Queering the Family, Reclaiming the Father: Proustian Evocations in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic includes a number of intertextual references to Marcel Proust and his multi-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past. In this essay, I investigate the usefulness of these references in the narrative of Alison's problematic relationship with her father, and I propose that they enable the structuring of queer gender and sexuality performances, which allow Alison to reclaim and reunite with her distant and ultimately lost father. As such, I point to the potential value of intertextual readings in identifying positive accounts of queer lives in the field of autographics.