Troubling Boundaries and Negotiating Dominant Culture: Fun Home as a Transmedial Text

Abstract

This article troubles the definitive boundaries between text and paratext, and questions the distinctions made between adaptations and transmedial texts. It conceives of a point of view in which it is possible to experience texts such as Fun Home as a series of distinct, separate texts and (para)texts, while simultaneously comprehending them as a complete, transmedial whole. This point of view is then used to examine the ways in which Fun Home interrogates and uses concepts of high and low culture, and ultimately its role in the negotiation of dominant culture. It brings together theory from adaptation and transmedia studies with theatre and performance studies to begin to theorise the complexities of intertextual connections made by the reader/viewer/spectator of the transmedial text, particularly those aspects of text made available at least in part via new media.

Keywords

• Adaptation
• Alison Bechdel
• Gestus
• Intertextuality
• Paratext