TO WATCH OUT FOR
Finitude cannot measure what cannot be confined, and limitations of consistency are to be construed not as a rigid regulus but as a Lesbian rule.
—J. R. Lucas, “The Lesbian Rule”
I
N THE “Cartoonist’s Introduction” to The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, a harried avatar of Alison Bechdel reflects on the origins of her long-running, cult favorite comic strip as she navigates the“archives” of the strip, a cavernous room filled with enormous stacks of file cabinets. As Bechdel’s avatar rifles through the papers, rum-maging through VHS tapes and boxes of slides marked “Precambrian DTWOF,” “Mesozoic DTWOF,” “Cenozoic DTWOF,” and “Big Bang DTWOF,” she ruminates on her original goals for the strip: “I saw my cartoons as an antidote to the prevailing image of lesbians as warped, sick, humorless, and undesirable. Or supermodel-like Olympic pen-tathletes, objective fodder for the male gaze. By drawing everyday lives of women like me, I hoped to make lesbians more visible not just to ourselves but to everyone” (xv). While Bechdel initially felt that lesbians were “essentially . . . well . . . more highly evolved”
(xv), her plan to present their “essential” superiority was ultimately doomed, for, “inducing the general from the particular doesn’t really hold water. Let alone millions of lesbians. My tidy schema went all to hell in the nineties. Lesbians could be reactionary provocateurs.
And colonels. Arch conservatives and Neocons could be gay. Oh, and
apparently no one was essentially anything” (Essential xvi). Thus, as the strip evolved over time, Bechdel came to a new understanding of the diversity of the “dykes” she portrayed and the culture of friends they developed. As Bechdel’s character ruminates on the collapse of her plan during her prefatory monologue she becomes increasingly rattled, her eyebrows raised with concern.
In the final panels of the “Cartoonist’s Introduction,” Bechdel looks out at the reader from the depths of her archives; she is sur-rounded by files, books, photos, boxes, a record player, and a slide projector, as well as various insects pinned to the wall and a tabby cat clawing at her leg. From the clutter, the figure breaks the fourth wall and appears to toss a copy of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For directly to the reader, asking, “Have I churned out episodes of this comic strip every two weeks for decades merely to prove that we’re the same as everyone else? Here, you decide. Essentially the same? Or essentially different?” (xviii). The questions seem to haunt Bechdel’s figure, who invites the reader to “make yourselves comfort-able. Clearly, I need to rethink this thing” (xviii). She then turns away from the spectators, departing the archive in the final two panels, stating that she must go “back to the drawing board. Most discon-certing” (xviii). Ultimately, she is seen in silhouette at the darkened threshold of a doorway, ostensibly a passageway back to the world apart from her collection—from this collection—swearing comically,
“&$@#.” Bechdel thus invites the reader to draw his or her own con-clusions on the experiment by reading the book, for she, playfully and begrudgingly, must “go back to the drawing board,” continu-ing, explicitly, to draw this world she’s created, even though she has come to no final determinations on the legacy of her long-running comic strip. In this meditation, Bechdel contemplates her goals and her (supposed) failings for the strip—to reveal the veracity of lesbian nature, a goal that eventually changed and evolved into something else—a study of a wider culture, a bringing together of many individ-ual storylines into a larger, more telling narrative of human nature.
This process of bringing together disparate parts that don’t quite fit into other contexts, and shaping them into a more cohesive, more powerful whole finds a somewhat surprising corollary in the archi-tecture of Ancient Greece, and in particular the isle of Lesbos, where the builders there mastered the art of bringing together irregular stones to form a consistent structure, developing a style that came to be known as “Lesbian masonry.” In fact, the builders of Lesbos were
so well known for working with these nonconforming building mate-rials that they developed a special tool, a flexible ruler known as “the Lesbian rule,” which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was made of lead and could be “bent to fit what was being measured.”
The Lesbian rule was so well known in Ancient Greece that Aristo-tle found the tool a useful analogy in his discussion of epieikeia, or equity, in his treatise Nichomachean Ethics:
When the law speaks universally, then, and a case arises on it which is not covered by the universal statement, then it is right, where the legislator fails us and has erred by oversimplicity, to correct the omission—to say what the legislator himself would have said had he been present, and would have put into his law if he had known.
Hence the equitable is just, and better than one kind of justice—not better than absolute justice but better than the error that arises from the absoluteness of the statement. And this is the nature of the equi-table, a correction of law where it is defective owing to its univer-sality. In fact, this is the reason why all things are not determined by law, that about some things it is impossible to lay down a law, so that a decree is needed. For when the thing is indefinite the rule is also indefinite, like the leaden rule used in making the Lesbian moulding; the rule adapts itself to the shape of the stone and is not rigid, and so too the decree is adapted to the facts. It is plain, then, what the equitable is, and that it is just and better than one kind of justice. (Book V)
Aristotle thus urges his listeners to understand the importance of epieikeia, or equity, apart from universality, from a singular law or dominant narrative. True justice is not marked by absolutes, but by flexibility and by understanding individual experiences and lives.
Equity must “adapt” to circumstances, as the Lesbian rule measures the reality of what exists, in all of its roughness and variability. In her article, “Universal Justice and Epieikeia in Aristotle,” Annie Hewitt notes that for Aristotle, epieikeia was an important concept, a correc-tive for overarching laws that failed to account for individuals:
As laws are written in ‘universal terms’ they offer inadequate guid-ance for those difficult cases that do not fall neatly under one gen-eral rule or another. While Aristotle is clear that written laws are essential to secure justice in a political community, he is quick to
recognize that alone they are insufficient to achieve this aim. Bridg-ing the gap between legal principle and concrete situation is Aristo-tle’s concept of epieikeia: that virtue which “corrects” the law where it falls short. (115)
While Aristotle’s words are far removed from Alison Bechdel’s archives, could her comic strip “bridge a gap” between an abstract, dominant narrative of gender identities and the practicality of actual lives? I would argue that, as the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1970s waned, Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For repre-sented a form of epieikeia as exemplified by the Lesbian rule, a flex-ible concept of equity that countered the essential, universal rule, and a binary, heteronormative standard, molding to fit the context of the actual world in all of its diversity. DTWOF offered an embod-ied performance that gently shaped readers’ perceptions, disidenti-fying with stereotypical heteronormative narratives of community and rendering a perspective of intersectional feminism that embraced individuals and their lived experiences. This chapter examines the history of DTWOF before exploring the ways in which it enacts and rebels against earlier conceptions of feminism, proposing tenets of a more diverse and more representative intersectional feminism. The focus then turns to queer theory, studying the ways in which DTWOF presents figures that disidentify with stereotypes, before finally turn-ing to the evolution of the strip over time, and the ways in which it came to celebrate equity through a wider, more varied perspective.