Alison Bechdel and Crip-Feminist Autobiography

Alison Bechdel’s recent graphic memoirs generate new strategies for negotiating feminist and queer literary theory’s troubled relationship to metaphors of disability. Presenting a set of continuities between Alison’s embodied experience of OCD and her adult drawing and writing techniques, Fun Home (2006) performs an intriguing revision of feminism’s “madwoman in the attic.” In this way, the memoir stages a contemporary crip innovation in feminist literary form. Are You My Mother? (2012) extends this intervention by aestheticizing depression and its complex relationship to chronicity and care. Replacing the fantasy of artistic self-sufficiency with a model of creative interdependence, Bechdel thus opens spaces for theorizing new forms of feminist and crip collaboration.