{"product_id":"alison-bechdel-conversations-9781496819277","title":"Alison Bechdel: Conversations","description":"Due to the huge success of her graphic memoir \u003ci\u003eFun Home: A Family Tragicomic\u003c\/i\u003e in 2006 and its subsequent Tony Award-winning musical adaptation in 2009, Alison Bechdel (b. 1960) has recently become a household name. However, Bechdel, who has won numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, has been writing and drawing comics since the early 1980s. Her comic strip \u003ci\u003eDykes to Watch Out For \u003c\/i\u003e(\u003ci\u003eDTWOF\u003c\/i\u003e) stood out as one of the first to depict lesbians in popular culture and is widely hailed as an essential LGBTQ resource. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIt is also from this comic strip that the wildly popular Bechdel Test--a test to gauge positive female representation in film--obtained its name. While \u003ci\u003eDTWOF \u003c\/i\u003esecured Bechdel's role in the comics world and queer community long before her mainstream success, Bechdel now experiences notoriety that few comics artists ever achieve and that women cartoonists have never attained. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSpanning from 1990 to 2017, \u003ci\u003eAlison Bechdel: Conversations\u003c\/i\u003e collects twelve interviews that illustrate how Bechdel uses her own life, relationships, and contemporary events to expose the world to what she has referred to as the \"fringes of acceptability\"--the comics genre as well as queer culture and identity. These interviews reveal her intentionality in the use of characters, plots, structure, and cartooning to draw her readers toward disrupting the status quo. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eStarting with her earliest interviews on public access television and in little-known comics and queer presses, Rachel R. Martin traces Bechdel's career from her days with \u003ci\u003eDTWOF \u003c\/i\u003eto her popularity with \u003ci\u003eFun Home \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eAre You My Mother?\u003c\/i\u003e This volume includes her \"one-off\" \u003ci\u003eDTWOF\u003c\/i\u003e strips from November 2016 and March 2017 (not anthologized anywhere else) and in-depth discussions of her laborious creative process as well as upcoming projects.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRachel R. Martin\u003c\/b\u003e is assistant professor of English and humanities at Northern Virginia Community College in Alexandria, Virginia. She has published scholarly work in \u003ci\u003eFeminisms in the World of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eWomen's Rights: Reflections in Popular Culture\u003c\/i\u003e. Her creative writing has appeared in \u003ci\u003eSo to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Arts\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University Press of Mississippi","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51260137996562,"sku":"9781496819277","price":32.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_9d0fa221-9794-4dbb-a3c0-39d0719fa28b.jpg?v=1746637515","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/alison-bechdel-conversations-9781496819277","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}