Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: Queer Futurity and the Metamodernist Memoir

By examining Alison Bechdel's Fun Home through the lens of metamodernism and queer theory, this essay argues that the graphic memoir reanimates the socioethical imperatives of queer modernity. Bechdel uses modernist literature to examine her relationship with her father and represent her sexual and artistic discovery. However, in its deployment of modernist tropes and allusions, Fun Home calls forth new models of queer subjectivity and supplants patriarchal genealogies with queer kinship structures that honor affinity rather than filiation. The queer temporal structure of the narrative engenders an enduring sense of queer futurity that persists in spite of her father's death.