Queer as Folklore: How Fun Home Destabilizes the Metronormative Myth

Queer as Folklore: How Fun Home Destabilizes the Metronormative Myth Imagine a queer person.Imagine what they look like and how they move through space.Now imagine the spaces they move through: where they work, where they go, and where they live.You are constructing a queer geography around your individual, who likely moves through crowded streets, coffee shops, concerts, and dark bars illuminated by weak neon.Our communal conceptualization of queer experience in modern-day America, especially as recorded in queer media, skews heavily towards urban geographies.The constituent "imaginative processes associated with gay migration from rural and suburban areas to cities" (Weston 256) continually construct and reinforce a hegemonic "discourse of metronormativity" (Sander 28) from which an imaginary narrative has emerged.The narrative mythologizes urban/rural as a strict binary and systematically privileges the urban above the rural.After constructing a theoretical foundation, this paper will explore the metronormative myth in lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic .The metronormative myth teaches us that queerness and rurality are not just incompatible but antithetical.Its omnipresent "clarion call" (Weston 253) to cosmopolitan refuges like New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle associates each half of the urban/rural binary with the dominant and subservient halves of auxiliary binaries.Take, for example, the private/public, protected/exposed, social/family and cultural/useful pairs in Foucault's "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias" (1967).Queering Foucauldian theory to describe the metronormative myth means naming the urban as the imagined sexual geography where queer folk have "found their natural ground and stability" and the rural as the urban's inverse where they have "been put