doppelgänger, Mo, ranting about the evils of the neoliberal state in response.

Bechdel and her comic strip dykes are not alone in struggling with the tensions of identity politics and radical queerness. The persuasive power of empathy and community—goals of identity politics and rights-based movements—butts up against queer claims toward destabilizing norms and resisting assimilation. 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. Bechdel’s unique insight into that tension, I will argue, arises from her complex and nuanced attempts to represent marginalized identities in a form that has itself been 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 coconstitutive 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.

I by no means wish to fall victim to the tendency, identified by Tyler Bradway (one of the contributors to this volume), of some scholars to “prioritize a specific literary form as the ideal mode for transmuting literary affect into socially valuable force” (xxxvi). Rather, by contextualizing the construction of Bechdel’s short- and long-form comics, I suggest that there is a place in the mainstream for the sort of contributory, pleasurable, and rich reading of texts that opens up space for alternative social imaginaries. I adapt Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics in visual and performance arts to literary practice to suggest how the expanding mainstream audience for Bechdel’s work extends the queer forms of her comics communities. Bechdel’s work is an act of hospitality both collaborative and antagonistic, a practice with potential for radical transformation, even in its inherent and sometimes irresolvable tensions.

I will first lay out the theories of relational aesthetics and hospitality on which my reading of Bechdel relies, before considering how the political and representational spaces of Dykes to Watch Out For provide a foundation for reading Fun Home as a space of both hospitable aesthetics and resistant queerness.¹

Relational Form

I invoke the performance art concept of relational aesthetics as a means to further understand the allure and imaginative possibilities of reading Alison Bechdel in various forms. The art historian Nicolas Bourriaud developed the concept of relational aesthetics in impassioned monographs on artistic practices that modestly “take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context” (113). His theory of this practice of visual art is particularly useful in a discussion of the discursive logic of language and image of visual narrative. Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics was first published in French in 1998, announcing the death of the old avant-garde and, with it, utopian politics and teleological visions of history, echoing queer theory’s critiques of normative temporalities.² Relational aesthetics sought to theorize art that abandoned imaginary utopias and instead enacted ways of living and models of acting collectively. To take an example from Bourriaud, the Argentinean-born Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work is perhaps the most recognized among artists associated with relational aesthetics. In his untitled solo show at 303 Gallery, New York, in 1992, Tiravanija converted the gallery space into a working kitchen, where he prepared Thai food for visitors. Rather than comprising the art itself, the food was instead the means for creating the possibility and opportunity for social interactions, with the artist as host in the social gallery space. For Bourriaud, “present-day art shows that form only exists in the encounter and in the dynamic relationship enjoyed by an artistic proposition” (21).

Some scholars, most notably Claire Bishop, have critiqued Bourriaud’s notion of form as relational property, in that by understanding form itself to be the locus of meaning, he assumes that “the work is automatically political in implication and emancipatory in effect” noting that “the relations set up by relational aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic” (Bishop, 62, 67). But Bourriaud conceives of form as improvisation that motivates the relational exchange between the artist and the public and thus motivates finding meaning in a structured work that is nevertheless open. In considering Bechdel’s work, I take up Bishop’s critique and follow Hillary Chute’s interest in “how comics texts model a feminist methodology in their form, in the complex visual dimension of an author narrating herself on the page as a multiple subject” (“The Space,” 200). I seek to understand Dykes to Watch Out For and Fun Home together as potentially relational queer forms. To develop a notion of relational aesthetics in the reading of Alison Bechdel’s work, I conceive of her authorial voice, so present in the text, as positing an invitation, in which the relational space created is one of constructive antagonism, both pleasurable and challenging, with the potential to upend hierarchies and reconstitute social possibilities: a responsive mode of relating to others that is simultaneously generous and vulnerable.

The Openness of Radical Hospitality

Jacques Derrida’s theorizations of hospitality provide a useful framework for developing a notion of authorial invitation, with the author as host and reader as guest. In Of Hospitality, Derrida distinguishes between conditional and absolute or radical hospitality. Conditional hospitality exists within the practical stipulations that make extensions of hospitality possible, the formalized rules that define the way to receive visitors, establishing a sort of pact between host and guest, much as literary forms determine rules and expectations for a reading experience.³ Conditional hospitality relies on normative language to solidify identity, establish responsibilities, and define boundaries and limitations. Constrained by these terms, this conditional hospitality is never fully open, according to Derrida, but rather always contains the potential for violence in the violation of its complex terms. Radical hospitality, on the other hand, gives without restriction. The host offers up everything, and paradoxically the guest becomes the host. The host must be master of the domain to extend hospitality, but hospitality also requires the willingness to give everything for the benefit of the stranger: “Even if the other deprives you of your mastery or your home, you have to accept this. It is terrible to accept this, but that is the conditional of unconditional hospitality” (70). In this study, then, I recast the hospitable relationship as that enacted between an author and reader, as an invitation. That Derrida’s characterization of absolute hospitality contains the possibility of the impossible, even the compulsion or necessity to upend the dynamics of the host-guest relationship, wherein the “guest becomes the host’s host,” suggests its potential for envisioning a radical redetermination of reading relationships.

As theorized here, hospitable aesthetics provide a space for public feeling, for volatility, for creating new alternatives—a queer culture that Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner identified as a world-building project. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler wrote of the challenge of “politicizing disidentification,” in the process of deconstructing the constraints of identity forms, using misrecognition to create and recover other new modes of being. José Esteban Muñoz likewise worked through the act of disidentification as a “step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material” for as-yet unimagined futures (Disidentifications, 31). Hospitable aesthetics work in a similar way, neither relying on a mainstream or normative voice to issue the invitation to act, create, or inhabit; nor relying on an indivisible subjectivity as the prerequisite for action and inhabitation—but rather providing the raw material for world-building and re-creation.

Bechdel’s work, taken as a whole, provides an opportunity for this hospitality, characterized by both confrontation and cooperation, wherein origins of change and difference might be humanized and localized through the literary imagination. Dykes to Watch Out For lays the groundwork for potential radical hospitality in the openness of its form. The reflexivity and ironic stance of Bechdel’s work help to craft an invitation to the reader. As developed in Fun Home, the multimodality of Bechdel’s form, so often remarked on in critical studies of her art and born of her long history of alternative comics artistry, ultimately models radical aesthetics that include and extend beyond the constraints of normativizing identity politics. By offering an invitation to the reader, Bechdel as artist and author offers up the control that she has as host, presenting her work—and, in the case of Fun Home, her family home—and the recollection and interpretation of her life therein, as a site of relational exchange that engages both mainstream LGBT and radical queer politics.

The Space of Self-Narrative

Bechdel’s work functions as such a productive site of hospitable aesthetics, in part, because of its self-reflexivity and self-narrativizing, which simultaneously engage with questions of identity and deconstruct identity’s normativizing values. Bechdel has frequently discussed the tension between her desire to represent the complexity of lesbian life as a site of difference as well as representation’s role in processes of normativization, as I will discuss further. Since the 1980s, identity categories have gradually been narrowed and unified in the name of social change and political representation, in turn resulting in the alienation from and rejection of the use of those identity categories as a site of political and social organizing. It was in opposition to these limitations and the production of norms that queer theory sought to distinguish itself from LGBT studies in the academy.

In the lead-up to that split, the practice and critical study of autobiographical life writing played a significant role in instituting norms, particularly around sex and gender. Critical feminist theory of the ’80s and ’90s further highlighted the complex generic and formal constraints of staking temporal and spatial claims for women’s life writing, the sort of conditions that undermine radical change. But feminist reinterpretations of autobiography, which emerged in the early 1980s, attempted to distinguish men’s and women’s autobiography, organizing generic and formal claims around the desirability of locating difference in essentialized lived experience, as evinced in the work of Estelle Jelinek. Those readings risked erasing the intersectional effects of class, race, and sexual orientation and drew generalized conclusions about textual effects recast as experiential cause. This essentializing effect is a starting point for Leigh Gilmore’s critique of feminist interpretations of autobiography, in which she interrogated the generic and truth-telling claims of feminist autobiographical practice. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, following Susan Stanford Friedman, have suggested “spatiality, rather than temporality, as a focus of critical reading practices” (“Introduction,” 39). By recasting self-narrative as a function of space rather than time, we can further consider how a literary text, especially one such as Bechdel’s, might provide the space necessary for a hospitable literary practice.

Indeed, Bechdel’s entry into self-reflexive writing came alongside the development of both LGBT autobiographical practice and the culture of alternative comics. In the wake of Stonewall, the prototypical gay autobiography had been the coming-out narrative, an act claiming to make invisible subjects visible (extensively problematized by Judith Butler and others). The coming-out narrative of victimization gradually gave way to “stories of living in community and refusing a minoritized and stigmatized identity position” (Smith and Watson, Reading, 152), which marks the starting point for Dykes to Watch Out For.

The Hospitable Aesthetics of Comics Counterpublics

If self-narrative provides a space for hospitable aesthetics, so too do comics. Comics studies scholars have argued that the reader of comics is an active, interpretive partner in the creation of meaning from the page. Drawing on foundational work by Scott McCloud, Gillian Whitlock has described reading comics as an experience of interpretation, “not a mere hybrid of graphic arts and prose fiction, but a unique interpretation that transcends both, and emerges through the imaginative work of closure that readers are required to make between the panels on the page” (968–69). Hillary Chute characterizes comics as a form that is “internally, conspicuously dialogic, or cross-discursive, across its words and images” (“The Space,” 199). Those words and images do not repeat each other but rather “move the na...