Teaching Fun Home as Public History
I assigned Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic for the first time in Public History and my students are reading it now. It is an amazing graphic novel that just got turned into a musical. I assigned it because I wanted to teach something about identity as it relates to the social frameworks of memory and to connect it to the ways in which we localize memories through landscapes, objects and images. I also wanted to do something on family history. So, what do I want students to get out of this reading experience? What questions do I hope they ask and explore as they read the text and examine the graphics? How do I encourage them to think beyond the coming of age/coming out/coming to terms with a gay dad stories to think about the structure of the text and the relationships between memory and identity? The things that made the book so fascinating to me actually focused around Bechdel's literary relationship with her father --- she experienced the