South Central Review

Taking a cue from recent Fun Home scholarship, the present study examines the ways in the which the formal and generic conventions of the graphic novel, the autobiography, and the memoir conflict and complement Fun Home’s consideration of multiple competing ideological, aesthetic, artistic, linguistic, and psychological positions. It ultimately concludes that the formal and generic discrepancies and mutations reify Valerie Rohy’s contention that Fun Home is an example of the “queer archive” by arguing that its purposefully labyrinthian aesthetic encourages a reading position and practice that replicate’s Bechdel’s own act of archival. In other words, the work drops readers in the middle of a labyrinth of references, texts, images, individuals, monsters, and madmen and seals up the door, leaving the smallest of “clews” to aid the reader in reorienting him or herself and finding a way out of the maze. At the same time, however, the work implies a yearning to return and stay, to forego the exit, turn back around and get lost once more, marking it as celebrated labyrinth and feverish queer archive, a source of both indescribable joy and absolute destruction: both Fun Home and Fun.(eral) Home.