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Beyond Psychoanalysis: Resistance and Reparative Reading in Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Tammy Clewell
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Abstract

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama promotes a form of reparation for its author and its readers, making a case for the much-maligned idea that literature serves therapeutic aims. The book not only models a reparative reading practice by using comics form to engage the insights and limits of psychoanalysis and modernist literature but also elicits a reparative reading experience for a community of readers forged in the discovery of a common emotional struggle. Bechdel's memoir represents an autobiographical narrator's loving yet ambivalent relationship with her mother in ways that invite readers to acknowledge a shared affective history of complex mother-daughter relationships that merits public examination, empathy, and social inclusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 51 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

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