APPREHENDING GHOSTS: INVISIBILITY AND MOURNING IN ALISON BECHDE'S FUN HOME (2006)
APPREHENDING GHOSTS: INVISIBILITY AND MOURNING IN ALISON BECHDE'S FUN HOME (2006)

Summary/Abstract: In the context of the larger conversation on durability and transience this volume proposes, this paper examines not how much one can enhance the durability of something whose nature is transient, but how one can apprehend that which has already given the measure of its fleetingness and transitioned into another state, beyond visibility and palpable presence. The space this paper is examining is that of trauma, mourning, and invisibility, as well as the representability and apprehension of the invisible within one of the most important American graphic memoirs, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), in the context of other post-traumatic graphic memoirs (i.e. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our Own, Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi’s American Widow, and C. Tyler’s You’ll Never Know). The theoretical background of this discussion comprises, among others, dialogues with Roland Barthes’ work on photography and mourning from Camera Lucida (1981), Jacques Derrida’s reading of Barthes’ Camera Lucida from The Work of Mourning (2001), Judith Butler’s work on representability, framing and grief from Frames of War (2009), as well as Peggy Phelan’s performative writing on death and invisibility from Mourning Sex (1997).

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