In the Queer Archive: Fun Home

This essay examines figures of archives in Alison's Bechdel's 2006 memoir Fun Home—the museum-like family house, the father's home library, Alison's childhood diary, and the public libraries she frequented as a young adult—as occasions for reimagining the queer potentiality of historical narrative. While the memoir begins with a schematic distinction between fact and falsehood, nature and artifice, later chapters revise that view, in part by identifying within the queer archive the counterhistorical impulse Derrida calls archive fever. Informed by that ceaseless drive, Fun Home provides an opportunity to investigate the archive's relation to identity and history.