cover girl, in theory

June 6th, 2010

My friend the Queer Theory Professor just wrote an article on my graphic memoir Fun Home for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. It made the cover, with this image of me searching the HQ shelves in a library.

It’s an odd sensation, reading an academic examination of my work. It’s sort of like being psychoanalyzed in public, but not exactly, since it’s the book and not myself on the couch. And because I don’t really have any training in critical theory, I only have a partial grasp of what people are talking about. The QTP’s article is called “In the Queer Archive.” I can’t really summarize it accurately, but it’s about the way I try to provide documentary evidence in my memoir—maps, photos, newspaper reports, etc.—and how that relates to something that Jacques Derrida calls “archive fever.” Here’s a nice disorienting quote.

We know, of course, that the historical person Alison Bechdel is distinct from the “I” of the narrator’s voice, and that this narrating consciousness, whose words fill the top of many graphic panels, is also none of the past selves, the Alisons aged two to twenty whom we see on the page. In part this proliferation of subjects is endemic to the autobiography, which must re-create past selves through retrospective projection and, in so doing, must cause them to anticipate the author who is to come.

Hmm. I’m not sure which Alison is making this blog post. The one who logged in to WordPress and hit “new post,” or the one who is just about to hit the “publish” button.