Confronting Visuality in Multi-Ethnic Women's Writing

Laflen Angela
ISBN: 9781137413048
DOI: 10.1057/9781137413048
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 6

Queering Spectatorship in

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Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

W hile the previous chapters of Confronting Visuality have focused

on how women’s writing in traditional literary forms such as nov-
els and short stories has evolved in conjunction with visual technologies
and practices, one of the most important developments in contemporary
American women’s writing has been the coming-of-age of graphic narra-
tives that depict visual relations in entirely new ways.1 Graphic narratives in
fact foreground issues of representation and gender by portraying women
as both viewing subjects and objects. In doing so, these texts prompt read-
ers to think about how women are positioned within looking relations in
particular social contexts and historical periods. Nevertheless, until very
recently, graphic narrative was considered largely the domain of male writ-
ers. It was not until the publication of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir
Fun Home in 2006 that critical and commercial attention began to focus on
American women’s graphic narratives.2 This chapter focuses on Fun Home,
arguing that Bechdel expands the range of women’s writing about visuality
significantly by focusing attention on how we frame events and come to see
them through the material artifacts of family, and on how issues of sexual-
ity inflect visual relations.
Fun Home, subtitled “A Family Tragicomic,” is intensely personal, nar-
rating Bechdel’s coming out as a lesbian and also providing a postmortem
coming-out narrative for her father, a closeted homosexual who commit-
ted suicide shortly after Bechdel came out to her family. Bechdel’s own
coming out to her family was complicated when it prompted the revelation
of her father’s hidden sexual identity. These multiple revelations focused
on sexuality, followed so closely by her father’s death, leave Bechdel ques-
tioning everything she knows about him, her family, and ultimately herself.
In Fun Home, Bechdel rereads and reimagines key moments of her life and
family documents through the lens of the knowledge she has an adult. She

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124 CONFRONTING VISUALITY IN MULTI-ETHNIC WOMEN’S WRITING

uses her memoir to reconsider her memories and investigate her family
archive of documents, considering how it is that she didn’t recognize her
father’s sexuality prior to her mother’s revelation of it, how this explains
particular parts of her childhood that she didn’t understand while growing
up, and looking for evidence of suicide. At the same time, Bechdel is herself
a “character” in Fun Home, and via the graphic narrative form, Bechdel is
able to contrast her adult knowledge of her father’s homosexuality and

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eventual death to her autobiographical avatar Alison’s3 ignorance. In this
way, Fun Home foregrounds what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has referred to
as “the epistemology of the closet,” the question of who knows what about
whom regarding matters of sexuality.
Prior to Fun Home, Bechdel was best known as the creator of Dykes to
Watch Out For, a serial comic strip that has been published in many papers
and collected in anthologies such as The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
(2008). Since the publication of Fun Home, Bechdel has published a second
graphic memoir focused on the reception to Fun Home and her relation-
ship with her mother titled Are You My Mother? (2012). While Bechdel’s
work in Dykes to Watch Out For and Are You My Mother? shares with Fun
Home a commitment to challenging stereotypes about lesbians and depict-
ing the real, lived experiences of lesbian characters, Fun Home represents
an important departure point for both Bechdel and American literature,
demonstrating the possibilities for and reach of contemporary literature
more generally. Not only was the book’s publication by Houghton Mifflin
the first time a mainstream press had published a feminist graphic narra-
tive, but the book was also a bestseller and was selected by Time as book of
the year for 2006. Fun Home has also, as Hillary Chute notes, “put produc-
tive pressure on the academy” by “expand[ing] what ‘literature’ is” (Graphic
Women 178).
Certainly, graphic narratives have been reshaping literary studies in
the new millennium. The publication of a special issue of Modern Fiction
Studies in 2006 on the subject of “Graphic Narrative,” edited by Chute and
Marianne DeKoven, serves in some ways as a signal of the official recogni-
tion of graphic narratives as an important “part of an expanding literary
field, absorbing and redirecting the ideological, formal, and creative ener-
gies of contemporary fiction” (Chute and DeKoven 768).4 Though Chute
and DeKoven acknowledge in their introduction to the special issue that
the medium of comics “has always contended with much denigration,”
they assert that “it is no longer necessary to prove the worthiness and liter-
ary potential of the medium” (768) and take as a foregone conclusion that
long-form works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991) have “demonstrated
clearly how moving and impressive comics can be” (768). The task now,
they explain, is “to explore what the form can tell us about the project of

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 QUEERING SPECTATORSHIP IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 125

narrative representation itself. What can we gain from works that are, in
their very structure and grammar, cross-discursive: composed in words
and images, written and drawn?” (768).
However, until the publication of Fun Home, the status of American
women’s graphic narratives was much less certain. In fact, until very recently,
graphic narratives were thought to be the province of male writers. As an
example, a 2004 New York Times Magazine cover story on graphic narra-

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tives referred to female authors only in passing and asserted, “The graphic
novel is a man’s world, by and large” (McGrath 24, 30). The publication
of Satrapi’s Persepolis in 2003 drew attention to women’s participation in
comics, but not until the publication of Fun Home in 2006 did American
women’s graphic novels come into their own. The word “groundbreaking”
frequently appears in critical assessments of Fun Home, and critics have
considered how Fun Home builds on and breaks ground within the con-
texts of earlier women’s graphic novels and the larger genre of memoir.5
Within comics theory, Fun Home necessitates new models that account for
the gendered and sexualized content that Bechdel includes,6 while within
literary studies, Fun Home has challenged scholars to develop critical mod-
els and a vocabulary to use in discussing graphic narrative.7 In addition, the
strategies Bechdel pioneers for depicting visual relations represent a crucial
evolution of women’s writing about visuality, demonstrating the critical
possibilities when a writer can depict the exchange of gazes visually in a lit-
erary work. In Fun Home, Bechdel not only illustrates the inherently queer
nature of spectatorship but also uses the form of the graphic narrative to
position the reader as a type of queer spectator. I argue that in doing so
Bechdel seeks to unsettle not only a heteronormative perspective but also
a homonormative perspective and to transcend divisions between straight
and gay individuals as well as between gay men and lesbian women. More-
over, Bechdel positions the reader as part of a queer model of desire by
developing visual strategies to connect the reader’s literal body and gaze to
Bechdel’s own throughout the narrative.

“To Think, and Imagine, and See Differently”

Understanding and analyzing the ways in which Bechdel sets out to queer
spectatorship in Fun Home does require some introduction to the narrative
possibilities of comics, as well as the ways in which Bechdel has innovated
within those possibilities. On the one hand, Bechdel makes use of a set of
tools that other female writers have used in graphic narratives. Writers are
able to depict looking relations in different ways in graphic narratives than
in either texts or films and to involve the reader in new ways as well. For

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my purposes, it is particularly significant that readers of graphic narratives

can observe the interplay of the gaze in a way not possible in text alone,
as characters look or do not look at one another and even gaze out at the
reader at times or use other strategies that evoke the reader as observer.
And in contrast to film, graphic narratives require a much greater degree of
reader involvement to make meaning. In fact, according to Scott McCloud,
“No other artform gives so much to its audience while asking so much

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from them as well” (92) due to the fact that readers are required to perform
“closure” to make meaning out of discreet panels. McCloud explains that
closure involves “observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (63), and
closure is essential to comics since readers are required to help create the
meaning “between” the panels of a comic—in the gutter—and even within
panels that often include only partial information. As a result of closure,
McCloud suggests that the audience for comics is “a willing and conscious
collaborator and closure is the agent of change, time and motion” (65).
The power of closure to involve readers in graphic narratives means
that the medium of graphic narrative is particularly well equipped to help
readers think critically about important issues. For example, in his intro-
duction to Joe Sacco’s graphic narrative Palestine, Edward Said explained,
“I felt that comics freed me to think and imagine and see differently” (ii).
It is not surprising, then, that feminist artists have recognized the poten-
tial for this medium to help readers think differently about issues of gen-
der and to intervene in visuality. For some feminist artists, this has taken
the form of challenging traditional notions of feminine beauty (such as
in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s and Lynda Barry’s works); for others, it has
meant challenging the supposed “to-be-looked-at-ness” of women, as
Phoebe Gloeckner does in her graphic memoir A Child’s Life (1998) by
having her autobiographical avatar, Minnie, gaze directly out of the panel
at the reader. Although Gloeckner depicts child sexual abuse in her narra-
tive, Minnie at times gazes directly at the reader with a look of challenge.
By gazing at the reader, invoking the presence of a reader, Gloeckner chal-
lenges the reader’s voyeuristic impulse and imbues her avatar with a sense
of agency. Even as she is being sexually abused in the panel, Minnie’s gaze
reaches out to readers, implicating them as participants in her abuse by
watching it and reminding the reader that Gloeckner, as artist, is in con-
trol of the narrative. For Bechdel, intervening in looking relations takes the
form of using the process of “closure” to build identification between the
reader and Bechdel’s own queer looking position as well as experimenting
with the multiple diegetic levels provided by the graphic narrative form.
Fun Home pioneers new narrative techniques to depict and consider
looking relations on multiple diegetic levels. Robyn Warhol explains that
the narrative of Fun Home functions on at least three levels: the first verbal

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 QUEERING SPECTATORSHIP IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 127

level of “the extradiegetic voice-over narration, printed in a font that looks

like free hand capital letters, always filling borderless horizontal boxes that
run above the panels of the cartoon” (5), the second verbal level of the
“intradiegetic dialogue, representations of words spoken inside the nar-
rative world, encircled in word balloons and set in the same font as the
voice-over” (5), and the third pictorial level, where “we find a cascade of
reproduced pictures and maps copied from books; original maps drawn by

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Bechdel; copies of handwritten and typed letters, notes, and diary pages;
hand-inked copies of photographs; and drawings of books whose titles are
clearly legible on the bindings” (5). Warhol further observes that “each of
these classes of images gestures in the direction of different diegetic levels,
multiplying the worlds invoked by the narrative structure of Fun Home”
(5). In its use of these different levels of narration as well as other features
of graphic narratives, Fun Home breaks ground in representing visuality
and spectatorship even within the medium of graphic narratives, greatly
contributing to the critical examination of visuality that has emerged in
contemporary American women’s writing.

Unsettling Sight(s)

In Fun Home, Bechdel exposes the queer base on which traditional models
of spectatorship have always rested. Queer, as a critical concept, encom-
passes the nonfixity of gender expression and the nonfixity of both straight
and gay sexuality. As Richard Dyer explains, the contemporary formulation
of queer functions in sharp contrast to its past; it signifies a fluidity of iden-
tity where, historically, queer represented an “exclusive and fixed sexuality”
(4). To be queer now, then, means to be untethered from “conventional”
codes of behavior. Michele Aaron contends that “at its most expansive and
utopian, queer contests (hetero- and homo-)normality” (“New Queer
Cinema” 5). Queer, in this sense, presents “the resistance to, primarily, the
normative codes of gender and sexual expression—that masculine men
sleep with feminine women—but also to the restrictive potential of gay
and lesbian sexuality—that only men sleep with men, and women sleep
with women” (Aaron, “New Queer Cinema” 5).
Spectatorship rests on a queer base because of the role of cross identi-
fication in visual pleasure, a concept originally developed to account for
the way that film spectators identify with characters unlike themselves.
This work grew out of efforts to delineate the role of the female spectator
within the male visual economy outlined by Laura Mulvey. Most famously,
Mary Ann Doane asserted that the female spectator on-screen and off-
screen (i.e., in the audience) is forced to identify with the male gaze in a

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transvestite manner; otherwise, she is left to identify masochistically with

the objectified female. More recently, critics have further discussed the
complexities of cross identification, whereby spectators identify with the
perspectives of characters unlike themselves. Anne Friedberg claims that
one of the major pleasures of cinema is oppositional identification: “Isn’t
cinema spectatorship pleasurable because new identities can be ‘worn’ and
then discarded?” (65). Similarly, Rhona J. Berenstein claims that specta-

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tors can enjoy identifying against themselves as much as they enjoy iden-
tifying with a character that closely corresponds to them. This work on
cross identification highlights how unfixed the identities of spectators can
be, particularly with regard to gender and sexual identity. Cross gender or
cross sexuality identification can provide an opportunity for spectators to
develop empathy for those who differ from themselves, but even if empa-
thy does not occur, the very possibility of cross identification undercuts
the notion that gender and sexuality identity are fixed, blurring boundaries
between identity categories often regarded as immutable.
Bechdel employs a number of strategies to consider the queer nature of
looking relations in Fun Home, but she begins by unhooking the sexuality
of looking from its heteronormative roots. In particular, Fun Home focuses
on how people—characters in the story as well as implied readers—look
at bodies, with particular emphasis, as Julia Watson has observed, on “the
necrotic and the erotic” (35). Drawings of bodies being embalmed or dis-
played at the family’s “fun home” contrast to “erotic bodies in action, in
scenes of her father’s and her own sexual encounters” (Watson 35). With
her focus on bodies, Bechdel also considers how bodies become visually
legible—read as evidence about how someone died, about a person’s sexu-
ality, and so on—and these issues are linked as well to how society attaches
value to particular types of bodies.
Importantly, Bechdel specifically does not invoke a heterosexual male
spectator for the bodies in Fun Home, and she actually undercuts that view-
ing position in several ways. In fact, though she acknowledges the social
power generally accorded to heterosexual male spectators, she ultimately
renders the conventional male gaze laughable and ridiculous. Alison briefly
experiences the force of an objectifying male gaze as a child when her father
inexplicably asks her to hold on to a “dirty” photo of a pinup girl during
a camping trip (111). When Alison looks at the image, thinking “it looked
clean enough to me” (111), she is disgusted and experiences a feeling of
intense personal identification with the woman depicted, an identifica-
tion that leaves her feeling “as if I’d been stripped naked myself, inexpli-
cably shamed, like Adam and Eve” (112). This shame even prompts her to
disavow her gender throughout the camping trip. Her reaction contrasts
strongly to her brothers’, who leer at the image, mock the woman’s breasts,

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 QUEERING SPECTATORSHIP IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 129

and tease Alison about it (112, 115). Bechdel’s depiction of the male gaze
in this scene emphasizes its objectifying power, its link to scopophilia and
voyeurism, and the ability of visual objectifications of women to demean
all women.
However, at a later age, Alison again confronts the objectifying male
gaze at the home of her friend, Beth Gryglewicz, and finds its power dimin-
ished. Teenage Alison and her brothers stay with the Gryglewiczes so their

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mother, Helen, can work on her master’s thesis. The Gryglewiczes, both of
whom have PhDs, have decorated their house with erotic, nude paintings
of the female Dr. Gryglewicz. In contrast to the pinup girl, these images are
entirely comic and not at all threatening to Alison. No one even glances at
the painting in the scene; not even Alison’s brothers seem to find it inter-
esting in the least. Bechdel draws attention to the painting with a humor-
ous, extradiegetic comment: “One of Dr. Gryglewicz’s many interesting
paintings of Dr. Gryglewicz” (160). Bechdel includes the painting as a form
of comic relief; she mocks the Gryglewiczes’ liberal open-mindedness—
depicting female sexuality visually in their home and requiring the chil-
dren to refer to them both as Dr. Gryglewicz—which contrasts to their
inherent conservatism as a married couple who share the same last name.
She also plays on the fact that teenage Alison, pretending to be a police offi-
cer, yells “spread ’em” to her friends and brothers while standing in front
of the painting of Dr. Gryglewicz doing just that. Here the male gaze is
rendered ridiculous and comical and not at all threatening to Alison.
That the male gaze is not the important erotic site in the book is also
evident in that dead, white male bodies become objects of the (queer) gaze
throughout Fun Home. Through her father’s work as a funeral director,
Alison has many opportunities to view dead bodies as a child. And her
father actually draws her attention to these bodies at times, usually when
the cadaver is that of a young, seemingly healthy person as opposed to
the “usual traffic of desiccated old people” (44). In a particularly impor-
tant scene, her father, Bruce, asks for Alison’s assistance while working on a
nude male cadaver whose chest cavity is split open. Alison finds both “the
strange pile of his genitals” and the cavity in his chest shocking (44), and
Bechdel questions why her father wanted her to see this sight, suggesting he
might have wanted to elicit an emotional reaction from her that he can no
longer produce himself. This scene dramatically shifts the power dynam-
ics away from the privileged male spectator and toward a pair of queer
spectators, one of whom is a young girl. The fact that the man has a “dark
red cave” in his chest reworks the traditional, Freudian concept of women
as castrated men, whose absent penis is frightening for men to perceive;
here it is the male body associated with a frightening, shocking absence,
despite the manifest presence of his male genitals. Bechdel relocates Freud’s

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130 CONFRONTING VISUALITY IN MULTI-ETHNIC WOMEN’S WRITING

lack from the genitals to the man’s chest cavity, and Bechdel remembers
that this is “what really got my attention” (44). Throughout Fun Home,
Bechdel focuses on moments when Alison comes to see things differently
or recognizes a reality she did not know existed. In this scene, with the
“gaping cadaver” (44), Bechdel highlights how a shocking sight changes
Alison’s perspective on male dominance. Alison literally sees a lack at the
very core of masculinity. This sight not only prefigures her to witness her

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own father’s death, as Chute has discussed, but also signifies a larger shift
from the privileged, evaluative male gaze to the critical, queer, female gaze.
In a book focused on “necrotic and erotic” bodies, the “gaping cadaver”
is one of the most “unsettling sights” Bechdel records, though it is not the
only one. In fact, Fun Home in general testifies to the productivity of dis-
rupting vision via the experience of witnessing unexpected, even disturb-
ing things. For example, Alison’s viewing of the pinup girl, though it upsets
her, also makes visible structures of female oppression. More important
are those “sights” that unsettle a heteronormative perspective, such as the
open and visible expression of homosexuality. In fact, Bechdel uses the
phrase “unsettling sight” specifically to refer to such a visible expression.
In narrating her coming-out story, Bechdel identifies a moment early in
her childhood when Alison intuitively recognized the “unsettling sight” of
a bull dyke in a restaurant when she was “4 or 5” with “a surge of joy”
(119). In a four-panel sequence, Bechdel depicts Alison’s recognition of the
dyke. Throughout the panel, Alison is depicted wide-eyed, openly staring
at the woman for the most part. Bruce immediately “recognized her too”
and makes a connection between the woman and Alison, asking, “Is that
what you want to look like?” (119). Although Alison answers “no” since
she perceives that the woman’s lack of femininity is offensive to her father,
she continues to stare at the woman, even looking back toward the restau-
rant after she and her father leave, and she recounts that “the image of the
truck-driving bulldyke sustained me through the years” and contrasts this
to her father “as it perhaps haunted my father” (119). Seeing the woman
unsettles Alison and her father differently; while she offers Alison a model
of female identity distinct from the femininity her father imposes on her,
Bruce perceives her openness as a threat to his shame and hiding.
Bechdel further unsettles a heteronormative perspective by locating les-
bian desire as the central erotic site in the text, which she does by depicting
Alison’s sexual initiation with her college girlfriend, Joan. This relationship
signals the transition of Alison’s lesbianism from theory to practice and
demonstrates Bechdel’s commitment to what Valerie Rohy has described
as an “ethic of full disclosure” as a “remedy for repression” (353). Judith
Kegan Gardiner contends that the “desired happy ending in [Dykes and
Fun Home] is coming out, a personal triumph that requires at least some

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 QUEERING SPECTATORSHIP IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 131

resonance in a specific social setting and historical period” (200). As such,

Alison’s sexual relationship with Joan is in many ways the culmination of
her coming-out narrative, and Bechdel’s extradiegetic narration compares
Alison’s sexual initiation to “Odysseus” acting in “true heroic fashion”
(214). Even though, as Gardiner points out, Alison’s coming out is “shad-
owed by Alison’s continuing guilt in the belief that her coming out con-
tributed to her father’s death” and therefore is “subordinated to the tragic

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mode” (200), the graphic depictions of sex between Alison and Joan stand
in stark contrast to the mystery and confusion cast over sexual matters in
Alison’s family and by the larger culture as she was growing up.
Alison comes to recognize over time that language itself is inadequate
to express important concepts with relation to gender and sexuality. Even
the dictionary, which Alison turns to again and again to define the impor-
tant terms that are unsaid and undefined in her home, turns out to be
unstable and unreliable. Although reading the definition of “lesbian” con-
firms for Alison that she is indeed a lesbian, she later finds that the “mam-
moth Webster’s” omits from its definition of “queer” any association with
homosexuality, and the definition of “father” proves to be equally vague:
“One who has fathered a child” (197). Over and over again, language fails
or characters are silent on important questions about sexuality. In her own
diary, Alison comes to refer to menstruation and masturbation as “ning,”
a signifier devoid of any referent and therefore suitable code for any refer-
ence to gender and sexuality. Warhol explains that the medium of comics
helps solve “the problem for Bechdel of the slipperiness of the signifier . . .
in a text like Fun Home there’s no need for language to carry the whole
weight of the visual—the physicality of things, of the body, is unnarrat-
able in words, so the drawings stand in . . . as signs pointing to the gap
in signification” (10). This is certainly true in the depiction of Alison and
Joan’s sexual relationship, in which the pictures work together with the
extradiegetic allusions to Homer’s Odyssey to make lesbianism visible and
locate romance in a female world that resists the masculine/feminine and
butch/femme clichés.
Significantly, Fun Home seeks to unsettle not only a heteronormative
gaze but also a homonormative gaze, signaling, once again, Bechdel’s inter-
est in a distinctly queer model of looking relations. Aaron has discussed
how the notion of queer is as unsettling of some of the givens of homo-
sexual identity as it is of heterosexual identity. In particular, a queer per-
spective often seeks to transcend divisions between gay men and lesbian
women, differences that reflect their very different social histories and
circumstances. By aligning Alison’s gaze to Bruce’s in Fun Home, Bechdel
offers a profoundly queer model of desire.

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132 CONFRONTING VISUALITY IN MULTI-ETHNIC WOMEN’S WRITING

Though Alison and Bruce are deeply divided in their reactions to femi-
ninity, they are nevertheless linked by a deep affinity of desires, which
Bechdel describes as a “slender demilitarized zone: our shared reverence
for masculine beauty” (99). Although their desire is directed differently—
Alison wishes to be masculine herself, while her father is attracted to mas-
culine beauty in others—Bechdel nevertheless, repeatedly, shows how
aligned their gazes are. Early in the narrative, for example, as the fam-

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ily stands up at mass while the altar boys exit the church, Bruce casts a
sidelong glance at the boys, while Alison openly watches them (see Fig-
ure 6.1). In contrast, one of her brothers stands with eyes closed, and the
other stares at the ceiling, while her mother, wearing a haggard expression,
stares straight ahead. In this panel, Bechdel aligns Alison with her father
even as she illustrates that what Bruce partakes in furtively, Alison will be
openly curious about. Later when describing their shared love of mascu-
line beauty, Bechdel depicts the two gazing at an ad in Esquire. Both ignore
the female figure in the ad (Bechdel includes only her face and arm in the
panel) and focus in on the muscular male model. When Alison directs her
father to look at the ad, telling him “you should get a suit with a vest,”
Bechdel depicts the two gazing at the ad in exactly the same way, as Bruce
responds, “Nice. I should” (99).
By linking Alison’s gaze so strongly to her father’s, Bechdel “proposes a
more fluid understanding of identification and desire, in which seeming
oppositions are revealed to have always been convergent” (Watson 42). Nor
are Bruce and Alison singled out as irregular due to their connection to a
fluidity of desire. For example, Alison’s, presumably heterosexual, brother

Figure 6.1 Panel from page 17 of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Copyright © 2006 by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights
reserved.

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 QUEERING SPECTATORSHIP IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 133

pretends to be a gay flight attendant, waving his arms theatrically and ask-
ing “Coffee, tea, or me?,” while Alison and her other brother play at being
an airline pilot and hijacker. Later Alison and her, also presumably hetero-
sexual, friend Beth dress up in men’s suits and pretend to be con men and
life insurance salesmen. Bechdel suggests that sexuality is a spectrum, one
that is fluid and changing, and in this way, the text avoids “rigid categories,
ready answers, or the supposition of singular responsibility” (Aaron, “New

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Queer Spectator” 192). As Gardiner has pointed out, Bechdel ultimately
critiques Bruce more for being a cold and distant father rather than a clos-
eted homosexual (191).
Bechdel also positions the reader as part of this queer model of desire,
developing visual strategies to connect the reader’s literal body and gaze
to Bechdel’s own. In the middle of Fun Home, Bechdel includes a single
two-page panel in which she reproduces a photograph that she found after
her father’s death depicting the family’s yard work assistant/babysitter Roy
lying on a bed wearing only underwear (see Figure 6.2).
This image, one of the most frequently discussed in criticism of Fun
Home, is significant for a number of reasons. Not only is it placed at

Figure 6.2 Pages 100–101 from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Copyright © 2006 by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights
reserved.

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134 CONFRONTING VISUALITY IN MULTI-ETHNIC WOMEN’S WRITING

roughly the center of the book,8 which is particularly important in Fun

Home because the text employs a circular structure so that the book in
many ways spirals out of this image, but it also shows Bechdel responding
to the image in multiple ways: contextualizing it in her family’s history,
assessing its aesthetic merits, trying to capture outraged shock, and so on.
Most interesting of all, though, is how Bechdel uses the extra-large panel
to depict a twice-life-size hand holding the photograph. As Watson points

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out, this hand invokes Bechdel’s material body, as well as the reader’s,
whose hand similarly holds the book and gazes at the photograph of Roy
(39–41). Bechdel here evokes a queer spectator, offering visual pleasure to
the reader who can appreciate masculine beauty as Alison and Bruce, and
Bechdel, do.

The New Queer Spectator

Bechdel does more in Fun Home than only depict a queer model of specta-
torship, however. She also uses the formal elements of the graphic narrative
to avow this queer spectatorial position and queer knowledge, in general.
To do so, she also considers how it is that spectators, even knowing specta-
tors, so often disavow the knowledge they have of homosexuality. Aaron
has pointed out that while traditional models of spectatorship were always
“obliquely queer” in the ways they invoked female transvestism and cross
identification, the queer spectatorial position was always contained—
understood to be temporary and at the same time disavowed (Aaron, “New
Queer Spectator” 187). Judith Halberstam agrees, focusing on how despite
the recent inclusion of a wider range of homosexual characters in main-
stream representations, these characters are still generally treated comically
or punished in some way to render the representation harmless to the sup-
posedly heterosexual viewer (84–85).
Disavowing knowledge of homosexuality is linked to the process of
“closeting,” which Sedgwick has described as “the defining structure for gay
oppression in this century” (71), as it seeks to uphold the binary construc-
tions of Western patriarchal and heterocentrist discourse. “The closet” rep-
resents an attempt to police a strict gay-straight dichotomy, and within the
logic of closeting, it is necessary for “straight” individuals to deny knowl-
edge of homosexuality in order to maintain this dichotomy. However, as
Sedgwick explains, “the closet” actually creates a myriad of queer subject
positions, due to it being a complex constellation of interrelated social and
psychological phenomena. As such, interrogating “the closet”—as Bechdel
does in Fun Home—can be a difficult task, giving rise to multiple readings

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 QUEERING SPECTATORSHIP IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 135

dependent on the viewer’s subject positions and what Sedgwick has referred
to as his or her own “homosexual/homophobic knowing” (97).9
In Fun Home, Bruce’s homosexuality exists in the twilight between
secrecy and reprimand because of social convention and homophobia.
Bechdel is attentive in the text to who can see through his performance
of heterosexuality and therefore “knows” about his homosexuality, and
she considers how characters, especially her mother Helen as well as Bruce

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himself, nevertheless disavow their knowledge of homosexuality, even at
great personal cost.
Bechdel foregrounds the issue of knowledge by employing an autobio-
graphical avatar who is unable to see through Bruce’s performance and fails
to recognize his homosexuality. As a child, Alison defines herself largely in
opposition to Bruce but without any awareness that her father is a closeted
homosexual. Alison and her father are locked in a contest of wills because
he attempts to impose conventional norms of femininity on her, while she
derides him as a sissy. In other words, Bechdel presents them as “inverted
versions of each other in the family . . . Alison’s rejection of femininity as a
compensation for her father’s lack of manliness, and his insistence on her
dressing and acting ‘feminine’ as a projection of his own desire to perform
femininity” (Watson 39). However, Alison is a truly ignorant spectator; she
does not recognize her father’s lack of masculinity as a sign of homosexu-
ality;10 nor does she understand that he imposes femininity on her due
to his own desire to perform femininity. At the pictorial and intradiegetic
levels of narration, Alison understands Bruce only as an enforcer of femi-
nine gender norms, and she sees this as an extension of his more general
authoritarian parenting. For example, Alison repeatedly resists Bruce’s
attempts to make her appear feminine throughout the narrative, whether
he is trying make her wear a matching neckline on a sweater, or barrettes,
or pearls, but her resistance is part of a more general resistance she offers
to what she refers to as his “curatorial onslaught” (14). Alison’s failure to
recognize Bruce’s homosexuality, though it seems reasonable given her age,
in fact drives much of the narrative of Fun Home, motivating Bechdel to
reconstruct memories of her childhood so as to “resee” them through the
lens of her adult knowledge.
Moreover, Bechdel illustrates that Alison’s ignorance about her father’s
homosexuality is not due to a lack of awareness about homosexuality per se
but simply a failure to recognize Bruce, specifically, as homosexual. Alison
acknowledges her own lesbianism and is able to identify signs of homo-
sexuality in others long before she learns about Bruce’s closeted homo-
sexuality. For example, during the family’s trip (minus Helen) to New York
during America’s bicentennial celebration, Bechdel employs the equivalent
of a shot/reverse shot sequence of panels to depict Alison’s recognition of

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136 CONFRONTING VISUALITY IN MULTI-ETHNIC WOMEN’S WRITING

the prevalence of homosexuality in Greenwich Village. She first provides

close ups on Bruce’s and Alison’s faces, which seem to look out of the panel
at the reader; in the next panel, however, the reverse shot, the reader looks
over Alison’s shoulder at “a display of cosmeticized masculinity” (190). In
her extradiegetic narration, Bechdel observes, “It was like the moment the
manicurist in the Palmolive commercial informs her client, ‘You’re soaking
in it.’ The suspect element is revealed to be not just benign, but beneficial,

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and in fact, all pervasive” (190). Alison’s sudden awareness changes her per-
spective on the entire trip to New York, prompting Bechdel to comment,
“It was a gay weekend all around” (190). In this sequence, Alison’s gaze is
strongly linked to her father’s, as the two stare at the group of men, and
is contrasted to her brother’s, who appears to the right of the panel star-
ing at the fireworks display. Nevertheless, despite recognizing the perva-
sive homosexuality surrounding her in New York, Alison remains strangely
oblivious to Bruce’s homosexuality. Even when he leaves the children alone
to go “out for a drink” at night, Alison’s lack of awareness is signaled by
the depiction of her sound asleep in the next panel (194). Alison’s failure
to recognize the implications of Bruce’s own “cosmeticized masculinity”
marks her as an ignorant spectator, rather than someone who has sup-
pressed knowledge about homosexuality more generally.
Bechdel confirms that Alison is truly ignorant of Bruce’s homosexuality
instead of simply suppressing knowledge of it when Helen reveals Bruce’s
sexual history to Alison after she comes out to her parents at the age of
19. Alison is completely surprised (58–59), responding in the intradiegetic
level of narration to her mother’s revelation “Your father has had affairs
with other men” (58) with “Dad? With other men?” and “Roy our babysit-
ter?”, and she is depicted as literally “floored” in that she comes to cradle
the phone to her ear while lying on the floor in the fetal position (59, 79).
In contrast, Bechdel positions the reader of Fun Home, from the outset,
as a knowing and complicitous observer. On the second page of the nar-
rative, in an extradiegetic note, Bechdel informs the reader that her father
is destined to die—“In our particular reenactment of this mythic relation-
ship [between Icarus and Daedalus], it was not me but my father who was
to plummet from the sky” (4)—and on page 16, she reveals that her father
had a “dark secret,” which is immediately revealed to be that he engaged
in “sex with teenage boys” (17). By revealing her father’s secret and fate so
early in the book, Bechdel invites the reader to join her in scrutinizing and
disassembling Bruce’s attempts to pass as heterosexual.
In its focus on Bruce, Fun Home is about the spectacle of the closet
and about the ways in which Bruce and Helen work together to perform a
conventional, small-town, nuclear family. Bruce’s secret identity is never-
theless ever present to the reader since Bechdel not only exposes it early in

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 QUEERING SPECTATORSHIP IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 137

the narrative but also repeatedly uses extradiegetic commentary to draw

the reader’s attention to Bruce’s performance of heterosexuality and the
existence of his hidden identity. As a result, the reader shares Bechdel’s gaze
and perspective throughout the text; she explains that although “he didn’t
kill himself until I was nearly twenty,” “his absence resonated retroactively,
echoing back through all the time I knew him” (23), and in recreating her
memories and family archive in Fun Home, Bruce’s secret and death reso-

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nate throughout the story that Bechdel tells. Thus as readers, we watch how
Alison and other characters interact with Bruce and are taken in by his
performance of heterosexuality (on the pictorial and intradiegetic levels of
narration), but we are constantly aware of Bruce’s ambiguous identity. His
passing is therefore rendered a failure in Fun Home since readers are never
taken in by his performance of heterosexuality.
Bechdel’s constant extradiegetic reminders about her father’s pass-
ing also underline the queerness of the encounters between Bruce and
Helen, as well as the reader’s consciousness of it. For example, in Chapter
3, Bechdel recalls how her father would cultivate promising teenage boys
“like orchids” by loaning books to them and offering them alcohol in his
house, accompanying her extradiegetic narration with an image depict-
ing Bruce entertaining Roy in his library, offering him books and a glass
of sherry. Helen’s intrusion with a reminder that their son John has been
“waiting for you to pick him up from cub scouts for half an hour” (65)
illustrates how fine a line exists between Bruce’s appearance of heterosex-
ual domesticity and illicit sexual behavior. Helen’s failure to react to find-
ing Bruce plying Roy with alcohol in the library also would suggest that she
is ignorant of his intentions—except that only seven pages earlier, Helen
revealed Bruce’s long history of affairs with men to Alison, a history dating
back to their engagement, so there is no doubt during this exchange that
Helen understands what Bruce is doing in the library with Roy, and more-
over the reader knows that Helen is aware and chooses to suppress this
knowledge in the interest of keeping the household together (216). In Fun
Home, these reminders serve to unsettle readers’ fixed position of superior
knowledge about Bruce’s identity—their supposedly sharp contrast to the
duped characters. By highlighting the characters’ suppressed knowledge
about Bruce, Bechdel forces the reader to see Bruce’s attempt to pass as
heterosexual as a failure.
At the same time, the text questions how much Bruce really understands
about himself and implies that on some level he believes his own perfor-
mance. During a high school English class that Alison takes with her father,
she participates in a class discussion in which her father points out how the
male teacher, Antolini Peters, makes a pass at the much younger Holden in
Catcher in the Rye. Bechdel adds the extradiegetic note, “awesome capacity

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138 CONFRONTING VISUALITY IN MULTI-ETHNIC WOMEN’S WRITING

for cognitive dissonance” (199). And even after Bruce is outed to Alison
and his family, he seems incapable of speaking openly. In the one discus-
sion Alison and Bruce have about their “shared predilection,” where Bruce
shares his originary moment with Alison, Bechdel describes Bruce’s story
as a “shamefaced recitation” during which he fails to respond to Alison’s
attempts to identify with his experience. She indicates that “it was not the
sobbing, joyous reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus. It was more like

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fatherless Stephen and sonless Bloom having their equivocal late-night
cocoa at 7 Eccles Street” (221).
Through her extradiegetic narration, which often reminds readers
about her father’s closeted homosexuality or juxtaposes in some way Ali-
son’s and Bruce’s experiences, Bechdel explicitly avows a queer perspective
and ensures that readers cannot completely misunderstand the purpose of
her text or misunderstand her as either vilifying or unequivocally celebrat-
ing her father. This avowal is particularly important in light of research
within queer film theory that suggests that if a film leaves too much of
the work of interpretation up to audiences, filmmakers risk spectators,
seemingly deliberately, misreading signs of homosexuality (Benshoff 182).
Given the necessarily collaborative nature of graphic narratives, the risk
of being too ambiguous is great. Bechdel’s frequent use of extradiegetic
narration helps ensure that readers cannot completely misread her text or
disavow the knowledge of homosexuality that they bring to bear in inter-
preting it, something that makes the popularity and appeal of Fun Home
even more remarkable.
Bechdel also avows a queer spectatorial position by drawing on the
reader’s knowledge of homosexuality to complete closure, and in order
to understand Fun Home, the reader specifically must perform closure
by bringing to bear all of what Aaron refers to as “queer common sense”
that he or she possesses. For example, Bechdel calls on the reader’s queer
common sense when she narrates the events surrounding Bruce’s arrest
and hearing for providing alcohol to a teenage boy. In a series of panels
depicting the event and its aftermath (see Figure 6.3), she depends on the
reader’s ability to interpret Bruce’s “cruising” in his car to pick up a teenage
boy, Mark, with the excuse that they will look for Mark’s brother together.
Even in her extradiegetic narration, Bechdel does not explicitly challenge
the official police report, which she reproduces, and which states “during
the course of the evening, defendant purchased a six-pack of beer. Witness
stated that Mr. Bechdel offered him a beer and he took it and drank it”
(Fun Home 161).
In the aftermath, there is no contradiction to this report either. Helen
describes the offense to Alison as “He bought a beer for a boy who wasn’t
old enough” (173), while Bruce simply confesses to Alison, saying, “I’m

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 QUEERING SPECTATORSHIP IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 139

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Figure 6.3 Page 161 from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Copyright © 2006 by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights
reserved.

bad. Not good like you” (153), and Bechdel notes that the judge also “stuck
strictly to the liquor charge” though “a whiff of the sexual aroma of the
true offense could be detected in the sentence,” which includes counseling
(180). In this instance, Bechdel assumes that readers will “read between
the lines” of the event and make a connection between Bruce cruising in

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140 CONFRONTING VISUALITY IN MULTI-ETHNIC WOMEN’S WRITING

his car and cruising for young boys in order to detect the “sexual aroma”
for themselves without her filling in any more of the gaps. In doing so, she
implicates readers with possessing knowledge about cruising and peder-
astic relationships, knowledge readers might disavow but must employ in
this scene in order to interpret and understand its importance to the nar-
rative of Fun Home.
In Fun Home, the reader is already assumed to be a queer spectator,

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capable of cross identifying with characters on the basis of gender and sex-
uality. This position is in fact required in order to understand Fun Home,
and it replicates Bechdel’s own attempt to understand her father’s complex
and fraught identity and behavior, which requires her to cross boundaries
of gender, age, and culture in order to empathize with his experience as a
closeted homosexual man.

Expanding Women’s Writing about Visuality

Bechdel’s queering of spectatorship, using the medium of graphic narra-

tive, represents an important evolution of women’s writing about visuality.
In the first place, her attention to the queer underpinnings of spectator-
ship usefully complicates the reductive binary opposition of male specta-
tors and female objects of the gaze that is the basis for traditional models of
spectatorship. In the second place, her use of the comics medium illustrates
the power of this form to intercede in representational practices not only
by making visual relations themselves visible but also by helping readers
practice new ways of looking.
Though all the texts included in Confronting Visuality resist the “male
gaze” and demonstrate that there are a variety of spectatorial positions
women can inhabit that don’t reduce only to “being looked at ness,” they
do not, for the most part, challenge the heterosexual bias of traditional
models of spectatorship. However, queer theorists have long derided
the heterosexual basis of Mulvey’s model of spectatorship. For example,
Ellis Hanson contends, “Queer theorists have already discovered that
the heterocentric and exceedingly rigid structure of the look in Mulvey’s
analysis—patriarchal masculinity leering at objectified femininity—writes
homosexuality out of existence” (13). Queer theory has worked to articu-
late the parameters for a “queer gaze,” and the result has been increasing
numbers of films (and indeed images, in general) that “make many forms
of address to more than one audience and allow the possibility of multiple
identifications by the spectator” (Evans and Gamman 32). The works of
“new queer cinema” such as Paris Is Burning (1990), Poison (1991), and

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 QUEERING SPECTATORSHIP IN ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 141

Swoon (1992) were particularly committed to undoing the heterosexist

basis of the gaze.11
Fun Home demonstrates the possibility for American women’s litera-
ture to participate in this project of reworking the traditional spectatorial
model. Though Bechdel is not the first to posit the importance of a queer
spectatorial position, she does explore the possibilities of this position in
new and unprecedented ways using graphic narratives. Her work illustrates

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that graphic narratives are well suited to exploring issues of visuality and
gender and perhaps, out of necessity, put these issues at their center. As
well, Fun Home participates in the work of confronting visuality by focus-
ing on how we frame events and how we come to see them, in Bechdel’s
case, through the material artifacts of family. By making these visualiza-
tion processes visible in unprecedented ways, Bechdel expands the range of
women’s writing about visuality significantly.

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