Abstract
In this chapter, Cordeiro and Ellison reflect on their use of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a rich, multimodal text they have incorporated in many of their freshman- and sophomore-level Honors composition and general population first-year seminar classes. As they discuss, they have used and approached Fun Home from a variety of angles: generically in relation to the Bildungsroman, as a Gothic novel, as a memoir, as a graphic novel, and as a model of performativity embedded by and within the text, highlighting the ways in which Fun Home both performs and is about identity performance. Cordeiro and Ellison foreground the concept of “pedagogical theatre” to illustrate how strong pedagogy should be fluid, flexible, shifting, nebulous, and always in rehearsal, as, like the characters in Bechdel’s novels, educators and scholars continually negotiate their relationships with students, with texts, and with writing.
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- 1.
Informed by prominent scholars since the 1960s, the term “performativity” and the practices related to it have shifted and grown tremendously. In this chapter, we intend the term to reflect the process of creating behavior and human practices that rely on an audience’s response to one’s own actions or a text. For further explication, see Austin (1962), Schechner (1985), and Butler (1988).
- 2.
Throughout this chapter we use “Bechdel” to refer to the author of the graphic novel and “Alison” to refer to the character in the text.
- 3.
In fact, mirrors are a pivotal material object within Fun Home, as is the concept of “mirroring,” which is related to mimesis, a central notion of theatre and performance studies. To mirror another is to rehearse behavior by performing the behavior more than once. As we continue these rehearsals, the iterative behavior becomes embedded into our identity until we no longer think about the behavior and it becomes “second nature” and a part of who we are. Consider how children learn by watching others and adopting their words and mannerisms. In short, we are taught to perform beginning in infancy. The pioneering social psychologist Charles Horton Cooley (1922) terms this process the “looking-glass self.” The many mirrors depicted in Bechdel’s text reflect this process to the reader. Discussing the notion of “mirrors” with students and the roles mirrors play in the text often leads to incredibly fruitful and animated discussions.
- 4.
Concept mapping depicts ideas students generate, written in bubbles, to show the relationships between each idea using arrows and a hierarchical arrangement, which creates a visual representation of the cognitive structure of students’ reading practices. Theme webs use various themes from the text (often chosen by the instructor) as nodes in a circular diagram. Students are asked to physically draw connections between these thematic nodes and then justify the connecting line they drew. For example, each small group could be assigned a different theme and given a different color marker to complete their part of the web of thematic connections.
- 5.
Such as Susan Stryker’s Transgender History or Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.”
- 6.
The concept of “as if” is a contemporary restating of Constantin Stanislavski’s “magic if,” which is a staple of contemporary acting technique in the US. For more information see An Actor Prepares (1936).
- 7.
We focus on gender norms here because Fun Home is the foundational text to prompt these explorations. The activity is easily adaptable to other non-normative and socially visible identity positions.
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Cordeiro, W., Ellison, S. (2018). Performative Texts and the Pedagogical Theatre: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home as Compositional Model. In: Burger, A. (eds) Teaching Graphic Novels in the English Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63459-3_11
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