Active Stocks
Thu Mar 28 2024 15:59:33
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 155.90 2.00%
  1. ICICI Bank share price
  2. 1,095.75 1.08%
  1. HDFC Bank share price
  2. 1,448.20 0.52%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 428.55 0.13%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 277.05 2.21%
Business News/ Opinion / Blogs/  EYE SPY: Bechdel test
BackBack

EYE SPY: Bechdel test

Honoured recently with a MacArthur genius grant, Alison Bechdel is one of our greatest living cartoonists

Alison Bechdel works in her studio at the castle of Civitella Ranieri, central Italy. Photo: Riccardo De LucaPremium
Alison Bechdel works in her studio at the castle of Civitella Ranieri, central Italy. Photo: Riccardo De Luca

To describe Alison Bechdel as only a cartoonist—as she herself does, along with most of the world—is but to draw attention to just one aspect of her staggering talent. Recently recognized with a prestigious MacArthur genius grant (for “changing our notions of the contemporary memoir and expanding the expressive potential of the graphic form," as the citation puts it), she straddles several avatars: graphic artist, writer, and most memorably perhaps, of being a creative healer of mental maladies.

Yet, in spite of her towering achievements, Bechdel’s name is perhaps most famously associated with the Bechdel Test, which asks of a work of fiction if it has two female characters who speak to each other on a matter involving something other than a man. If the answers to all three parts of the question turn out to be in the negative, the work is considered to have failed the test of gender neutrality.

The Bechdel Test has its inception in the popular comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, which Bechdel created and kept running for 25 years. It was syndicated to various publications between 1983 and 2008 and concerned itself, often archly, with recording the ordinary lives of lesbian women in the US. In the guise of often routine documentation, it touched on deep-rooted gender and sexual politics, exposing biases and making a case for visibility and recognition of sexual minorities in gently ironic language, both verbal and visual. Along the years, she also wrote two intense graphic memoirs—Fun Home and Are You My Mother?—each of which is based on the gradual disintegration of her own family.

Born in 1960, Bechdel grew up with a father who was a closet homosexual with a sadistic streak in him, and a mother who was inadequately affectionate towards her. When she was seven, her mother told her she was too old to be kissed goodnight, and this Proustian betrayal left a profound impact on the young Bechdel. Her father, Bruce, was a high-school English teacher, a man with fine literary tastes, and a part-time mortician (the last was a family business, which he felt compelled to carry on). “I began confusing us with the Addams family," Bechdel once said in an interview, about of her early life. Her humour had a sardonic edge.

When she was nine years old, Bechdel was asked by her father to help him embalm the corpse of a young man. She was made to look on at the naked body as her father emptied out the viscera—an experience that left her emotionally rattled. A few years later she came out to her parents by writing them a letter. In spite of her tempestuous relationship with her father, he turned out to be surprisingly supportive. Her mother’s disapproval was scathing and unambiguous. With it, she also let Bechdel in on a family secret: her father’s homosexuality. Shortly after this, Bruce was hit by a truck and killed. Bechdel maintained it was suicide, not an accident. She wrote about her feelings for her father with gruelling honesty in Fun Home.

In Are You My Mother? (the sequel to Fun Home) Bechdel battled, with unsparing candour, with the sense of rejection she felt from her mother. Drawing on her diaries going back 40 years, several hours of transcriptions of telephone conversations with her mother, and thousands of photographs she had taken of and with her family, Bechdel drew a wrenching portrait of love and loss, confronting her need to defy her mother’s judgment and yet also to seek her approval—a conundrum that haunts every child who rebels against their parents.

Although Bechdel’s working process is arduous and painstaking (one of the fullest accounts of it is in thisNew Yorker profile published in 2012), there is a lightness of touch in her pencilling. Classed with the modern masters of graphic narratives—Art Spiegelman, Peter Kuper, Gabrielle Bell, and Marjane Satrapi—Bechdel stands out for her affinity with the cartoon form (you can see an example of her style in this love story she wrote for the New Yorker this year) and for what has been appositely described as “a forensic quality to her writing".

A fortnightly look at the world of arts, from close and afar.

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 19 Sep 2014, 06:50 PM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App