THE SOCIAL EXPERIENCE OF LESBIAN SEXUALITY REPRESENTED IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL-MEMOIRISTIC GRAPHIC NOVEL

Abstract

Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist and memoirist from the USA, who published in 2013 her second graphic memoir, entitled Are You my Mother? A comic drama. In the work, she reflects on relationships, subjectivity and discusses her own identity and sexuality. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to analyze how the artist represents the experience of lesbian sexuality by recreating memories of the mother-daughter relationship through the mobilization of visual and verbal resources. For the multimodal analysis, the theoretical and methodological support of the grammar of visual design (KRESS; VAN LEEUWEN, 2006) was used, focusing on the narrative and conceptual meanings in the representational metafunction to analyze the representation of the social experience of lesbian sexuality. Regarding the critical framework, concepts developed in the paper Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (RICH, 1980) and in the chapter Lesbian Psychology (ELLIS, 2015) were adopted. Overall results indicate the mobilization of verbal-visual resources to represent the social experience of lesbian sexuality signaling the subjective and institutional dimensions of sexuality, as well as the socially experienced processes of invisibility and oppression in terms of lesbian sexuality.