Vital lines drawn from books: difficult feelings in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

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 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 contextualise 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

Fun Home (September 30-October 2, 2021)

Program for Fun Home (September 30-October 2, 2021). To view the photos from this production of Fun Home., please click here

The feminine affective universe in Vernon Subutex of Virginie Despentes

Ever since the publication of her first novel Baise-moi (1993), gender identities have constituted a leitmotivin Virginie Despentes’ work. Vernon Subutex, her latest novel published as a trilogy from 2015 to 2017, pursues this exploration. The three volumes portray intermittently twenty-six characters and, in addition to their social experiences, Despentes exposes us to their interiority as, in her fiction, the social can never be divorced from the personal. At first glance, the novel seems to reinforce the gender-based division of the univers affectifs. The novel actually reveals how the gendered dichotomy assigning reason and the public sphere to men and binding women to emotions and the private sphere still shapes identities. Women in particular seem mostly preoccupied with personal relationships, just as they are reduced to their gender, if not sex: love and their (self-)objectification prevail. Despentes does not explicitly denounce the persistence of gender-based ideals or of the gendering of the univers affectifs. On the contrary, the faithful rendition of the female characters’ interiority raises the readers’ awareness as to this phenomenon. The critique occurs, therefore, on the metadiscursive level