Dykes to Watch Out For
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Dykes To Watch Out For (sometimes DTWOF) is a comic strip by Alison Bechdel. The strip began in 1983.
DTWOF documents the life, loves, and politics of a fairly diverse group of characters (most of them lesbians) living in a medium-sized city in the United States, featuring both humorous soap-opera storylines and biting topical commentary.
According to Bechdel, her strip is "half op-ed column and half endless, serialized Victorian novel". Characters react to the contemporary events, including going to the Michigan Womyn's Festival, Gay Pride parades and protest marches and having heated discussions about day-to-day events and political issues. The strip is one of the most successful and longest-running queer comic strips.
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[edit] Main characters
Some readers have speculated that the town the main characters live in is based on Minneapolis, Minnesota. The central characters include:
- Monica Testa (or Mo), the central character, a politically committed lesbian feminist with a tendency to whine, previously a worker at Madwimmin Bookstore while earning a library science degree, then working briefly at Bounders Books and Muzak (a parody of Borders Books and Music) before getting a job as a reference librarian;
- Lois McGiver, a sex-positive activist, drag king, and housemate to Ginger and Sparrow (with whom she had an affair when both were in their twenties), currently dating single mother Jasmine, mother of transgender teenager Janis (originally introduced as Jonas);
- Ginger Jordan, a struggling academic and English professor at the Buffalo Lake State University, currently dating Samia, a Syrian Muslim chemist in a marriage of convenience to a man;
- Sparrow Pidgeon (birth name Prudence), a women's shelter director and New Ager-turned-atheist, who identifies herself as a "bisexual lesbian" and is currently involved with a straight Jewish male activist and stay-at-home dad, Stuart Goodman, with whom she has had a child, Jiao Raizel (or J.R.);
- Clarice Clifford, a workaholic environmental lawyer (and Mo's lover in college), her wife Toni Ortiz, an accountant and homemaker, and their teenage son Rafael Clifford-Ortiz (or Raffi);
- Sydney Krukowski, an amoral yuppie Women's Studies academic with a compulsive spending habit, Mo's lover and recently a breast cancer survivor; and
- Jezanna Ramsay (formerly Alberta), manager of the late gay and lesbian bookstore Madwimmin Books, which also employed Mo, Lois, and Thea, a Jewish lesbian, and former lover of Sydney, with multiple sclerosis. Since the closure of Madwimmin due to financial pressures, these two characters seldom appear.
Only some of the characters' surnames are known, since such names appear only when it is appropriate to the dialogue (when Ginger and Sydney, as college instructors, are addressed as "Professor Jordan" and "Dr. Krukowski," for instance) and are not established from the beginning.
[edit] Books
The strip has had a number of collections, including:
- Dykes to Watch Out For (1986)
- More Dykes to Watch Out For (1988)
- New, Improved! Dykes to Watch Out For (1990)
- Dykes to Watch Out For: The Sequel (1992)
- Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For (1993)
- Unnatural Dykes to Watch Out For (1995)
- Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For (1997)
- The Indelible Alison Bechdel: Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For (1998)
- Split-Level Dykes to Watch Out For (1998)
- Post-Dykes to Watch Out For (2000)
- Dykes and Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out For (2003)
- Invasion of the Dykes To Watch Out For (2005)
The first of these collections contains miscellaneous, individual strips; the serialized story centered around Mo begins halfway through the second collection, "More Dykes to Watch Out For".
[edit] Literary references
As with Bechdel's popular autobiographical novel, Fun Home, DTWOF includes many literary allusions. For example, the name chosen for Sydney Krukowski (one of the very few DTWOF characters who is not politically correct) references Stanley Kowalski, a character from A Streetcar Named Desire. Sydney also drinks Loch Lomond, a favorite drink of two characters from The Adventures of Tintin.
[edit] Contributions to popular culture
The strip popularized what is now known as the Bechdel Test, also named the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel's Law. Bechdel credits Liz Wallace for the test. The test appears in a 1985 strip entitled The Rule in which a character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:
- It has to have at least two women in it, who
- talk to each other about,
- something besides a man.
