Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 05 March
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
For 25 years, Alison Bechdel created the immensely popular cult comic strip ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’, which was syndicated in 50 publications across the US. The infamous ‘Bechdel Test’, a widely adopted formula for testing whether a film or book is gender biased, grew out of a scene in her strip. This highly effective gender bias test asks whether the story features at least two women, who talk to each other, about something other than a man.
The Bechdel Test has since been adopted by many reviewers, with pressure brought to bear on Hollywood to increase the number of movies produced that pass the test. Thus immortalised in the popular lexicon, Alison Bechdel has become a true cultural icon. In the Guardian, Laura Miller branded Alison a ‘lesbian Woody Allen’, describing her as ‘comical and … adorable, a quality that allows her to carry readers where they might not otherwise be keen to go.’
Her work has been at the forefront of the move of comics into the literary mainstream, particularly her rave-reviewed books Fun House – Time magazine’s Best Book of 2006 – and Are You My Mother? In these memoirs about her parents, Alison explores her relationship with her father, a closeted gay man who died in a probable suicide months after his daughter came out to him, and her mother, an aspiring actress who became a frustrated housewife after her marriage.
Alison will be introduced by Clementine Ford.
Featuring
Clementine Ford
Clementine Ford is a Melbourne-based writer, speaker and feminist thinker. She is a columnist for Fairfax’s Daily Life and is a regular contributor to the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Through her twice-weekly columns for Daily Life, Clementine explores issues of gender inequality and pop culture. Fight Like a Girl is her first book.
Her ability to use humour and distilled fury to lay bare ongoing issues affecting women has earned her a huge and loyal readership. Clementine’s work has radically challenged the issues of men’s violence against women, rape culture and gender warfare in Australia, while her comedic take on casual sexism and entertainment has earned her a reputation as an accomplished satirist.
Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel is an internationally beloved cartoonist whose darkly humorous graphic memoirs, astute writing and evocative drawing have forged an unlikely intimacy with a wide and disparate range of readers.
For twenty-five years Alison self-syndicated Dykes to Watch Out For. The award-winning generational chronicle has been called “one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period” by Ms. Magazine. From the strip was born the now famous “Bechdel Test,” which measures gender bias in film.
Her first graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was named the Best Book of the year by TIME, describing the tightly architected investigation into her closeted bisexual father’s suicide “a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.” Fun Home was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and was adapted into a Broadway musical that has won five Tony Awards, including “Best Musical.” Alison is also the author of Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama which delves into her relationship with her mother, as well as the theories of the 20th century British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Her latest work, a profoundly affecting graphic memoir titled The Secret to Superhuman Strength, was released in 2021. The Guardian calls the memoir, “quietly astonishing” and “extraordinarily generous.”
Alison was the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2014 she received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. In their citation the MacArthur Foundation noted that Alison “is changing our notions of the contemporary memoir and expanding the expressive potential of the graphic form.” In 2017, Alison was ushered in as Vermont’s third cartoonist laureate.
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