ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I investigate how Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic theorizes the links between and among writing, reading, and sexuality in ways that challenge the stability of a discrete, readable queer subject. In Fun Home, Alison’s recognition and articulation of her queerness frequently occurs at the site of the page through acts of reading and writing. First, I analyze how Alison and Bruce use writing to strategically reveal or conceal their sexuality, manifesting their queer identity through divergent modes of textuality. Second, I analyze how acts of reading seep into and inform Alison’s sexuality in both imaginative and material ways. I argue that, in both form and content, Fun Home stages queer textuality for the reader, revealing the comics’ potentialto not merely mirror queer identity but to manifest queer ways ofreading, knowing, and being.
