Introduction: serializing the self in the space between life and art / Janine Utell -- The hospitable aesthetics of Alison Bechdel / Vanessa Lauber -- "Girlie man, manly girl, it's all the same to me": how Dykes to Watch Out For shifted gender and comix / Anne N. Thalheimer -- Disseminating queer theory: Dykes to Watch Out For and the transmission of theoretical thought / Katherine Parker-Hay -- Bechdel's men and masculinity: gay pedant and lesbian man / Judith Kegan Gardiner -- Mo van Pelt: Dykes to Watch Out For and Peanuts / Michelle Ann Abate -- Dancing with memory in Fun Home / Alissa S. Bourbonnais -- "It both is and isn't my life": autobiography, adaptation, and emotion in Fun Home, the Musical / Leah Anderst -- Generational trauma and the crisis of apreĢs-coup in Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs / Natalja Chestopalova -- The experimental interiors of Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? / Yetta Howard -- Inchoate kinship: psychoanalytic narrative and queer relationality in Are You My Mother? / Tyler Bradway -- Decolonizing rural space in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home / Katie Hogan -- Fun Home and Are You My Mother? as autotopography: queer orientations and the politics of location / Katherine Kelp-Stebbins -- Inside the archives of Fun Home / Susan R. Van Dyne -- Servants to what cause: illustrating queer movement culture through grassroots periodicals / Margaret Galvan -- Framing community from inside out: the information worlds of Dykes to Watch Out For / Don L. Latham and Jonathan M. Hollister.
Summary:
"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"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.