The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, BYLINE: The monster is a punch line, but for Alison, the fact that the women in her comic could only watch 'Alien' captured a bigger truth about the American culture she'd grown up in. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Last movie I was able to see was 'Alien.' The two women in it talk to each other about the monster.

One, it has to have at least two women in it. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) I only go to the movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Want to see a movie and get popcorn?īECHDEL: As they talk, they're trying to decide what movie to go see. Cartoonist Alison Bechdel is living in New York in a shoebox-size apartment, working on her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For.ĪBDELFATAH: One day, she sits down and starts to draw.ĪLISON BECHDEL: Two dykey-looking (ph) women, a Black woman and a white woman walking down the street together.

Here are Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei. The hosts of NPR's history podcast Throughline talked to the Bechdel creator about its value and its limits. One test has become a convenient shorthand for measuring representation in movies - the Bechdel Test. Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends-academics, social workers, bookstore clerks-fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.īechdel fuses high and low culture-from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory-in a serial graphic narrative 'suitable for humanists of all persuasions.'īechdel fuses high and low culture-from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory-in a serial graphic narrative 'suitable for humanists of all persuasions.After this year's Oscars, some are still celebrating historic victories for inclusion, as well as critiquing what and who are still missing from the silver screen. Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it 'half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel') of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a 'rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down' (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes.

From the author of Fun Home-the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and othersįor twenty-five years Bechdel's path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages.

The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel