Julia Watson

Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Fun Home is an autographic narrative about memoirs, memory, and acts of autobiographical storytelling that mingles irony and pathos in the comingout/ coming of age story of young Alison in an “artistic, autistic” family who run a funeral home. Its multimodal text interweaves allusions to Modernist literary texts and feminist manifestoes with drawn photographs and diverse cartooning styles. This essay explores Bechdel’s graphing of subjectivity at multiple interfaces, and examines her use of ambiguous “evidence” for a father-daughter coming-out story that is both indictment and posthumous homage.

Witness or False Witness: Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in First-Person Testimony

One possible response to allegations of hoaxing that surround the contemporary traffic in witness narratives is to re-theorize issues central to testimonial narration. Rather than arguing that the truth or falsity of witness narratives can be definitively determined, we complicate the transparency of the first-person narrator in testimony and the claim of authenticity that has become the guarantor of that subject position. To do so, we explore how the effect of authenticity is produced by certain “metrics,” and how differing “I”-formations—here, composite, coalitional, translated, and negotiated—generate the aura of authenticity a text projects, as well as the imagined relation of readers to personal stories of witness. After tracking the metrics of authenticity in four exemplary texts—“Souad”’s Burned Alive, the Sangtin Collective’s Playing with Fire, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, and Dave Eggers’s What is the What?—we suggest an alternative reading practice to “rescue” the reading often associated with testimonial narratives.

As Gay and as Indian as They Chose: Collaboration and Counter-Ethnography in In the Land of the Grasshopper Song

This essay illuminates multiple complexities in collaborative life writing through an analysis of In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908–09 by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, a book in the form of a journal recounting colonial contact between whites and indigenous people prior to the 1910 United States appropriation of native lands in what is now far northwestern California. Arnold and Reed function as amateur ethnographers, narrating a complex tale of encounters and negotiations, but they leave out those that had to do with their lesbian relationship. Thus, their overt collaboration masked that of a more private kind. Watson examines the very complicated speaking position(s) of Arnold and Reed in relation to the native population, their white cohort, and each other, illuminating the various modes of collaboration that emerge from this multiply voiced text: co-optation, coercion, collusion, cooperation, collectivity, compromise, and camoufl age.