Skip to main contentSkip to navigation
Print subscriptions
Newsletters
Sign in

Alison Bechdel

July 2023

  • Alison Bechdel photographed in Paris in September 2022

    Alison Bechdel: ‘The Bechdel test was a joke... I didn’t intend for it to become a real gauge’

    The US graphic novelist on having her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, turned into an audio series, ​growing up in a funeral home, ​and ​​her famous women-in-film test

June 2023

  • Emily Havea and Maggie McKenna in Sydney Theatre Company 2021 adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.

    Top 10s
    Top 10 Sapphic love stories

    The days when lesbian stories were always racked with anguish are behind us. As Pride month gets under way, here is some rather more joyful reading

May 2022

  • Dave Eggers: ‘Every high school student should have unfettered access to literature’

    Dave Eggers offers to replace books a South Dakota school board wants to pulp

    The writer calls the planned destruction of copies of five titles – by Bernardine Evaristo, Alison Bechdel, Imbolo Mbue and Stephen Chbosky as well as his own – ‘an unconscionable horror’

November 2021

  • The school board at Chancellor High School in Spotsylvania County, Virgnia prepares to hear public comments earlier this month from those who oppose the board's proposal to ban ‘sexually explicit’ books from school libraries.

    US libraries report spike in organised attempts to ban books in schools

  • Alison Bechdel filling in the blacks on her work

    No straight lines: Alison Bechdel and the unstoppable rise of queer comics

May 2021

  • 060 Karelina Clarke and Adam Murphy in Sydney Theatre Company’s Fun Home, 2021. Photo: Prudence Upton ©

    Fun Home review – Alison Bechdel memoir-musical adaptation burrows its way into your heart

  • Bech2

    Yoga, karate, skiing … Alison Bechdel on her lifelong obsession with exercise

September 2019

  • Donna Tartt

    The secret herstory: what happened to Donna Tartt's women?

  • Books of the century so far

    Best culture of the 21st century
    The 100 best books of the 21st century

February 2019

  • Rachael Stirling (left) as Nan in the BBC adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet.

    Top 10s
    From Tales of the City to Tipping the Velvet: top 10 books about coming out

    Novelist Kate Davies picks the best books about a task that never happens just once

December 2018

  • Honor Kneafsey and Emily Mortimer in the 2017 film of The Bookshop.

    Top 10s
    Top 10 fictional booksellers

    From Italo Calvino to Iain Sinclair and Alison Bechdel, literary retailers have been at the centre of some wild, dark dramas

October 2018

  • the 2005 film version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

    Top 10s
    Robin Ince's top 10 books about the human condition

    From Douglas Adams to Oliver Sacks, the standup comedian reveals some of the writers that have helped him try to work out what makes us tick

July 2018

  • Fun Home at the Young Vic

    The week in theatre: Fun Home; One for Sorrow; Undaunted; Windrush: 492 – review

    Acclaimed cartoonist Alison Bechdel comes to life in a remarkable new musical, a stranger menaces liberal London, and a high-wire suffragette thrills

June 2018

  • Kaisa Hammarlund and Brooke Haynes, as young Alison, in Fun Home

    Fun Home review – Bechdel memoir takes stage musical in new directions

    This adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel is a beautifully performed mix of memory-play and strip-cartoon

June 2017

  • Alison Brie in Glow Niecy Nash in Claws Taylor Schilling in Orange is the New Black

    Wonder women: how this summer's TV passes the Bechdel test

    Shows such as Orange is the New Black, GLOW and Claws allow their female characters to do more than just play the girlfriend, signaling important progress

September 2016

  • Nasreen's Secret School by Jeanette Winter

    Banned Books Week 2016: the 10 most challenged titles – in pictures

    As the American Libraries Association’s annual celebration of the right to read kicks off, take a look through the titles most frequently ‘challenged’ in 2015, and some of the reasons behind the calls to ban them

August 2016

  • Gravity (fail) and Twilight Saga (pass) … why the Bechdel test needs revised.

    The women's blog
    Why the Bechdel test doesn’t (always) work

    Samantha Ellis
    If this simple gauge of gender inequality in film has Twilight winning over Gravity, there’s obviously something wrong. As a feminist playwright, I’ve found another solution

March 2016

  • The cast and creative team of Fun Home accepting the award for best musical at the 2015 Tony awards.

    US promotes gay rights at United Nations with Broadway musical visit

    US ambassador takes 17 UN envoys to see award-winning play Fun Home, centred around lesbian character and her gay father

January 2016

  • In 2014 the only woman who made the long list for the Grand Prix Angoulême International Comics Festival was Marjane Satrapi. In 2015, no women made the list.

    The not-so-secret history of comics drawn by women

    The head of the festival that awards comics’ most prestigious prize – the Grand Prix – claimed that women don’t appear in the history of comics. He’s wrong

December 2015

  • A frame from Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying, one of a number of artistically ambitious graphic novels that have come out in recent years.

    So you'd like to get into highbrow comics. Here's where to start

    From superheroes to memoirs, there’s never been a richer time for comic books. But where does one start with a genre that is exploding so quickly?
About 38 results for Alison Bechdel
12
Explore more on these topics