Abstract
While the previous chapters of Confronting Visuality have focused on how women’s writing in traditional literary forms such as novels and short stories has evolved in conjunction with visual technologies and practices, one of the most important developments in contemporary American women’s writing has been the coming-of-age of graphic narratives that depict visual relations in entirely new ways.1 Graphic narratives in fact foreground issues of representation and gender by portraying women as both viewing subjects and objects. In doing so, these texts prompt readers to think about how women are positioned within looking relations in particular social contexts and historical periods. Nevertheless, until very recently, graphic narrative was considered largely the domain of male writers. It was not until the publication of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home in 2006 that critical and commercial attention began to focus on American women’s graphic narratives.2 This chapter focuses on Fun Home, arguing that Bechdel expands the range of women’s writing about visuality significantly by focusing attention on how we frame events and come to see them through the material artifacts of family, and on how issues of sexuality inflect visual relations.