A dyke with dry eyes. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home as crypto-bio-graphy

This paper is a close-reading of Alison Bechdel’s comics Fun Home, subtitled A Family Tragicomic, as a complicated game with the biography of a lesbian cartoonist faking an intimate testimony of her own coming-out and her father’s supposed suicide. This article analyses a dialectic relation of revealing and concealing within the book, tracking both textual and iconic strategies, accompanying Bechdel’s comments and comic spin-offs as well. The main thesis is that the analysed strategy applied to the convention of queer narratives by the author is a deliberate attempt at challenging the hierarchical relations of word and image, male and female, and high and low.