The Reproduction of Mothering: Second Wave Legacies in Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?

‘I took the idea that the personal is political very much to heart as a young person’, the cartoonist and graphic novelist Alison Bechdel states (Terzian, 2012), positioning herself as a child of the counter-culture and second wave feminism. ‘It's guided me down this road of doing this not necessarily exhibitionistic but certainly very intimate work in a public space’ (Terzian, 2012). Inspired by the counter-cultural politics of experience and committed to the liberating potential of self-reflection, Bechdel's work draws extensively on her own life. The long-running syndicated comic, Dykes to Watch Out For (2009), documents lesbian lives and features a character, Mo, who is a cipher for Bechdel herself. The graphic memoirs that have followed recount the intersecting biographical narratives of Bechdel and her parents. The first of these, Fun Home: A Tragi-comic (2006), tells the story of her relationship with her father, Bruce, a mortician, teacher and closeted gay man who is highly likely to have committed suicide around the time Bechdel was coming to understand her own lesbian sexuality. The subsequent graphic novel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012), recounts her relationship with her mother, Helen, also a teacher and a prolific amateur actress, from the time of her childhood through to the tense period when Bechdel was writing, and revealing, her father's secrets and their family life. This practice of narrating the intimate, however, ‘comes at a cost’: Bechdel's family ‘are not happy about it.’ But the relationship between her family and her writing is complex: ‘it's sort of a strange loop. If I hadn't had that family I wouldn't have that need to publicly talk about all this’ (Terzian, 2012).

Bechdel frames the differences between her own attitudes to self-revelation and the more negative views of her parents in psychosocial terms (Bechdel, 2016). Her parents' way of thinking was shaped by the norms and attitudes of their own time. Her mother and father wer