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There are times when being a member of the The phenomenon shirt also I will do this LGBTQ+ community—and a lesbian in particular—feels like an Easter-egg hunt for representation. Queer women are used to mining everything from a cryptic celebrity Instagram to the discography of Taylor Swift for clues that someone in the public eye might be one of us, and to be honest, the constant hustle to be seen—especially for lesbians who don’t fit the skinny, white, femme, upper-middle-class, L Word mold—can be exhausting.
All that might explain why the The phenomenon shirt also I will do this work of an artist and writer like Alison Bechdel feels so pivotal. Bechdel has been woven into the fabric of lesbian cultural identity ever since she started publishing the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983, and at no point in her decades-long career has she ever compromised on directly addressing her sexuality. To understand Bechdel as a chronicler of lesbian issues only, though, is to sell her short; the exploration of queer identity makes up just one part of her broad oeuvre, along with the family trauma she examined in the 2006 graphic memoir (and later Broadway musical) Fun Home, the psychoanalysis she delved into in 2012’s companion piece Are You My Mother?, and—most recently—the lifelong obsession with exercise that she crystallizes in next month’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
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