Alison Bechdel: Dykes to Watch Out For

In a field that is more and more concerned with promoting comics auteurs, it is striking that Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is largely praised and studied on its own. The fact that its discourse on archiving, visibility, and sexual identity are its most celebrated aspects, coupled with Bechdel’s pre-Fun Home status as a celebrated underground comics artist, make the lack of attention paid to her earlier work, Dykes to Watch Out For, as well as her subsequent Are You My Mother? A Family Drama, all the more surprising. Through an examination of possible explanations, this chapter posits that rather than genre or form, literariness or timeliness, Bechdel’s “lesser” two works have been neglected due to their focus on women’s and lesbians’ stories. Rather than simply calling for a redress, this chapter argues that a critical reevaluation of these works is politically necessary due to their discursive questioning of archival erasure.