Recuperating Feminist Networks: Alison Bechdel and Grassroots Politics

Today, lesbian comics artist Alison Bechdel is widely celebrated. This renown has been building since the success of her 2006 memoir Fun Home rocketed her from a cartoonist beloved by lesbians to a more broadly known figure. While her meteoric rise has attracted ample academic attention, critics focus on Fun Home and subsequent work, largely ignoring her early comics, namely the long-running strip, Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF, 1983-2008).

In this presentation, I employ network analysis to examine these comics within the grassroots communities that support them. Bechdel’s successful self-syndication of DTWOF in as many as 50 grassroots publications at any one time allows her, starting in 1990, to support herself solely through her artistic production. To study the moment before self-sufficiency, I created publication networks, with the analysis tool Gephi, of the grassroots periodicals that Bechdel worked on—WomaNews (1983-1985) and Equal Time (1986-1990). Through assessing these networks alongside graphics that Bechdel produced for these publications, I examine how feminist and LGBT politics influenced the early evolution of her strip.

In doing the difficult work of recuperating this material through non-digital archival research and representing it through digital tools, I ask: what feminist and LGBT genealogies remain unknown and what sort of tactics must we use to recover them? Moreover, by considering the readership networks in the comments sections of Bechdel’s current website, I ask: what do the digital networks that surround Bechdel’s work today tell us about the state of the grassroots politics that germinate her early work?