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Parallel Universes? Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008) and Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (1991-1996)1

Hélène Tison

Résumés

Alison Bechdel et Diane DiMassa, qui créent leurs bandes dessinées dans un contexte socialement et culturellement hétéronormatif, donnent vie à un fantasme : un monde qui, au lieu d’exclure les gouines de l’espace public, est entièrement organisé autour de personnages lesbiens. Leurs œuvres reflètent les débats féministes des dernières décennies, les tensions entre féministes lesbiennes et hétérosexuelles et les stratégies de lutte contre les discriminations. Utopique pour l’une, dystopique pour l’autre, chacune crée un univers parallèle aux États-Unis contemporains, qu’elles remettent profondément en question. DiMassa présente une version caricaturale et dégradée de la société étasunienne, axée sur le traitement des minorités et vue à travers les yeux d’une « terroriste lesbienne » qui défend leur droit d’exister. Les bandes dessinées de Bechdel, qui paraissent dans la presse pendant vingt-cinq ans, offrent une perspective lesbienne sur la politique et l’actualité étasuniennes et abordent des thèmes féministes et/ou LGBTQ+ (questions transgenres et de genre, mariage gay, etc.) au sujet desquels ses personnages évoluent, comme l’ont fait de nombreux Étasuniens depuis les années 1980. Provocatrices, drôles, marginales, ces bandes dessinées n’en demeurent pas moins d’une actualité étrangement brûlante.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 This article expands a sub-chapter about Hothead Paisan which appeared in Female Cartoonists in the (...)
  • 2 For the history of the Comics Code, see Nyberg.
  • 3 “Head shops,” which sold items associated with recreational drug use, also carried independent comi (...)
  • 4 In the US, homosexual acts between consenting adults were decriminalized nationwide in 2003 only.
  • 5 From 1954 to 1989, the Comics Code forbade the representation of “illicit sex relations,” “sexual a (...)

1Comics in the US are still mainly famous for their superhero figures, starting with Superman, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the late 1930s; yet from underground zines and comics to graphic novels to webcomics, the field is in fact extremely diverse. Independent, “underground” comics (also known as comix, with the final “x” signaling adult content), began to gain ground in the 1960s (Gabilliet 94-98), thanks to the combination of the rise of countercultural youth movements, the rejection of the Comics Code (often compared to Hollywood’s Hays Code2), and the development of affordable printing processes and independent bookstores3 which made distribution relatively easy. For all their differences, comics and comix were very similar in one respect: from their creators and publishers to their readers, they were overwhelmingly the province of young white males—and they tended to rely on an immoderate use of stereotypes, sexist and racist stereotypes in particular. As Trina Robbins and others have explained, the “glut of testosterone” in comix was a major incentive for women cartoonists of the time to get together and publish their own work (Robbins, 2016 vii; Chevli 13; Dueben n.p.). Interestingly, then, the presence of women in independent comics was thus initially grounded in separatism. Also noteworthy is the fact that the early story of LGBTQ+ comics parallels that of independent comics by women (Cook 37-38). In US society however, the position of “sexual deviants” was much more precarious: not only did they face widespread homophobia, they also had to deal with discriminatory legislation4 and, in a context of pervasive homosexual panic, the combination of queerness and a medium that was generally associated with children made LGBTQ+ themes and characters taboo in mainstream comics.5 LGBTQ+ comics tended to be restricted to niche publications, appearing in the gay papers and magazines that became increasingly available in post-Stonewall years.

  • 6 In a 2019 interview, its creator Howard Cruse remarked that very few comics shops carried Gay Comix(...)
  • 7 In the late 1990s, Bechdel, whose bi-monthly strip appeared in almost 50 gay and lesbian newspapers (...)
  • 8 Even DC and Marvel started embracing LGBTQ+ themes and characters in the last decade of the twentie (...)

2Apart from Wimmen’s Comix, lesbian cartoonists also appeared in separate publications: Come Out Comix and Dyke Shorts (Wings, 1973 and 1978), Dynamite Damsels (Gregory, 1976), and starting in 1980, in Gay Comix (1980-2005), with more than half of the first issue written and drawn by lesbians.6 In later years, this trend persisted, in reaction to the difficulty of being included in “straight” publications until fairly recently7 but also out of a sense of community: LGBTQ+ anthologies such as Roz Warren’s Dyke Strippers (1995), Jennifer Camper’s Juicy Mother (2005 and 2007) or Justin Hall’s No Straight Lines (2013), and the Queers and Comics Conference (launched in 2015) are conceived as shared spaces where cartoonists can meet, encourage and nurture each other; something that is still necessary today, even though LGBTQ+ themes and creators have made significant inroads in mainstream publications.8

Unreal universes

  • 9 A number of Dykes to Watch Out For strips are accessible on Bechdel’s website: dykestowatchoutfor.c (...)
  • 10 Unlike her ragingly ambitious character Sydney, Bechdel actually received a “MacArthur Genius Grant (...)
  • 11 It opened on Broadway in April 2015 to great acclaim, and went on to win five Tony Awards the same (...)
  • 12 In her 1995 interview with Anne Rubenstein, she explains that Dykes to Watch Out For began “in the (...)

3Although it may be slightly exaggerated to claim that Alison Bechdel9 is now a mainstream author, she has definitely become a superstar in the small world of women and lesbian cartoonists, with official genius status.10 But for years, before the resounding success of her graphic memoir Fun Home (2006) and its adaptation into an award-scooping musical,11 she was a minority, marginal figure,12 with a small but devoted group of followers and fans—and thus not very different from fellow cartoonist Diane DiMassa. In fact, the reader is delighted, and not really surprised, to see that Bechdel and DiMassa, different though they are, refer to each other’s work in their own (Bechdel, 1993 9, 64 [fig. 1]; 1998a 90; DiMassa 243 [fig. 1]).

Fig. 1. © 1993 by Alison Bechdel, Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For, 64. © 1999 by Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan, 243.

4DiMassa is the creator of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. Everything about that title is provocatively offensive, as is her protagonist, who describes herself as a “socially bizarre dyke not quite up to political snuff; eats meat, likes sex toys, has never protested in Washington, D.C., prone to raving and episodical behavior, including vicious mood-swings! into ambushing, farting and hanging upside down!” (DiMassa 39); on the back cover of The Complete Hothead Paisan, Bechdel describes the book and its protagonist as “the backlash to the backlash.”

  • 13 Interviewed by Wesley Joost in 2000, Bechdel said that she had been making a living from cartooning (...)

5Both are independent creators, writing and drawing alone, who have been extremely self-reliant in their careers, in the sense that they haven’t sought out an existing audience, or penetrated a market, but have conjured up their own. Both started small, and with a limited but clear ambition—to freely create the kinds of stories whose absence they deplored—and were encouraged and sustained early on by enthusiastic readers to continue producing their strips.13 Both have said that without this feedback and support they would not have gone very far, convinced as they were that they were mainly creating for themselves, and perhaps a few friends and acquaintances—in this respect, they are not very different from scores of women artists, cartoonists in particular, minority authors in what was widely seen as a minor medium at the time when they started.

  • 14 In an interview for the Dyke Strippers collection, DiMassa also explained that creating Hothead hel (...)
  • 15 For instance, in a 1995 strip, after a page featuring DiMassa and her partner Stace discussing the (...)
  • 16 Hothead Paisan was in fact first published “as a quarterly comic ‘zine” (Warren 60).

6Their series stem from a frustration and a desire:14 in a culturally, socially, politically, male-dominated context, one which, additionally, is heavily heteronormative, Bechdel and DiMassa give life to a fantasy—a world that is entirely organized around female, and lesbian, characters. Both have created deliberately unreal worlds, although in very different modes and styles. DiMassa (whose protagonist has telepathic conversations with her cat) does not attempt mimetic illusion; she creates disjointed stories, so that it is often hard to say what one episode is about—some follow Hothead’s fantasies or dreams, others seem to compound a hectic sequence of unrelated events and situations, made up of different strata of “real worlds”: those of the character, awake (and often delusional) or dreaming, or that of the cartoonist, all of which can further be imaginatively embedded in yet other “realities.”15 In her drawing style, DiMassa is similarly untroubled by referential illusion: the backgrounds are minimal, sometimes entirely bare, the perspective is often flawed, she plays with gutters and inconsistent settings, and her rough style recalls amateur fanzine.16

Fig. 2. © 1999 by Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan, 21.

7DiMassa creates a universe that parallels the contemporary US, and presents us with a thematically condensed, amplified and degraded version of that world, focusing on its relation to minorities, as seen through the eyes of an uncompromising lesbian. As an example, many of the male characters are deformed, repulsive, ape-like, hardly articulate and exceptionally stupid (fig. 2); others are the “white men in glasses + ties [who] are running, I mean ruining my life!!” (28; emphasis in original); and straight women are “spritz-heads” who are hopelessly devoted to the males who abuse them (fig. 3). In an excessive and ironic mode, her representations are inspired by a heterosexist, essentialist, Venus vs Mars discourse. But of course, she disrupts these categories with one that heterosexism doesn’t compute, and to which Hothead rightfully belongs: lesbians and queers, who take center stage. Although we are often granted an external viewpoint on Hothead, we mainly see the world around her through her eyes, and her vision of a caricatured heteronormative society affects the reading: on the one hand, exaggeration and caricature are a means of revelation; on the other, as we read Hothead Paisan, we remain constantly aware of the distortion and irony, and experience a sort of dual or dialogic vision: we simultaneously perceive Hothead’s fictional, provocatively portrayed world, and the “real” one she refers to through caricature.

Fig. 3. © 1999 by Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan, 89.

  • 17 Alison Bechdel did take her inspiration from the community she herself was living in when she began (...)
  • 18 As in Dykes To Watch Out For: The Sequel, where Mo is reading a gay paper whose title is alternatel (...)
  • 19 See her “Life Drawing” interview: “the strip is a hybrid, you know. It’s part editorial and part so (...)

8Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For is more realistic—the fantasy lies mainly in the lesbian lives lived in the strip, almost entirely sheltered from the male and heterosexual world during its first ten years.17 Her plots are much more coherent and consistent than DiMassa’s, the physical world she draws is fairly mimetic, though she does play with certain conventions that foreground fictionality, for instance when, from one panel to the next, the text changes on the books or newspapers that the characters are reading, on the t-shirts they are wearing, etc.18 Both cartoonists feature in their own comics and sometimes interact with the characters; Bechdel even has episodes where they are presented as the creators of the strip. Such metaleptic moments are fairly common in comics, but they are still effective, and the blurring of the line between reality and fiction enables and enhances a (comical) dialogue between the two realms. In addition, and contrary to Hothead Paisan (which of course didn’t last as long: five years, compared with twenty-five for Dykes to Watch Out For), the world of Mo and Co. changes quite fundamentally over time: Bechdel incorporates societal evolutions, debates, etc., as in the “I.D. Fixe” episode (1999 58) that tackles prejudice against trans people within the group of lesbian friends. Such evolutions are highlighted in the title of the tenth collection: Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out For (2003), which ironically comments on the changes within the comic’s lesbian community (by then, the regular cast of characters includes children, men, bisexual and transgender people, a Republican lesbian, meat-eaters, etc.). The characters and their politics evolve along with American society, as is illustrated most clearly with the issue of same-sex marriage, discussed below. Current events are very often alluded to and politics is central to the series, which Bechdel sometimes describes as “part editorial and part soap opera”;19 current affairs often determine the content of the strips, and they can even affect their very structure, as in the 2003 episode about DIY home improvement which is in fact a “cautionary parable” about the Iraq war (2005 86).

Lesbian spaces (of resistance)

  • 20 Bechdel uses the phrase in her 2008 collection to describe the impression she had when, in her twen (...)
  • 21 For instance, in a 1990 strip in which Mo, reading the personal ads in a community paper, expresses (...)
  • 22 As illustrated by the “Lavender Menace uprising” of 1970 (Heller, 1997 8).

9Nevertheless, the parallel universes20 of both works are steeped in fantasy, most obviously in their “mapping of a lesbian space,” to quote Dana Heller (1993 32), author of one of the few articles about Hothead Paisan, who in turn cites DiMassa’s description of Hothead Paisan as a “labor of love for the lesbian nation” (29; italics mine). The expression “lesbian nation”, which is also used in Dykes to Watch Out For,21 appeared in the 1960s and was taken up and developed by Jill Johnston in her 1973 collection of essays by the same title; it refers to the creation of an economic, social and cultural space based on a separatist structure and intended to free women from dependence upon men and to establish egalitarian relations between them. Lesbian feminist separatism has a fraught history; conceived as a political necessity, a means for lesbians to separate “from men and from institutions, relationships, roles and activities which are male-oriented, male-dominated and operating for the benefit of males and the maintenance of male privilege” (Bette Tallen, qtd. in Mudd 10), but also in reaction to “the homophobia of the women’s movement,”22 it was soon criticized for being elitist, racist and impractical. It is generally perceived negatively today in particular because of its essentialism (Rudy 192, 200) and prejudice, with certain separatists calling for the exclusion of non-lesbians, transwomen, bisexuals, etc. (Sheila 17), as exemplified in particular by the controversy over the exclusion of transwomen from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (Ring n.p.). However, the experiment was politically and theoretically important, revolutionary in many ways, and although its actualization often proved problematic, as has also been the case for other forms of separatism, it opened up a number of avenues and crucial debates for lesbian and feminist activists. Moreover, as used by Bechdel, DiMassa and many others, the expression “lesbian nation” refers less to a literal space than to a political state of mind (Heller, 1993 28).

10Furthermore, as Judith Butler reminds us in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, space is political, public space in particular, which power structures appropriate and use as a “theater of legitimacy” (85); when protesters or oppressed groups take to the streets and claim a right to this public space (Butler refers to the “struggles to make the street safe for women, gender and sexual minorities, including trans people, whose public appearance is too often punishable by legal and illegal violence,” 74) they bring this process to light and enable a questioning of the apparently indisputable legitimacy of dominant institutions—including the institution of heterosexuality. This is also what Bechdel and DiMassa do when they give substance to the concept of lesbian space, when they literalize it in their comics.

Fig. 4. © 1999 by Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan, 87.

  • 23 Fig. 4 illustrates both the sexism on display in the male space of the city, and Hothead’s disrupti (...)
  • 24 The labrys logo on Madwimmin’s window suggests that it may have been inspired by Labyris, the lesbi (...)
  • 25 Discussing the strip in Indelible, Bechdel describes it as “a slightly more utopian community than (...)
  • 26 Heller describes the world of Hothead as an “unidentified urban jungle… a hyper-heterosexual dystop (...)
  • 27 Bechdel created 19 episodes of Servants, published in the Advocate from March 1989 to August 1990; (...)

11In Hothead Paisan, the city, the streets are male-controlled, hostile for women who are either commodified, dominated (for example by huge billboards with ads featuring naked women; see fig. 4),23 or brutalized. Because public spaces are ferociously heteronormative, and doubly alienating for lesbians, they become a hunting ground for Hothead. Bechdel’s response is entirely different: she creates an urban space that is defined by the lesbian community which makes up her cast of characters; she even draws a map of that space (1998 79), and presents a feminist and lesbo-centered neighborhood whose streets bear the names of such women as Djuna Barnes, Lillian Faderman, Lorena Hickock, Eleanor Roosevelt, and whose landmarks (or monuments) are the different locations where her characters live, shop, work or gather, such as the co-op or Madwimmin, the lesbian feminist bookstore that is central to many episodes in the series.24 In a deliberate reversal of the exclusion and silencing of minorities, she refuses to grant access to this space to the white males in positions of power whom Hothead ruthlessly attacks. To some extent, it can be argued that she and DiMassa create mirroring parallel universes, a utopian25 and a dystopian26 lesbian separatist fantasy. While Hothead continually fails to actualize the fantasy, Bechdel’s characters exist in a world that has made room for them, that comprises a lesbian space—indeed for many years, the space of the series is almost entirely lesbian, with males and non-dykes being granted a marginal existence. The political significance (noted by Chute, 177) of this re-centering is made all the more obvious by a comparison with Servants to the Cause,27 a more inclusive counterpart to its contemporary Dykes to Watch Out For; Servants doesn’t feature any heterosexual character, but it is based on the interaction, indeed on the cooperation, between three lesbian and three gay colleagues working at the 10 % Tribune, a fictional periodical which Margaret Galvan describes as an “intersectional space” (217).

  • 28 When Mo meets him as he babysits Raffi, he introduces himself as “Carlos, the male role model,” and (...)

12The lesbian separatism of Dykes to Watch Out For is most obvious and consistent in the strip’s first decade, when men of any description are almost entirely absent; after the birth of Toni and Clarice’s son Raffi in 1993, the second male character is Carlos, a gay friend of Toni’s, introduced in 1996, thirteen years into the series—and in whom so-called masculine and feminine character traits are insistently and humorously blended (fig. 5).28 And so, while Bechdel’s parallel lesbian universe becomes less separatist, the males that are allowed in are polar opposites of those featured in Hothead Paisan, so that her urban setting is and remains, on the whole, welcoming and safe for her characters.

Fig. 5. © 1997 by Alison Bechdel, Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For, 31.

13The mainstream, male-dominated world, though generally kept at bay in the Dykes to Watch Out For utopia, does however resurface regularly; the sense of threat rarely originates in the space that the characters inhabit, but more often from the country at large, as relayed in the references to current events that reach the characters via their TVs and newspapers (as also happens in Hothead Paisan), and also occasionally, and more intimately, through their parents. Far from suggesting that Bechdel’s lesbians are helpless or trapped in the limited space they inhabit, the threat makes that space more precious, and also regularly encourages Mo and her friends to invade the male-dominated world around them (the 2005 collection is entitled Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For) and make it, albeit temporarily or partially, their own, as when Clarice, Toni and Raffi move to a “respectable,” white, middle-class, heteronormative neighborhood where they confront their neighbors about their racism and homophobia; or when the friends gather in numbers to demonstrate in their home town or to march on D.C. In an episode from the late 1980s, Mo enthusiastically tells Jezanna about her experience at the famous 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, and exclaims: “Half a million of us! We turned that creepy, imperialist capital into a whole different world! For one weekend we had a glimpse of real freedom. It was like being 100 % queer and proud of it, but at the same time not being queer at all anymore” (1988 70). Mo thus highlights the relation between minority and majority, center and margin; she also underlines the importance of the reversal of the norm: when the norm is queer, queer ceases to be marginal—and strange, odd, suspicious—, temporarily in D.C., and permanently in the lesbian space of her own neighborhood.

14While Mo and the half-a-million demonstrators (momentarily) create a queer space in the nation’s capital, Hothead (1990 49-62) gets a brief respite from her less peaceful clearing out of a space when she is invited to Provincetown. Although P-Town isn’t entirely “het-free,” it is enough of a parallel queer universe for Hothead to describe it as “a place for me” (52) and to consider running for mayor there, a highly uncharacteristic desire to become involved in the affairs of the world and with other human beings.

  • 29 Dysfunctional in, or rendered dysfunctional by, a dysfunctional world, Hothead is “on permanent dis (...)
  • 30 In an episode where she lists some of the things that “make me lose my temper” (187) in an antiphra (...)

15Such successful, albeit brief, forays into queer spaces bring to light the importance and centrality of a sense of place, of inclusion in public and communal spaces, in the work of both cartoonists. In the very first episode, Hothead grabs a rifle and declares to Chicken: “I’m going out to clear a space in society for you an’ me” (30). And revealingly, the cover of DiMassa’s Complete Hothead Paisan (fig. 6) shows the protagonist on a rampage in an urban setting whose chaotic state can probably be attributed to her, as can the fact that it appears to have been entirely cleared of its (heterosexual) population—the only living beings there are the grinning, heavily armed heroine and her cat Chicken. The image, representing Hothead’s successful conquest of public space, is also a direct answer to, and contradiction of, a question that she asks a lamp which plays the part of a genderless God-figure: “How come the only place I can really be me is indoors?” (64). The permanently disabled lesbian29 expresses the sense of threat and the alienation she experiences in public spaces, which relegates this undomesticated figure, like many other marginals, to confined spaces—the closet, the hospital, or prison.30

Fig. 6. © 1999, by Diane DiMassa, cover The Complete Hotheaded Paisan.

  • 31 Described by the narrator, in a 1996 episode, as the “oldest extant group household in lesbiandom” (...)
  • 32 It appears in an early episode entitled “The Rule,” where a woman tells a friend: “I only go to a m (...)

16Conversely, in Dykes to Watch Out For, the private spaces and personal choices of the characters illustrate the separate and alternative lives a lesbian space can accommodate: three of the main characters, Ginger, Lois and Sparrow, live in a “commune,”31 most of the characters have “progressive,” or ethical, jobs, and some are even downwardly mobile (1988 49), which is another reversal of social norms and expectations (as well as of set phrases, clichés and commonplaces); they refuse to adhere to mainstream mores as regards politics and information, but also consumption and entertainment (as illustrated by the now-famous “Bechdel test”),32 domains in which gender roles and positions are invented or consolidated. They even reject certain aspirations voiced by members of minority groups, in particular that of becoming accepted in (or absorbed by) the mainstream: Mo is horrified at the prospect of finding herself inside the norm and rejects the idea that “we’re just the same as everyone else” (1993 81), just as she opposes gay marriage even when her friends become staunch advocates of the cause.

  • 33 She complains to her friend Roz: “Some rigid dyke with a pole up her ass once told me I wasn’t a ra (...)

17In Hothead’s everyday fight against the heteronormative world around her, she resists social norms much more radically than Bechdel’s dykes: she doesn’t work, has sex partners but no “life partner” and even rejects the sort of “lesbian norms” that Mo often affirms, such as vegetarianism and non-violence, to name just the two most obvious examples.33 Furthermore, not only is Hothead’s vulgarity at complete odds with traditional femininity, but her linguistic mode, rife with slang, swearing and deliberate misspelling, is rooted in impropriety and distortion, and further illustrates her contempt for rules.

18Hothead Paisan’s name in itself is a refusal of a basic social norm: an often gendered first—or Christian—name, and a surname inherited from the father (the only family member in Hothead Paisan is Gram, the grandma, suggesting a matrilineal line of descent). This basic and dominant signifier of family institution and hierarchy, patriarchy, is rejected in favor of a compound of two slangy, genderless nouns: Hothead creates herself performatively. Her first name refers to one of her dominant character traits; Paisan is more ambiguous: translated as “homegirl” in an early story (39), it suggests an aspiration to a friendly community, a sense of belonging to a place and a group, be it a socially and politically devalued one (peasants); in an American context, it can also refer to a community that is often associated to organized crime, and connote violence.

  • 34 This inscription counters moments of self-doubt, as when she moans “I’m just illegible graffiti on (...)

19The double H tattooed on her arm can, of course, be read as a sign of solipsism; but it is also an inscription of her identity on her body, in a context where both are threatened; Hothead labels herself, chooses and exhibits her name, thus affirming her identity and ownership of her body in a world where women’s bodies are commodified.34

  • 35 This idea also runs through much of Bechdel’s work; cf. the introduction to Essential Dykes to Watc (...)

20In a similar but lighter mode, her cat is called Chicken, which is another way to question the power of words to describe reality, playfully highlighting the instability of language and its arbitrariness (also a recurring theme in the work of Bechdel); and perhaps, humorously, a reflection on and a deflection of the male privilege of naming, starting with the Bible and the male Christian god, the European explorers naming continents, the fathers, scientists and doctors—the “great men” whose names have been inscribed on our everyday reality and on female bodies. Hothead Paisan thus debunks and counters the violence of language most vividly experienced by minorities, which it abuses or erases.35

Feminist violence?

21As for physical violence, it is a staple of, not to say a technique in, comics; the medium is an ideal outlet for violent fantasies which can be rendered graphically (rather than merely textually) and without causing any of the repulsion or guilt that more mimetically realistic media can elicit in viewers.

  • 36 The contrast is explicitly, and comically, described by Mo when she tells Clarice and Toni: “It mak (...)
  • 37 In two 1992 strips, Bechdel refers to the demonstrations against Paul Verhoeven’s film Basic Instin (...)
  • 38 Which is another form of (deliberate) reversal for Bechdel, who explained in Indelible, that for ye (...)

22Violence is central to Hothead Paisan, as the subtitle (“Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist”) makes clear, important but peripheral in Dykes to Watch Out For—when Hothead pulls out her weapons, Bechdel’s dykes organize kiss-ins; when the latter pull out their dildos, the former chops off penises… In Dykes to Watch Out For, patriarchy and heterosexuality are an oppressive given, the subject of numerous strips and discussions among the characters, but are hardly represented: on the page, in the books, the norm is lesbian and nonviolent—a reversal, therefore, of the “outside” world,36 although in popular entertainment and discourse, as Lynda Hart argued in Fatal Women, lesbians are associated with violence and aggressiveness.37 Thus violence, though rarely illustrated, is not entirely absent from Dykes to Watch Out For, and, in somewhat stereotyped (second wave) feminist fashion, when it does appear, it is almost systematically associated with or caused by male figures (see 1988 68), and as mentioned earlier, there are no male characters until quite late in Dykes to Watch Out For, and in fact hardly any male figures at all.38

23Violence, on the other hand, is ubiquitous in Hothead Paisan, at the heart of the protagonist’s goal to “clear a space” for herself and her cat (30) because “the goddess said so” (24), a goal which she feels she can only achieve through the use of violence. Nonetheless, the comic regularly focuses on the issue of Hothead’s savagery and prejudice, and denounces it as inappropriate; her friends remind her that “violence breeds violence! […] you don’t go out and imitate the behavior you’re trying to stop, because then you add to it!!!” (171). There are a number of direct or indirect disclaimers, with the figure of the cartoonist insisting that Hothead Paisan is a satire and a fantasy (85), a work of fiction, that Hothead is insane and her response disproportionate and ineffective—but a necessary, exhilarating and liberating outlet for rage against a dysfunctional society.

  • 39 Hothead often evokes the opening line of the famous 1970 pamphlet by the Radicalesbians: “What is a (...)
  • 40 “ELLES AFFIRMENT TRIOMPHANT / QUE TOUT GESTE EST RENVERSEMENT.”

24Undeniably, there is a simple form of jubilation in creating a parallel universe in which a lesbian character single-handedly reverses centuries of victimization of women at the hands of men; however, Hothead’s violence cannot be merely dismissed as entertainment and letting off of steam. Indeed, not only does she present her feminism as indissociable from anger39 and violence (for instance, she defines herself as a “FEMINIST!” “FEH MUH NIST” “gun-totin’, axe-throwin, take-no-prisoners, queen of my world, angry pissed-off bitch on wheels!!”; fig. 7), but DiMassa’s gesture of reversal brings to mind another radical work of fiction that has been described as a lesbian-feminist utopia, “a prophetic vision of the Amazon revolution” (Rosenfeld 6), in which the naming and renaming of women is a statement of autonomy and a “form of warfare” (Rogan 446), and whose opening page reads “TRIUMPHANT, THEY ASSERT / THAT EVERY GESTURE IS A REVERSAL”:40 Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969 7; my translation), whose last section famously narrates the “war or […] guerrilla between elles and ils.(2001 131; my translation)

Fig. 7. © 1999 by Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan, 192.

  • 41 In an article originally published in an issue devoted to the “utopian imaginary” in the journal L’ (...)
  • 42 “[É]criture lacunaire,” “fureur,” “il n’y a pas de fluidité, pas de lien entre les séquences. L’eff (...)

25Wittig describes “my irascible elles41 as a “collective entity” and a “collective character,” (2001 129-130; my translation) not unlike Hothead herself. In the first episode of the latter’s saga, her origin story is given: “I wonder what would happen if say, some lesbian really checked out for lunch. [While] she’s going about her daily queer routine, all this TV crap is seeping in and she’s getting psychotic, and like she needs therapy really bad but she doesn’t know it? I bet her boundaries would be really fuzzy. I bet she’d be lots of fun to be around. I bet she’d be a real… HOTHEAD PAISAN” (fig. 2). First introduced as “some lesbian,” she becomes a hypothetical fictional figure at the same time as she is conjured up and named in the performative last sentence: “I bet she’d be a real… HOTHEAD PAISAN.” The indefinite adjective “some”, followed by the indefinite article (“a real”), suggests that every lesbian in the US potentially contains the embryo of a Hothead—she is, to a large extent, an emblem, like Wittig’s elles, a collective character. Some of Wittig’s strategies are remarkably similar to those of DiMassa, whose disjointed, fragmented stories recall the former’s “lacunal writing” and the “fury” which gives Les Guérillères its momentum and determines its rhythm: “there is no fluidity, no link between the episodes. The desired effect is that of the shortness of breath, of speed, as in battle” (2001 128-131; my translation).42

26In a different medium, and in a different mode, DiMassa nevertheless, like Wittig, creates a fiction that is an empowering response to the violence of patriarchal domination and suppression of dissenting voices. I have said that DiMassa’s world is dystopian, but it is important to note that this is what Hothead is fighting against; DiMassa represents forms of violence that are not caused by mere desperation and that are not blindly reactionary, they also express an aspiration to achieve a political goal and are generally directed at sexist cretins—an often extreme form of corrective violence—and on certain occasions, at more specific targets, such as male doctors who perform unnecessary procedures on female patients (71-75), or a group of rapists who have been acquitted in court (219-236). As she is about to execute these three men, Hothead dances with their victim, Roberta, and they rejoice at the prospect of a world that has been freed of rapists and batterers (232); when she then “rips [the] spine” of two of them “through [their] asshole,” the act itself is elided, it takes place behind a half-closed door, but the bleeding, mangled corpse of her first victim is shown, beneath a few lines of free-floating text: “does this freak you out? It’s based on a photo of a botched abortion” (233). Thus, the scene is partly self-censored, its brutality acknowledged, and when DiMassa shows the result of Hothead’s gruesome vengeance, the image is referred back to an instance of violence against women, and thus also directed against her victim-perpetrators—the representation of Hothead’s retaliatory violence is also an element in the retaliation.

  • 43 “Leur violence est déchaînée elles sont au paroxysme de leur fureur, elles apparaissent dans leur e (...)
  • 44 “une force telle qu’il puisse faire basculer le pronom ils […] et lui dérober son universalité, au (...)

27This character’s violence, encompassing humor, hope (“clear a space for you and me,” 30) and despair, is thus played out in a dystopian space before the victory of the “amazons,” which Hothead aspires to transform into a lesbian / queer utopia—as in Les Guérillères’ last section (which is chronologically the first), whose characters Wittig describes in terms that could just as well apply to the cover of The Complete Hothead Paisan: “Their violence is unleashed they are in a paroxysm of fury, they appear in their devastating enthusiasm with fierce gazes and bristling hair”43 (1969 168-170; my translation). For Wittig as, I would argue, for DiMassa, the representation of violence and the creation of a lesbian space are significant, indeed crucial, political gestures: commenting on Les Guérillères, Wittig writes that the most violent section of the book enables her to give elles the strength to topple the masculine ils and appropriate the latter’s universality within the space of the text.44

Identity politics and tactical alliances

  • 45 With many a twist, obviously, violence in particular, in complete contradiction with Audre Lorde’s (...)

28Hothead’s guerilla tactics not only bring to mind Wittig’s Guérillères; DiMassa’s subcultural zine with its violent lesbian protagonist fighting sexism, racism, homophobia, is also strongly evocative of Grrrl power, the late twentieth-century subcultural movement that combined feminist goals and a punk aesthetic, and that is associated with third-wave feminism and queer culture (Garrison). Nevertheless, Hothead also exhibits an unabashedly essentialist vision of gender and gender relations that is much closer to the second wave45 as illustrated in the poster, a parody of the sexist billboard ads mentioned earlier, advertising her guerrilla services and promoting her “FTPP” (“Fight the Penis People,” 195) movement, which reduces men to their sexual organ.

  • 46 “‘Identity politics,’ as a modernist mode of oppositionality, has essentialist requisites which res (...)

29The two series are clearly at odds in terms of violence, its uses and its representation; yet the theme indirectly brings to light interesting parallels in the perception of gender relations and feminism, notably its association with an essentialist depiction of male figures. Second-wave identity politics are at play in both Hothead Paisan and Dykes to Watch Out For, and have an important role in the reception of both series (and thus, arguably, in their very existence), but they also both open up to differential oppositionality, that is, to modes of action and protest that rely on the bringing together of various marginal positions (which identity politics would tend to oppose), an awareness of (marginal) affinities, and the forging of tactical alliances46 as weapons in the feminist struggle.

  • 47 Toward the end of this album, Clarice, visiting the endangered species wing of a natural history mu (...)

30While at the beginning Bechdel’s nonviolent, often irenic lesbian world is steeped in ideas that are generally associated with second-wave feminism, it gradually but resolutely moves toward third-wave and queer ideas, with characters such as Stuart, Sydney, Jonas/Janis, Cynthia, etc., seriously destabilizing Mo’s ideal vision (initially dominant in the strip) of lesbians as born female, vegetarian, left-wing, unshaved, downwardly mobile, enemies of capital, big corporations and consumer society. These new viewpoints are not merely queer or third-wave—indeed, in the 1990s, Bechdel began to include regular characters that would have been unimaginable ten years earlier, at complete odds with the community that was then at the heart of the series, such as a straight man or a diehard GOP supporter. However, these new characters are not merely mainstream, or conservative, they are conspicuously hybrid and revealing of a non-essentialist view: Stuart (who turns Sparrow into a “bisexual lesbian,” 2000 58) sees himself as a lesbian trapped in a man’s body; Sydney, the ambitious queer studies professor, is also a carnivore, an unbridled shopaholic and a deconstructionist; while Cynthia, the Christian lesbian, supports abstinence and the Republican party. The significance of these characters’ introduction is felt in the very titles of some of the last volumes: Unnatural Dykes To Watch Out For (1995); Post-Dykes To Watch Out For (2000); Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out For (2003) and Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For (2005)—the invasion goes both ways, as the drawing on the cover suggests: on the one hand, Bechdel’s dykes with their friends and allies arrive from another planet to invade ours; on the other, Mo’s lesbian planet is invaded by new forms of LGBTQ+ life.47

31Meanwhile, in Hothead Paisan, taking into account different oppositionalities and alternative positions appears as a necessity. The comic’s excessive and provocative mode demands it; without this tension or opening up of the reading, Hothead’s prejudiced and essentialist aggressiveness could become unbearable, if not untenable—as illustrated in episode #5, when the Fran character (a “proper” dyke who represents a reader, and could be a caricature of Mo) interrupts the story: “This is disgusting! I can’t believe a womon would write this garbage! […] why doesn’t she just undo the last 20 years of feminism!!!” (84-85). The uncompromising homicidal lesbian terrorist who takes no prisoners (fig. 7) is nevertheless made to agree to a modicum of compromise by her pacifist friends Roz and Alice, her bisexual and transgender lovers Suzette and Daphne, and forges alliances not only with other queers but also with straight women, such as rape victim Roberta—and of course with Chicken, the voice of reason and wisdom.

Parallel universes

  • 48 This episode and Mo’s transphobia are analyzed by Kai Linke in his book on “racism and whiteness in (...)

32Neither Hothead Paisan nor Dykes to Watch Out For decides in favor of one position or another—both series offer reflections on gender issues in US society, but they do not merely reflect and criticize this society, they cross swords with it, insinuate themselves into it and thrust their oblique and ironic perspectives at it. In an early episode of Dykes to Watch Out For (1991), Harriet is holding a newspaper whose headline reads “Strange cluster of brain cells found in straight men” (1992 88); the irony is threefold: it is directed at studies that try to find a biological explanation for sexual “deviance”; at essentialism, on which this type of approach is little more than a variation with a scientific coloring; and at the representation of the norm, which is destabilized—the “abnormal” brains here are those of straight men, so that, conversely, the norm is constituted by women, gays and lesbians (this tactic recalls the nineteenth-century invention of the concept of heterosexuality based on the construction of what Michel Foucault, in Histoire de la sexualité, described as “a new species,” the homosexual). There are very clear evolutions since the beginnings of Dykes to Watch Out For, where the absurdity of the norms which exclude gays, lesbians and women was denounced, but which also revealed similar prejudices and exclusions at work in this lesbian community. In an even earlier strip (1987), Mo, the “victim of a regrettable haircut,” wails: “How’m I ever going to get a job, let alone a girlfriend, with this haircut? I look like a transsexual marine!” (1988 34). When the first bisexual character appears in 1992, almost ten years into the series, Mo is upset: “they’re always making us change the names of things to include them! It’s… it’s awkward!” (1993 55). Two years later, she complains to Lois when a “transsexual lesbian” signs up to participate in the literary reading she is organizing: “What am I supposed to do? Have bi women and drag queens come in here and read about schtupping their boyfriends?” and she refuses to change the name of her reading series to include “bisexual and transgender” people, though this time, the episode ends with Lois giving Mo a quick lecture on the “infinite sexual continuum” which leaves the latter to question her own prejudices (1995 52-53).48 A decade later, Mo’s circle has become much more inclusive and Jasmine and Lois are handing out flyers demanding that “all self-identified women” be allowed to attend the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. All the main characters in Dykes to Watch Out For contribute to the contemporary debates that take place within lesbian and queer activist groups in the US, and two of them even play didactic roles within their community, and for the readers: Lois who joins Queer Nation in 1990 and the Lesbian Avengers a few years later (1992 65; 1993 105) and who explores issues of female masculinity and transgenderism; and university teacher Sydney (and to a lesser extent Ginger) who keeps us informed about academic work on gender issues—and through whom Bechdel also makes fun of people like me: in a 1997 strip, in answer to Mo who is surprised to see Sydney sporting a dildo and harness, the latter retorts, “Oh, please, Mo, you’re so provincial; can’t you see I’m disarticulating the epistemological foundation of gender through deferral and deconstruction of fixed sexual signifiers?” (1997 138). Among the recurring debates in Dykes to Watch Out For is one that has sometimes been referred to as the “sex wars” between anti-sex (or “vanilla”) and pro-sex (or pro-porno) feminists and lesbians; these positions are represented mainly by Mo (until she meets Sydney) and Lois, who temporarily saves the Madwimmin bookstore by developing a range of erotic and pornographic books and magazines, and by starting the very lucrative sale of videos and sex toys—though we never see a penis in Dykes to Watch Out For, we do see an increasing number of dildos and vibrators.

  • 49 For instance, “Bunns & Noodles” and “medusa.com” are blamed for the demise of Jezanna’s feminist bo (...)

33Same-sex marriage is one of the subjects that appears regularly in the series, especially in its last few years; it is also one that gives rise to the most notable, and funniest, developments and reversals. In 1988, Mo rants against the patriarchal institutions of heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family, and considers that they must be abolished; a few episodes later, Toni expounds: “It just has so many negative connotations. Marriage is about property transfer and creating state-approved nuclear families” (1990 99). By 1998 Toni hasn’t merely changed her mind, she has in fact become a committed activist in the “Freedom to Marry Coalition” (1998b 57). Meanwhile, although Mo continues to oppose it, she seems increasingly isolated—or increasingly close to conservatives and reactionaries: in a 2004 strip, as Clarice and Toni are about to get married and Sydney, down on one knee, has proposed to Mo (“Will you do me the honor of paradoxically reinscribing and destabilizing hegemonic discourse with me?”), a panel shows demonstrators outside City Hall whose words, “I don’t believe in gay marriage,” almost exactly echo Mo’s answer: “Sydney, I’m not going to marry you, I don’t believe in marriage” (2005 83-84). She is even doubled on her left by the “man on the street,” wearing a NASCAR cap, who is interviewed about gay marriage and declares: “Well, let me begin by saying that in this post-human era, the very concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ have become quaint fictions” (2005 69). These are just a few examples, and Bechdel touches on many areas beyond LGBTQ+ issues: she regularly discusses US politics in the broadest sense, or, through the Madwimmin bookstore, the commodification of culture and the aggressive strategies of big companies49 that are destroying independent businesses, etc.

  • 50 In a 1993 episode, Mo is enraged by what Bechdel calls the “lesbian chic craze” (1998a 197) and fum (...)
  • 51 In Bechdel’s “The Rule,” these figures appear in film posters in the background, epitomizing the ty (...)

34This kind of political commentary is much rarer and less direct in The Complete Hothead Paisan, but both series have in common the (mis)appropriation of certain ideas and symbols that are firmly associated with the spirit and history of the US: I have already mentioned Mo’s “downward mobility” as an example of the rejection/reversal of norms. Like Hothead, Mo demonstrates that upward mobility is not inevitable—and the irony of the posture of the “self-unmade lesbian” is particularly biting in the US context. While Mo and Co are afraid of becoming “like everyone else” and being absorbed in the mainstream,50 it can be argued that in some respects, Hothead is a paradoxical patriotic heroine—indeed, she possesses many of the qualities that are characteristic of American heroic figures. In fact, despite the unclassifiable, anarchistic dimension of the character, if we think of her in her context, it becomes obvious that she has a place in US popular and mainstream culture—particularly in heteronormative genres which hold immoderate virility in high regard. Heller (1993 34-35) situates Hothead halfway between the figure of the Amazon and the “frontier renegade,” that is to say the pioneer, the solitary and rebellious adventurer who sets out to conquer new territories which must be wrested from the barbaric populations that occupy them, whatever the price to be paid, and whose role was seen by expansionists and proponents of the doctrine of manifest destiny as unquestionably divine. Likewise, Hothead considers her conquest of a space to be a mission entrusted to her by “the goddess” (24), and the version she gives of this quest is all the more pleasing as, of course, the “Indians” whom she sacrifices are precisely the white men whose lawless and brutal tactics enabled them to conquer and dominate the North American subcontinent. This cartoon character cannot fail to recall another quintessentially American figure who also has its roots in that of the frontier renegade, the superhero. The latter fights to protect vulnerable Americans against the attacks of villains; Hothead fights to protect women and queers against misogynists and homophobes—and the cover of The Complete Hothead Paisan is an obvious reference not only to superheroes, but also to the kinds of testosterone-charged super-men of action movies played by the likes of Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.51

  • 52 When she seeks her friend Roz’s help to run away from a city in which she feels threatened, the lat (...)
  • 53 As Hothead explains to Chicken, “The world sucks, man! Every time ya leave the house ya never know (...)

35The urban setting represented on the cover of the Hothead Paisan anthology is in ruins, a wasteland of her own creation in which she seems to be thriving and which echoes the recurring questions concerning the origins and effects of violence, if only because the world’s violence is the condition of this character’s very existence; she is an irreducible, profoundly contradictory character, who is at times described as the solipsistic source of her malaise (135),52 but who also reminds us that she and others53 are expected to accept and adapt to the literal and symbolic violence exercised against them. The wasteland in which most of the episodes take place is a dystopian parallel universe and a projection of the protagonist’s mental state and space; however much she struggles (and kills and maims) to bring about a world of lesbian harmony, the lone dispenser of queer justice is trapped in a masculinist nightmare which is the cause not only of her constant fury, but also of her chronic depression. On the contrary, Bechdel’s characters are able to find strength and support in their community and are seen to evolve quite profoundly over the years; their relationship to the world outside the lesbian enclave becomes more appeased as the mainstream becomes less hostile toward them, and as they themselves gradually include much more diverse personalities.

36Bechdel and DiMassa do not literally advocate, nor even strictly represent, lesbian separatism (though in its early years, the world of Dykes to Watch Out For comes close), but they do create non-patriarchal fantasies, fictional spaces that are not male-centered and -dominated, but centered on and dominated by women and queers—and in this sense, that are revolutionary, as suggested indirectly by Bechdel in a 1995 interview with Anne Rubenstein: “I’m a lesbian writing a strip that has no male characters in it—and people somehow manage to construe even that as being a statement about men. My strip is not ‘not about men.’ It’s simply ‘about women’” (30).

37In a chillingly prescient 1991 strip written and drawn immediately after the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings and the latter’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, Lois exclaims: “The boys won! They pit their biggest enemies, the black community and the feminists, against each other, they get a black justice who’ll vote to abolish civil rights, they give a tacit nod of approval to sexual harassment and they’ll repeal Roe v. Wade in the bargain!” (1992 97). In 2016, a mere two weeks after the presidential election and eight years after she had put an end to the series, Bechdel posted “Pièce de Résistance,” the last episode to date, which she introduced as follows:

Since I stopped drawing Dykes to Watch Out For at the tail end of the Bush administration, people have asked me many times if I thought about my characters, and if so, what they were up to. And I would have to be honest. No, I didn’t think about them, and I had no idea what they were doing.

But last week they all started flooding back. (Bechdel, 2016 n.p.)

38Raised from their slumbers, Mo and friends are gathered, in a doomsday mood, for an antiphrastic post-election “Thanksgiving” dinner. When the guests ring the bell, Sparrow says, “I’ll get the door. While we still have one”; Stuart is preparing to move his family into a fallout shelter; Clarice is frantically organizing resistance, and when Sparrow comments, “I was afraid she’d be a mess, like after the 2000 election,” Toni replies, “I guess that’s the difference between depression and mortal fear.” Meanwhile, in the backyard, Sydney, Ginger and Mo, “muddling through the stages of grief,” are gathered around the barbecue and a scorched turkey that symbolizes the country’s fate. Indeed, it is not only women and lesbians who face dangerous regressions, but the country as a whole. Sparrow’s gallows humor is revealing of the centrality of space in the threat posed by the (unnamed) president-elect, and the episode, conjured up by the electoral success of a far-right populist, opens with a text panel that highlights the contrast with “eight quiet years of […] civil rights progress.” Indeed, rereading Bechdel’s and DiMassa’s comics in early 2023, it is amazing, and appalling, to see how the work of these two cartoonists, thirty and forty years after their creation, can feel like prophecies that are being fulfilled. Bechdel’s analyses of the more worrying aspects of US politics and DiMassa’s dystopian parallel universe seem to have materialized in contemporary US society, where the most progressive social and political movements, critically conceptualizing and promoting equality, now confront far-right, masculinist, white-supremacist, homophobic groups—and a powerful anti-abortion movement that, regardless of public opinion, has managed to obtain a majority in the Supreme Court and crush one of the most basic rights of women.

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WONG, Curtis. “Wonder Woman Is Officially Queer.” HuffPost, 29 September 2016. www.huffpost.com/entry/wonder-woman-queer_n_57ec2b6ce4b0c2407cdb8eea. Accessed 27 May 2023.

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Notes

1 This article expands a sub-chapter about Hothead Paisan which appeared in Female Cartoonists in the US (Tison).

2 For the history of the Comics Code, see Nyberg.

3 “Head shops,” which sold items associated with recreational drug use, also carried independent comics and are often credited with having contributed to their popularity.

4 In the US, homosexual acts between consenting adults were decriminalized nationwide in 2003 only.

5 From 1954 to 1989, the Comics Code forbade the representation of “illicit sex relations,” “sexual abnormalities,” and “sex perversion” which unambiguously targeted LGBTQ+ characters (Kistler n.p.; Mance 297). Nevertheless, the gay or lesbian subtext of such early popular figures as, for example, Batman and Wonder Woman—first denounced as such by Fredric Wertham (188-193), who saw this as harmful to the young—has become legendary.

6 In a 2019 interview, its creator Howard Cruse remarked that very few comics shops carried Gay Comix, which was almost only distributed in gay bookstores—without their support, the magazine might have remained “a one-shot.” He also insisted that “I didn’t want it to be a boys’ club like early undergrounds had been. I wanted to be sure that gay men and lesbians were there” (qtd. in Puc n.p.).

7 In the late 1990s, Bechdel, whose bi-monthly strip appeared in almost 50 gay and lesbian newspapers and magazines in the US (Rubenstein 24), noted that she had not managed to reach a mainstream audience: “I seem to have hit the glass ceiling in terms of crossover. […] I see no reason why a dyke can’t be a universal subject just as well as Mike Doonesbury or Charlie Brown can. But for the most part, heterosexual comics readers haven’t proved willing to make the shift of identity that I make routinely” (Sternbergh et al. 169).

8 Even DC and Marvel started embracing LGBTQ+ themes and characters in the last decade of the twentieth century. Northstar was the first out-and-proud gay superhero of mainstream comics (1992, Marvel), and many have followed, with a number of longstanding characters being revealed as LGBTQ+, such as Wonder Woman who, in 2016, was declared to have been bisexual (Wong) —thus, ironically, proving Wertham right (see note 5 above). However, when diversifying proves unprofitable, such mainstream publishers do not hesitate to step back; Philip Lamar Cunningham noted “Marvel’s cancellation of a slew of its titles, many of which featured people of color and women” in 2017, based on vague reports from retailers “that people didn’t want any more diversity” (46).

9 A number of Dykes to Watch Out For strips are accessible on Bechdel’s website: dykestowatchoutfor.com/strip-archive-by-number/.

10 Unlike her ragingly ambitious character Sydney, Bechdel actually received a “MacArthur Genius Grant” in 2014.

11 It opened on Broadway in April 2015 to great acclaim, and went on to win five Tony Awards the same year, including Best Musical.

12 In her 1995 interview with Anne Rubenstein, she explains that Dykes to Watch Out For began “in the margin of a letter to a friend. I drew this whacked-out lesbian holding a coffee pot, and called it ‘Marianne, dissatisfied with the morning brew: Dykes to Watch Out For, plate number 27.’ Even though it was the first one I ever drew. It was just this silly, literally marginal thing” (22; italics mine).

13 Interviewed by Wesley Joost in 2000, Bechdel said that she had been making a living from cartooning for eight years, and declared: “I have an incredibly loyal bunch of fans, and it’s thanks to them that I’ve been able to keep doing [Dykes to Watch Out For]” (36); DiMassa has an episode that relates the fundraising drive that enabled her to continue producing Hothead Paisan (406-408). And, writing about her readers, Bechdel explains that their interest stemmed from a similar desire to her own: “there was an incredibly positive and enthusiastic response to these early cartoons… The quality of the drawing and writing was wildly uneven… but lesbians were so desperate to see a reflection of their lives that it didn’t seem to matter much” (1998a 27).

14 In an interview for the Dyke Strippers collection, DiMassa also explained that creating Hothead helped her deal with her anger, at a time when she was recovering from substance abuse: “Drawing the stuff and being able to look at it helped me a lot. It’s a lot scarier when it’s inside” (Warren 60).

15 For instance, in a 1995 strip, after a page featuring DiMassa and her partner Stace discussing the cartoon on the phone, a caption informs the reader that we are “back in the real world” (376), i.e. that of Hothead, which turns out to be a film directed by “a bearded white thing… with a god complex” (381); the cartoonist eventually gets rid of him and reassures Hothead: “I’ll never give up creative control” (382).

16 Hothead Paisan was in fact first published “as a quarterly comic ‘zine” (Warren 60).

17 Alison Bechdel did take her inspiration from the community she herself was living in when she began Dykes to Watch Out For, a strip which she conceived of as “a kind of women-only space,” but her exclusion of men (including family members, co-workers, etc.) was based less on reality than on a decision to keep the focus on the women (private email, January 2023).

18 As in Dykes To Watch Out For: The Sequel, where Mo is reading a gay paper whose title is alternately “Out Of It” “Out Of Coffee” “Out On A Limb” and “Out Of Our Minds” (16-17).

19 See her “Life Drawing” interview: “the strip is a hybrid, you know. It’s part editorial and part soap opera” (Emmert, n.p.); and in Indelible she describes her series as “half op-ed column, half endless, serialized Victorian novel” (62). Also in Indelible, in the chapter entitled “Condensed Dykes to Watch Out For,” she creates a timeline of the strip and explains: “there’s a line” —which is in fact the first line—“in the chart for real-life events that made their way into the comic strip, like presidential elections, marches on Washington, and the Iran/Contra hearings” (71).

20 Bechdel uses the phrase in her 2008 collection to describe the impression she had when, in her twenties, she first discovered lesbian venues and a lesbian culture in New York City (xii).

21 For instance, in a 1990 strip in which Mo, reading the personal ads in a community paper, expresses her fears that it is being threatened by the increasing number of women seeking “non-dyke” partners and lovers (1992 16).

22 As illustrated by the “Lavender Menace uprising” of 1970 (Heller, 1997 8).

23 Fig. 4 illustrates both the sexism on display in the male space of the city, and Hothead’s disruption of that space: she attacks the group of self-satisfied ad-men by turning their weapon of oppression against them and, appropriating the offensive billboard, she magically transforms the submissive sex-object it displays into a powerful avenger.

24 The labrys logo on Madwimmin’s window suggests that it may have been inspired by Labyris, the lesbian feminist bookstore run and frequented by separatists, which opened in New York City in 1972 and closed in 1977, a few years before Bechdel moved to Manhattan (NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project n.p.).

25 Discussing the strip in Indelible, Bechdel describes it as “a slightly more utopian community than most of us experience” (208).

26 Heller describes the world of Hothead as an “unidentified urban jungle… a hyper-heterosexual dystopia” (1993 30).

27 Bechdel created 19 episodes of Servants, published in the Advocate from March 1989 to August 1990; she had intended to continue the series, but it was cancelled when the magazine dropped most of its comics (Galvan 218).

28 When Mo meets him as he babysits Raffi, he introduces himself as “Carlos, the male role model,” and then tells her that “we practiced standing up to pee and then we redid the dollhouse drapes” (1997 31). And when Sparrow’s male lover Stuart is introduced (at the end of 1997), he immediately creates more occasions for gender blending: after looking through his wallet, where they find his co-op membership card, his therapist’s business card, etc., Ginger and Lois decide that “maybe he is a lesbian” (1998 39).

29 Dysfunctional in, or rendered dysfunctional by, a dysfunctional world, Hothead is “on permanent disability… cause I’m nuts” (62).

30 In an episode where she lists some of the things that “make me lose my temper” (187) in an antiphrastic mode, she draws herself in a straitjacket bouncing about in a padded cell and shouting (about her “problem with men”): “now this one’s really all in my head, hey?” (188).

31 Described by the narrator, in a 1996 episode, as the “oldest extant group household in lesbiandom” (1997 39), it actually survives until the end of the series.

32 It appears in an early episode entitled “The Rule,” where a woman tells a friend: “I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it, who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man. Last movie I was able to see was Alien, the two women in it talk to each other about the monster” (1986 22-23; original emphasis).

33 She complains to her friend Roz: “Some rigid dyke with a pole up her ass once told me I wasn’t a radical lesbian in her book cause I eat meat and talk about sex out loud!” (43; original emphasis).

34 This inscription counters moments of self-doubt, as when she moans “I’m just illegible graffiti on the wall of life” (347); and finds an echo in the episode when she is told she must feel “unshakable” in her skin (303).

35 This idea also runs through much of Bechdel’s work; cf. the introduction to Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (x) which shows Alison in college reading aloud from Adrienne Rich’s On Lies and Silence: “Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images… this will become not merely unspoken, but unspeakable” and so, “armed with … a hazy mandate to speak the unspeakable, I landed in New York City” (xi).

36 The contrast is explicitly, and comically, described by Mo when she tells Clarice and Toni: “It makes me feel kind of schizophrenic… Here we are, going about our little counter-culture lives […] but out there in the real word they’re bombing abortion clinics… holding Nazi and KKK rallies […]. We’re living in a Protestant police state and all I’m worried about is getting a job so I can help perpetuate the paranoid patriarchal death culture” (1988 37; original emphasis).

37 In two 1992 strips, Bechdel refers to the demonstrations against Paul Verhoeven’s film Basic Instinct, which was criticized by LGBTQ+ activists for depicting yet another murderous bisexual / lesbian character (1993 24-27).

38 Which is another form of (deliberate) reversal for Bechdel, who explained in Indelible, that for years, until the day in 1981 when she made the decision to create lesbian characters, she only drew men, which she associates with violence—she talks about being “sustained by the cheerfully violent world of my drawings” as a non-conforming high schooler who resisted being “force[d] back into girldom” (1998a 19).

39 Hothead often evokes the opening line of the famous 1970 pamphlet by the Radicalesbians: “What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion” (1).

40 “ELLES AFFIRMENT TRIOMPHANT / QUE TOUT GESTE EST RENVERSEMENT.”

41 In an article originally published in an issue devoted to the “utopian imaginary” in the journal L’Esprit Créateur in 1994, reprinted as the last chapter of La pensée straight (2001 127-135): “mon colérique elles,” “une entité collective,” “un personnage collectif.”

42 “[É]criture lacunaire,” “fureur,” “il n’y a pas de fluidité, pas de lien entre les séquences. L’effet recherché est de souffle court, de rapidité, comme dans une bataille.”

43 “Leur violence est déchaînée elles sont au paroxysme de leur fureur, elles apparaissent dans leur enthousiasme dévastateur les regards farouches les cheveux hérissés.”

44 “une force telle qu’il puisse faire basculer le pronom ils […] et lui dérober son universalité, au moins dans l’espace de ce texte” (2001 131).

45 With many a twist, obviously, violence in particular, in complete contradiction with Audre Lorde’s pronouncement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” as Heller notes (1993 30).

46 “‘Identity politics,’ as a modernist mode of oppositionality, has essentialist requisites which result in the production of unproblematic essentialized identities as the basis of oppositional consciousness. In [Chela] Sandoval’s framework, however, identity politics becomes a tactical maneuver rather than a single informing strategy; this move allows for the possibility of constructing social movement coalitions built on less-essentialized or strategically essentialized affinities” (Garrison 148).

47 Toward the end of this album, Clarice, visiting the endangered species wing of a natural history museum, is drawn beside Mo in a glass cage with a sign that reads: “Childless N. American Lesbian. Dykus Undomesticus” (2005 140).

48 This episode and Mo’s transphobia are analyzed by Kai Linke in his book on “racism and whiteness in queer US comics” (148).

49 For instance, “Bunns & Noodles” and “medusa.com” are blamed for the demise of Jezanna’s feminist bookshop (2000 34).

50 In a 1993 episode, Mo is enraged by what Bechdel calls the “lesbian chic craze” (1998a 197) and fumes: “Lesbians are replacing step aerobics in the depraved cesspit of mainstream American culture!” (1993 94).

51 In Bechdel’s “The Rule,” these figures appear in film posters in the background, epitomizing the type of fiction that the Bechdel test excoriates.

52 When she seeks her friend Roz’s help to run away from a city in which she feels threatened, the latter replies: “What makes you think it’s gonna be different someplace else? When you get there you’ll be there!!” (135).

53 As Hothead explains to Chicken, “The world sucks, man! Every time ya leave the house ya never know if yer gonna make it back! ‘Specially if yer a girl! or a queer! Or a color!!” (186).

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Table des illustrations

Crédits Fig. 1. © 1993 by Alison Bechdel, Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For, 64. © 1999 by Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan, 243.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/21116/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 365k
Crédits Fig. 2. © 1999 by Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan, 21.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/21116/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 964k
Crédits Fig. 3. © 1999 by Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan, 89.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/21116/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,0M
Crédits Fig. 4. © 1999 by Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan, 87.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/21116/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 521k
Crédits Fig. 5. © 1997 by Alison Bechdel, Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For, 31.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/21116/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 598k
Crédits Fig. 6. © 1999, by Diane DiMassa, cover The Complete Hotheaded Paisan.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/21116/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,7M
Crédits Fig. 7. © 1999 by Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan, 192.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/21116/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 306k
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Référence électronique

Hélène Tison, « Parallel Universes? Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008) and Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (1991-1996) »Transatlantica [En ligne], 1 | 2023, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2023, consulté le 26 septembre 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/21116 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.21116

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Hélène Tison

Université de Tours, EA 6297 Interactions Culturelles et Discursives (ICD)

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