Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

[editor’s note: isn’t it totally shitty that all the reviews of Are You My Mother? are comparing it to Fun Home? I am totally going to do the same thing, but gawd. I wonder if authors feel the same way about this as parents do when grandma compares their Johnny to cousin Jane, or like I did when people are like “OMG! You like lost a ton of wait. U r looking sew good!”] 

In her newest book, Are You My Mother?, Bechdel is still as relentlessly intertextual as she was in Fun Home. As in other academic and journalistic accounts, for Fun Home Bechdel assembled an archive of material and relied on it to inform her telling. Her unique insistence on tracing every newspaper clipping, family photograph, and book passage by hand, and thereby drawing it into this stylized portrait of her experience, literally illustrated that when an author introduces this sort of “objective” evidence for their tale, they are subjectively framing it so it fits their point of view. In other words, Fun Home was as much a “A Family Tragicomic” as a lesson in hermeneutics. Likewise, in Are You My Mother? Bechdel still exercises the same fastidious attention to detail in her drawings as she did in earlier works. In the text she even demonstrates how she “underwrites” the authenticity of her characterizations: by first enacting, photographing, and then drawing each pose in every panel herself.

However, in contrast to Bechdel’s earlier work, Are You My Mother? is more limited in what literature it draws upon to illustrate the narrative and how. In this work, Bechdel mostly relies on psychoanalytic texts to both guide and illustrate what she can infer about herself from the dynamics of her intimate relationships. Though she discusses these ideas at length, and uses them to structure her narrative, Bechdel’s discussion of how she identified the explanatory power of Freud et al. is unsatisfying to say the least. Indeed, she says that following a therapy session she starting investigating the work of Freud, soon after got knocked between the eyes by a board and then developed a pimple between the eyes. The proximity of this trauma to her “third eye” caused her to surmise that “my unconscious was telling me to pay more attention to my unconscious” (49). Funny, yes, but she fails to make a case about why the reader might also consider psychoanalysis to be a compelling analytic framework. Perhaps I found that this lack of methodological grounding detracted from my enjoyment of the book so much because now when I come across a piece of work that looks like it could be autobiographical criticism I expect for it to read like Terry Goldie’s** more disciplined work, queersexlife (how now can I not be leery when I see theory applied without an extensive discussion of how the author identified [with it/it as a useful lens]?).

Notwithstanding the narrative flops (alluded to above and amply discussed elsewhere), Bechdel still demonstrates that she can translate complex ideas effectively, and, indeed, artfully. For instance, in the first section, Bechdel overlays a summary of Winnicot’s theory of object relations over a chart of the significant intimate relationships in her life, and demonstrates to the reader what his theory might elucidate (see below). Additionally, even if her ungrounded theorizing led to some facile characterization, we can still trust Bechdel to present characters with dimension, in this work experimenting with her style by adding shadows, in each panel showing the play of darkness and light.
 
Despite the (not infrequent) twinges of vicarious embarrassment I felt while reading Are You My Mother?, it was for the artistic details, and flashes of inspiration that made still made it a highly enjoyable work to read. They are also why I will eagerly seek out whatever future work Alison Bechdel produces.

 

**"tip o' the nib" to Ferg for suggesting this connection

Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow by Nicholas K. Blomley

Trust Google Images to present something that illustrates the cutting edge of socio-legal theory. Hmm. Or, actually, trust me to hastily argue that a silly picture is worth 111 pages of words. This is, of course, a great underestimation of Blomley's work and I guarantee (if I have any remaining credibility, that is) that arguments like the foregoing--tenuous at best, based on cursory research--are not to be found in the book of which this review takes as its subject. Additionally, and unlike that last sentence, Blomley's writing is lucid. Though his book is about something as pedestrian as, well, the pedestrianist logic that forms the foundation of the sidewalk, he makes his argument interesting and his prose playful.

Through his analysis, Blomley seeks to demonstrate how his choice to conceptualize space in terms of "civic humanism" in his past work "blackboxed" the processes that enabled the oppressive regulation of minorities (among other things). According to Blomley, socio-legal theorists and civil rights rhetoricians conceive of the sidewalk as a part of a Habermasian public sphere in which people should ideally be allowed to exercise their rights of free speech. However, by inquiring into the processes and logics that inform the material construction of the sidewalk (historically, municipally, judicially and legislatively) Blomley finds that its central purpose is to allow pedestrians' free, unobstructed circulation. Thus, sidewalks are constructed by civil engineers with a view to minimizing obstructions (human and non-human alike) to pedestrian flow. Hence, Blomley's provocative article title, "How to Turn a Beggar into a Bus Stop," and the google image of the anthropomorphized sign above; using the logic of pedestrianism, all barriers to foot traffic are equal, and we can objectify beggars, crowds of people waiting at a bus stop, and a street sign marking the bus stop in the same way. Judges and legislators conceive of these spaces similarly, viewing sidewalks' principal purpose as facilitating people's movement; people's right to speech are secondary in this context and should minimally impair people's (constitutionally entrenched, at least in Canada) right to mobility. Moreover, decisionmakers can assure themselves that they are not discriminaing when they pass laws against panhandling or find that people should not be able to sleep on the sidewalk if they are insulating themselves from the cold concrete by laying out newspaper (a.k.a. "a structure"); as anyone, regardless of class, is entitled to freely pass down these municipally tended tracks these decisions are in the public interest. Blomley concludes that human rights activists will continue to be frustrated and disappointed by the regulation of the sidewalk so long as they keep arguing in terms of the public sphere. He closes by suggesting we look beyond arguments about equal rights, by rejecting this idea that we are one people all stumbling around, bumping into, obstructing each other under the blanket of law. He seems to be arguing that instead of looking to the courts to determine how the sidewalk should be administered, justice will be done by having municipalities think more critically about the sidewalk. For Blomley, it's not a question of their bad faith, but the continued reliance on logics that structure human environments and behavioural possibilities that are indifferent and occasionally offensive to social justice.

As you can probably tell from the long summary of its contents, I really enjoyed this book. For one, it was informed by Blomley's work (of course), Riles, Valverde, and ANT. I wrote a paper in which I sought to account for "the how" and the space of Canadian law in one of the more influential graduate courses I took. It was especially exciting to see how someone else employed drew on these sources in their analysis. Second, I have recently been preoccupied by the practical realities and possible political and ethical implications of a street vendor program in Vancouver, so I am happy to have the work of a locally engaged academic from which to draw.

Fin.