Published online: 26 Mar 2026.

Journal of Lesbian Studies
ISSN: 1089-4160 (Print) 1540-3548 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/wjls20
From the Male Gaze to the Female Gays: Universalizing Lesbian Experiences in Alison
Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For
Cassia Hayward-Fitch
To cite this article: Cassia Hayward-Fitch (26 Mar 2026): From the Male Gaze to the Female Gays: Universalizing Lesbian Experiences in Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For , Journal of Lesbian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2026.2649964
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2026.2649964
© 2026 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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From the Male Gaze to the Female Gays:
Universalizing Lesbian Experiences in Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For
Cassia Hayward-Fitch
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

KEYWORDS
Alison Bechdel; Comics;
Dykes to Watch Out For;
Laura Mulvey; Male Gaze

ABSTRACT
This article argues that Alison Bechdel envisioned a new way of looking at lesbians in her long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008). Through simultaneously universalizing lesbian experiences while celebrating the ways in which her characters’ sexualities rendered them different from each other and from the so-called ‘universal’ white male protagonists of much mainstream media, Bechdel created what I term a ‘universalizing’ gaze. This gaze usurped Laura Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’ through presenting lesbian characters, not as sexual objects drawn for the reader’s pleasure, but as aligned with readers: as the sexual subjects of the comic. This technique allowed Bechdel to portray lesbians as sexual people without hyper-sexualizing them, enabling a diverse group of readers to see themselves represented in the strip.
Introduction
In her long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008), Alison Bechdel pioneered a mode of lesbian storytelling that universalized lesbian experiences. Simultaneously, her work celebrated the ways in which lesbians’ sexualities rendered them distinct from “the zillions of ‘universal’ white male protagonists” found in mainstream media (Bechdel, 1998: 69). In presenting lesbians as ‘universal’ while refuting the possibility of such a positionality, Dykes to Watch Out For countered homonormative values of universalizing queer identities by aligning them with the conventions of straight society. By interrogating normative constructions of universality, this article argues that Bechdel enabled a diverse group of readers— inclusive of lesbians and non-lesbians—to see themselves represented in the strip. To achieve this representation, Bechdel created what I term a ‘universalizing’ gaze, in which lesbian characters were presented, not as sexual objects drawn for the reader’s pleasure, but in alignment with the
CONTACT Cassia Hayward-Fitch c.haywardfitch@gmail.com University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
readers—as the sexual subjects of the art. This positionality undermines the ‘male gaze’ that Laura Mulvey, in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” argues is the narrative norm.
Mulvey’s groundbreaking work uses psychoanalytical theory as a framework to show how, in narrative cinema, the ‘look’ of the camera aligns with that of male protagonists to code male characters for identificatory pleasure and frame female characters as erotic ‘looked-at’ objects. Through the combined gazes of the camera and male protagonists, audiences— regardless of their gender—are primed to identify with male characters and project their sexual fantasies onto female ones, creating an “active/ male, passive/female” dichotomy (Mulvey 2009: 19) . Thus, the combined looks of the camera, male characters, and the audience create a “determining male gaze” (19) that shapes depictions of women in narrative film.
Bechdel undermines this gaze in Dykes to Watch Out For, not by eliminating depictions of lesbian sexuality from her comic, but rather by situating lesbians as simultaneously the bearers of the look and those invited to gaze upon their fellow female characters. This allows her to portray lesbians as sexually active without hyper-sexualizing them, resulting in a ‘universalizing’ gaze. In my conceptualization of this gaze, I draw on Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006), which examines how our experiences of everyday objects and phenomena are normatively constructed by cultural orientations. Thus, to perceive objects from a queer perspective, Ahmed argues, one must become disoriented; that which purposefully disorients us, Ahmed terms a Queer Orientation Device. Bechdel’s universalizing gaze functions in this way, orienting readers to identify with lesbian perspectives by positioning them as the ‘universal’ norm through her character design, plotlines, and worldbuilding.
Although there is a tension in applying Mulvey’s theories to Bechdel’s work—namely, Mulvey’s seminal essay engages only with narrative cin- ema—this article contends that the comics medium is similarly able to create a shifting gaze between ‘camera,’ characters, and audience. Specifically, where Mulvey explains that film controls the dimensions of time and space to create a gaze (26), within this medium, narratives unfold in a single space (the screen) over time. In comics, however, narratives unfold across physical space, and the reader creates a sense of temporality as they assemble the images in sequence. The comics reader consequently has more control over their gaze than the cinematic audience, as they can choose to linger over a panel or to skim it. Thus, in applying Mulvey’s theory to Bechdel’s comic strip, this article does not seek to conflate the two mediums but rather aims to productively show how the specificity of the serial grassroots comic strip allowed Bechdel a space and temporality to achieve what was not then possible in mainstream film: to create an entire storyworld where every pen stroke evidenced a universalizing gaze.
To show how Bechdel achieved a universalizing gaze in her work, this article is divided into three sections that correspond to the three components of Mulvey’s gaze. It begins by examining the look of the ‘camera’— how Bechdel structured her storyworld and character design from a distinctly lesbian positionality. Next, it examines how characters look at each other within the strips, focusing specifically on how the depictions of lesbians looking at lesbians complicate the male looker, erotically coded female look-ee dichotomy discussed by Mulvey. Finally, this paper analyses the fan letters Bechdel received to demonstrate how readers viewed and responded to the strips. Through this structure, the article argues that Bechdel’s narrative approach enabled a diverse group of readers to see themselves represented in her comic while allowing her to celebrate lesbian sexuality without objectifying her characters.
The Look of the ‘Camera’
Because Bechdel found traditional depictions of women in comics “instinctively offensive,” she sought to create an art style in Dykes to Watch Out For “that didn’t preclude their peoplehood” (1998: 16). Similar to film, where Mulvey contends that “women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact” (19), Frederik Bryn Køhlert argues that in comics, female characters are “often reduced to sexualized objects and erotic spectacle for the implied male reader […] [and] the female body is typically put on display for the reader to enjoy, in drawings that routinely but unrealistically exaggerate certain physical features or postures” (Køhlert, 2019: 23–24). Thus, to universalize lesbian experiences, Bechdel developed a narrative and drawing style where lesbians got “to be ‘universal’ the way, historically, men have gotten to be universal” (qtd. in Joost 2018: 38). Through this style, she showed readers that lesbians could be ‘universal,’ while pushing the limits of what ‘universality’ might mean. As she remarked in her keynote speech for the “Queer & Comics” conference held at the Graduate Center of CUNY in 2015:
Occasionally a straight person or a reviewer would say that my work was universal… and I loved that… but it also bugged me because behind that word, I can’t help but sense this lurking fear of difference—it’s conditional approval and I wanted unconditional approval, I wanted to be ok even if I wasn’t like you (n.p.).
Bechdel did not undertake this work in a vacuum, but rather within the broader context of the Women in Comics movement. Stemming from the wider underground comix movement of the 1960s and ‘70s—which alienated female creators due to its sexist nature, causing many to set out to create their own publication spaces and communities (Robbins, 2016: vii)—the genesis of the Women in Comics movement can be traced to the inception of Wimmen’s Comix (1972–1992), which contained the first lesbian comic aimed at a female readership: Trina Robbins’ “Sandy Comes Out” (1972). From the beginning, creators disagreed over how to represent female bodies and sexualities in comics, and a second anthology, Twisted Sisters (1976, 1994), emerged from the rift between Robbins and fellow Wimmen’s Comix contributor Aline Kominsky Crumb over this topic. Moreover, due to the sexist content of many underground comix, alongside larger cultural connotations of comics as a medium by, for, and about men and boys, and the sexual nature of many female comix, female creators were viewed as suspect and potentially masculinist by the Women in Print movement. This led Ms. Magazine to refuse to publish promotional material for Wimmen’s Comix (Kirtley, 2018: 275). Women’s comics thus became a site where the tensions of the wider Sex Wars were rendered extremely visible. Consequently, when Bechdel published her first Dykes to Watch Out For strip in the New York City-based feminist newspaper WomaNews in 1983, she entered a highly charged field where she had to navigate both comics’ misogynistic culture and the sex-negative feminist pushback to this.
Although we predominantly think of how characters are constructed when examining themes of gaze, in comics, as the entire storyworld is created by the artist’s hand, every pen stroke is imbued with authorial intent. Therefore, Bechdel’s gaze is apparent in the entirety of her world-building. Her artwork is inspired by several male artists, including Charles Addams, Robert Crum, Howard Cruse, Edward Gorey, Norman Rockwell, and Hergé (Gardiner, 2010: 82). Specifically, like Hergé’s ligne claire style, Dykes to Watch Out For juxtaposes simple character designs which, Kai Linke argues, resemble the unmarked mental image we hold of ourselves, with meticulously drawn backgrounds that “reflect the fact that we visually perceive the world around us in much more detail than we perceive ourselves” (Linke 2021: 110). Through this style, readers simultaneously imagine themselves embodying the characters and are easily transported into Bechdel’s storyworld. Bechdel navigates the universality/ specificity dichotomy in her strip by never naming its location, describing it only as a mid-sized American city (though it is often thought to have been inspired by Minneapolis, the city where Bechdel was living when she began serializing the comic in 1987). This technique allowed a wide cross-section of readers to imagine that Dykes was set in their city, enabling an intimate collusion with the narrative and thereby augmenting the universality of the strip’s themes. However, this genericism also speaks to a limit of the strip’s universality: while Bechdel’s decision allowed city-dwellers to connect the strip’s locale to their homes, this ability did not extend to readers in small towns and rural areas. This underscores the ‘metronormativity’ (Halberstam, 2005) of queer communities; since rural readers had less access to queer and feminist newspapers and bookstores than those living in cities, they were less likely to be able to access the comic.
The genericism with which Bechdel describes her locale is juxtaposed with the drawing style itself; in particular, her backgrounds often contain legible book titles, newspaper articles, and posters, which Rebecca Beirne argues “create a pictorial record of lesbian texts, trends in gay and lesbian magazines, mainstream attitudes, and political debates” (Beirne 2008: 168). These details both embellish backgrounds and often contain in-jokes accessible only to those with prior understanding of lesbian community concerns. A 1993 strip, “Cultural Exchange” (#155, Bechdel 2008: 99), exemplifies this. The comic takes place in the feminist bookstore Madwimmin Books, whose accuracy is such that Kathleen Liddle suggests it can be used to “catch glimpses of the existence and current plight of feminist bookstores” in the real world (Liddle 2005: 146). This accuracy is illustrated by the drawing of many real lesbian and feminist magazines in this strip: On Our Backs, off our backs, Ms., and Sojourner, to name four examples.
These magazine titles not only serve as decoration but also create humor. Specifically, the strip concerns Lois approaching a male customer reading On Our Backs, an erotic lesbian publication. As Lois feels that this customer is reading the magazine to be sexually aroused, she sets out to make him uncomfortable by asking if she can help him, and proceeding to tell him that the magazine in question is “rather tame” and recommending he peruse instead “a hot photo spread of three totally tattooed babes with strap-ons doing an armpit shaving scene”, causing the man to flee the shop. Over the course of this discussion, the title of On Our Backs changes, first to On Our Racks and then to On Our Rag. This transformation exists on a separate narrative plane from the conversation, and audiences should not read the title as literally changing across panels. Rather, this change illustrates that, where the customer begins by viewing the magazine as a source of titillation, by the end of the conversation, its content terrifies him. That this humor specifically laughs with, not at, lesbian communities emphasizes that Dykes to Watch Out For was both written about lesbians and created from an insider’s perspective that privileged lesbian readers over its accessibility to a wider audience, thereby enhancing the sense of intimacy between these readers and the comic.
In Understanding Comics (McCloud, 1993), Scott McCloud discusses reader/character identification, positioning cartoon characters as ‘universal,’ because, unlike photorealistic images that are not exact self-portraits— where viewers will see the face of another—the cartoon face allows all readers to see themselves represented, enabling the high level of reader investment within comics reading communities (36). However, McCloud’s notion of ‘universality’ is problematic because the comics medium typically depicts womanhood as an add-on to manhood; take the cartoon face he sees as ‘universal,’ then add certain signifiers: long hair, luscious lips, Bambi eyes, and huge curling eyelashes. Moreover, not only is womanhood typically seen in comics iconography as supplementary to ‘universal manhood,’ but, as Bechdel discussed in an interview for the Comics Journal in 1995, “women get represented as a sexualized subset, an aberration” (qtd. in Rubenstein 2018: 26), a fact that is especially true of media depictions of lesbians, as their sexuality is concurrently a point of othering and a site of sexual titillation for male audiences, as illustrated in the strip discussed above. Lesbian readers are consequently unlikely to see themselves reflected in McCloud’s so-called universal face, as the conceits of comics’ language have dictated that their creators rarely draw such images with this identification in mind.1
Bechdel initially circumnavigated this conundrum by drawing only female, predominantly lesbian, characters, creating a visual landscape in which such experiences and bodies were the norm. Moreover, even when she introduced male characters to the strip later in its run, the gender dynamics of traditional comics are complicated by the fact that none of her male characters exhibit stereotypical masculine characteristics. Stuart, for example—the only straight, cisgender adult man to become a mainstay in the cast—is described on Bechdel’s website as “More stereotypically lesbian than… many lesbians” (Bechdel n.d). Thus, the strip threw traditional gender dynamics into relief; unlike the Smurfs, for example, where all the characters except Smurfette are male and the audience is primed to presume new characters to be male unless explicitly told otherwise, in Dykes, Bechdel orients her audience to view her female characters as the standard and the men as the ‘add-ons’ whose genders must be explicitly stated.
Further, Bechdel based her dykes on so-called ‘universal’ male bodies. As a child, she drew only male cartoon characters and struggled to draw women because she did not connect with “the representations of women [she] saw in the world” (Bechdel, 2015, n.p.). However, she eventually found that, by envisaging the women she drew as butch lesbians, it became easier to draw them as she could rely on the skills she had developed to draw men. Accordingly, while Mulvey argues that “As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look” (21), Bechdel shifts this power to her female characters by taking as a starting point bodies already coded for identificatory pleasure and assigning them a female gender.
Bechdel’s resultant art style did not simply reflect her feminist refusal to see womanhood as an add-on; it also reflected the fact that her own presentation of queer womanhood included little of the “stuff added on” typically used to represent women in comics (Bechdel, 2015, n.p.). It was consequently not only the portrayal of women in general that Bechdel sought to challenge through her art style; she specifically wanted to redefine comics’ representations of women to include her own experience. Because of her deliberate refusal to conform to stereotypical representations of womanhood in her work, while Mulvey notes that men are typically the assumed “look-ers” in media, regardless of who reads Dykes to Watch Out For, it is absent of the male gaze, instead embodying a universalizing positionality.
Lesbians Looking at Lesbians
Despite Bechdel’s aim to present her dykes as the subjects, not the objects of her art, she never shied away from drawing lesbians in sexual ways. In many respects, Dykes’ lesbian themes allowed Bechdel to create sexually explicit comics without facing the type of criticism that creators like Kominsky Crumb encountered across their careers, as, devoid of men, the argument that Bechdel’s characters were performing for a male gaze could not be readily applied. Moreover, where many straight female comics artists faced criticism that their sexually explicit material appealed to male readers, rendering them complicit in perpetuating the objectification of women, because Bechdel published predominantly in LGBTQ+ and feminist papers, her sexual material was clearly aimed at women and gay men. Thus, Bechdel’s depictions of female sexualities were disconnected from straight men, male attraction, and a desire to appeal to a male gaze. This speaks to the ways a lesbian gaze complicates the rigid distinction between identificatory and erotic pleasure implicit in Mulvey’s “active/male, passive/female” dichotomy. Where a straight gaze assumes a reader will identify with one gender and desire the other (in binary terms), a lesbian gaze allows audiences to simultaneously desire and desire to be a character, or switch between the two perspectives across a narrative, enabling the drawn female body to simultaneously embody the “look-er” and connote a possibly erotic “to-be-looked-at-ness” (19). Accordingly, in her comic, Bechdel usurps the binaries on which Mulvey’s male gaze depends, since here, it is lesbians, not straight men, who are actively invited to look at other lesbian bodies on intra- and extradi- egetic levels.
Bechdel’s knowledge of the narrative possibilities unlocked by such a positionality regarding the portrayal of lesbian sexuality is seen from her first published Dykes cartoon, “Twyla is appalled to learn that Irene is a morning person: Dykes to Watch Out For Plate No 19” (Bechdel, 1983: 16). The strip depicts a wide-awake naked woman (Irene) jumping into bed with the still sleeping Twyla—eggs and orange juice in hand—the morning after their first night together. This image invites readers to position themselves as either Twyla or Irene and reflect on past sexual encounters, assigning lovers to either of the two roles. Through this, Bechdel examines the dynamics within lesbian relationships while refusing the binaries (top/bottom, ‘man’/’woman’) typically associated with lesbian sex, instead creating a new, humorous binary of morning person/night owl. Through this framework, she engages her readers in a discussion of lesbian sexuality that refuses to participate in potentially objectifying paradigms that focus on sex acts, encouraging them to examine instead how sexuality interacts with other aspects of women’s personhood.
Representing sex is vital to Dykes to Watch Out For’s aim of universalizing lesbian experiences; because it is for this aspect of their lives that sapphic women are at once othered and hypersexualized by mainstream media, it is the experience about which it is most vital to challenge societal assumptions. The inclusion of nudity and sexually explicit content in Dykes to Watch Out For is thus just as crucial to Bechdel as her aim that lesbian readers identify with her cast of characters. She demonstrated this in her “Queer & Comics” keynote; when asked by an audience member why Dykes was not published in their local newspaper, Bechdel explained that the paper in question would not print her sex scenes, and “lesbians do have sex”, so she refused to provide them a censored version (Bechdel, 2015, n.p.). Moreover, despite being contacted by Universal Press Syndicate in September 1993 to create a mainstream comic with LGBTQ+ content inspired by her successful Dykes series, Bechdel declined the offer because, as she discussed in an interview the following year, she would have had to tone down her sexual content and, “I’m not interested in writing for a mainstream audience, I’m really happy [as I am]. I can draw naked people. I can write about politics” (qtd. in Sewell, 2001: 254). The queer and feminist newspapers in which Bechdel was published therefore correctly oriented her readers’ perspectives on her comic; as she published only in papers with similar values, they served as semiotic thresholds that primed readers to respond to the strips with their own universalizing gazes.
The large cast of characters engendered by Dykes to Watch Out For’s twenty-five-year run allowed Bechdel to show that there was no single way in which lesbians engaged in sex, refuting essentializing notions. She demonstrates this both across strips and within single episodes; for example, “Love and Work” (strips #290 and #291 from 1998 2008: 202–03), features almost the entire cast of the serial and focuses on the myriad ways they engage with their sexualities from fantasizing, through masturbation, to partnered sex with and without the use of sex toys and role-play scenarios. Across the two-part episode, Bechdel does not create a hierarchy between these different sex acts but rather uses her comic’s structure to create vignettes that showcase the humor to be found in the ways her characters do (and sometimes fail to) participate in sex.
Bechdel’s ability to create anti-objectifying sexually explicit lesbian content is most apparent in the “bonus content” she produced for the comic book versions of her work from More Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel, 1988)—the first collection of the serialized strips—onwards. Where most queer and feminist newspapers were willing to publish images of implied sex, assumed nudity and naked breasts, the majority would not allow sexually explicit drawings of genitalia, limiting Bechdel’s ability to depict sex in the syndicated strips. Therefore, when the opportunity to create comics in a format with no content constraints presented itself, Bechdel chose to write a story called “Down to the Skin,” the entirety of which focuses on her characters, Mo and Harriet, having sex for the first time.
Told over twenty-six pages, this narrative depicts realistic naked bodies, including mons pubis and pubic hair, and specifically details how lesbians might engage in sex. Despite its subtitle, “A Mildly Erotic Epilogue,” though the strip features nudity, it never makes a spectacle of its characters’ bodies. This complicates the erotic function Mulvey claims women play in narratives for both male characters and the audience; although both Mo and Harriet are sexual on an intradiegetic level, neither functions “as erotic object[s] for the spectator” (20). Instead, the narrative focuses on the clumsy nature of the encounter, with many humorous moments, such as when Mo pauses the experience to remove her socks as she feels silly being completely naked save for them, or when she forgets to remove her glasses before going down on Harriet in the concluding panel. This again speaks to the push-pull of ‘universalization’ across Bechdel’s work; in drawing women whose bodies do not resemble those represented in most mainstream media, who engage in sexual activities seldom seen in any media outside of pornography—where it is typically aimed at straight men, not queer women—Bechdel at once universalizes such experiences while refusing homonormative values of proving her characters’ worth through emphasizing their compliance to socio-cultural norms. Through Bechdel’s privileging of an examination of her characters’ anxieties and emotions over a sensationalization of their bodies within her sex scenes, she once again evidences a universalizing gaze through which her characters can be sexual while resisting objectification.
The Look of the Audience
It was not Bechdel’s gaze alone, but this gaze combined with that of her readership that shaped the strips’ ability to celebrate lesbian sexuality without objectifying its characters since, as Johnathan Flowers argues, “the reader brings with them the totality of their lived experience in the act of reading, an experience that informs not only what is being read, but how it is read” (Flowers, 2020, p. 208; emphasis in original). Lesbian readers in particular, have access to a specific body of knowledge and subcultural experience, which gives them, Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman maintain, “a different perspective on the erotic images in question” (Evans & Gamman, 1995, p. 35). That Bechdel drew her characters in sexual lights was as important to many of her readers as it was to Bechdel herself, with one fan writing on October 4th, 1991, to praise the strip for being “clever, intelligent, hilarious, heartwarming, sexy, creatively drawn, and challenging” (Fan letter to Alison Bechdel 1991), and another from October 1995 writing to say they thought it was “witty, irreverent, hip, well-drawn, sexy, political, satirical and just plain funny” (Fan letter to Alison Bechdel 1995). That both fans list Dykes’ “sexiness” alongside many other aspects they enjoyed speaks to its uniqueness as one of the only pieces of media wherein readers could find visual representations of all aspects of lesbian lives, from the clothes they might wear, through the food they eat, to the ways they engage in sex.
Bechdel’s readers’ ability to see themselves in her characters was heightened by the diversity of representation across the strips, both in the ways characters had sex, discussed above, and in many other elements of their characterization. Dykes’ characters encompass a diverse spectrum of races, body types, ages, religions, hairstyles, facial features, fashion choices, and disabilities. Because of the strip’s diversity, many fans wrote to say how much they identified with its characters, with one reader from September 11th, 1997, going as far as to assert, “I think every queer girl, lesbian, whatever—can imagine themselves a character in your strip” (Fan letter to Alison Bechdel 1997).
However, though Bechdel strove for inclusivity, as in her decision to generalize the comic’s setting, there were limits to the characters’ universality. As Linke observes, although there are many Characters of Color, “Dykes is clearly written from a white perspective, and the reader perceives the world of the comic through this white lens” (Linke, 2021, p. 118). This perspective is explained not only by Bechdel’s positionality as a white author, but specifically by the fact that she based all the main characters, regardless of race, on herself:
Mo is my guilt-ridden, liberal superego. Lois represents my secret desire to be one of the cool girls. Clarice is my driven, ambitious, workaholic side; Toni the flip domestic side. Sparrow is the part of me that wonders if maybe my chakras are blocked, and
Ginger the part of me that alternates between thinking I’m a genius and thinking I’m an utter fraud, all the while procrastinating hopelessly (Bechdel 1998: 62).
While this self-identification means Bechdel’s characterizations do not rely on racial stereotypes, as Linke further explains, it means that Dykes “portrays racial difference as an issue of superficial, no more than skindeep diversity, leaving out all aspects of racial difference that have to do with power differences and the uneven distribution of life chances” (135).2
That Bechdel based many of her characters’ personalities on her own traits did not, however, prevent racialized readers from identifying with them. For example, a young Latina woman wrote on January 12th, 2017 to say, “I find a little part of myself in each of the DTWOF characters: my workaholic side in Clarice, my Latina heritage in Toni ［…］, my spiritual side in Sparrow, my procrastination in Ginger, and finally, my political views and my partial negativity in Mo” (Fan letter to Alison Bechdel 2017). Therefore, though there were limits to the strip’s universality, what Bechdel achieved in her characterization was, as Gabrielle N. Dean argues, to create
a cast of stereotypes: none of them is complete in her own right, but together they produce a puzzle-picture of the community of choice. The reader’s identificatory pleasure depends not on her assimilation of any one character as an ideal ［…］. Rather, the reader’s pleasure lies in identifying with the ‘whole’ body, with the notion of family queerly and politically recast, and in her concomitant ability to identify its operative parts (Dean, 1997, p. 212).
This is again reflected in the fan letters; as a reader wrote on December 27th, 2020, “Your characters feel both specific and part of something larger, they are their own people and yet they come together so well” (Fan Letter to Alison Bechdel 2020).
Such feelings were not exclusively expressed by lesbian readers who found direct representation in the strip: the Smith University archive contains fan letters from readers of many different genders, sexualities, and nationalities. Many gay men, for example, also read and enjoyed the strip—although if the archived letters can be taken as exemplary of Dykes total readership, not in as large numbers as women. These men, like Bechdel’s lesbian readers, wrote to express their joy in seeing themselves and their communities represented in her work. For example, a Canadian fan wrote on May 20th, 1990, to say,
The thing that amuses & delights me as a gay man is that your strips seem to reflect the reality of my life & circle of friends more closely than a lot of gay male cartooning. This is not to say that we’re dykes in training, but rather I think it’s your knack of capturing the delights of the world of gay political organizing as it is shared by a group of loving friends (Fan letter to Alison Bechdel 1990).
These sentiments further complicate the male gaze, as male readers here identify with female characters, an identification that is antithetical to how Mulvey argues female audiences engage with films. Thus, in Dykes, Bechdel did not create a way of looking at and engaging with characters that was open only to queer women but rather oriented a vast demographic of readers toward multiple, competing semi-identifications.
As Ramzi Fawaz describes with reference to another queer serial, Tales of the City, because the type of character relationship engendered “is neither symmetrical identification nor disidentification, but what we might call a sense of adjacency, a feeling of recognizing particular kinds of people one might have ‘hung out’ around, or evolved and explored new possibilities with” (Fawaz, 2022, p. 244), readers’ connection to the serial is created not through their bond with a singular character but rather with a community of them, as illustrated in the fan letters above. Because each character is both aligned with and distinct from the reader, they are simultaneously an “everydyke” and a specific character, allowing Bechdel to concurrently celebrate the diversity of lesbian experiences while universalizing them. In a comic strip like Dykes, this sense of character-adjacency is complemented by the visual aspects, whereby readers can physically see the ‘kinds’ of people they might recognize from their real lives alongside detailed depictions of lesbian subcultural spaces, including the vegetarian Café Topaz and Madwimmin’s Books.
Bechdel’s readers not only wrote to say how much they enjoyed her strip; many also offered suggestions for future plotlines and character developments. For example, on the 15th of December 1988, a fan wrote to suggest that she add, “a dyke in a wheelchair, or a blind dyke with a cane or a dog, or a deaf dyke signing to another dyke” (Fan letter to Alison Bechdel 1988). Shortly after this interaction, Bechdel introduced Thea, a physically disabled woman who sometimes uses a wheelchair and other times crutches, to her recurring cast. Bechdel’s inclusion of readers’ suggestions in Dykes to Watch Out For adds a dimension to its construction of a gaze absent from Mulvey’s analysis. Where Mulvey argues that the look of the camera dictates the look of the audience “as it watches the final product” (26), because they engage with a finished product, this audience is unable to influence the look of the camera. Conversely, Dykes’ seriality, combined with Bechdel’s self-syndication to over two hundred grassroots presses—which, Margaret Galvan argues, facilitated “close communication with each periodical” (Galvan, 2018, p. 412)—and her efforts to increase the diversity of her representation through reader interaction, created a positive feedback loop through which audiences shaped Bechdel’s gaze while her comic and its publication spaces, in turn, shaped how they viewed her work. Thus, Bechdel and her audience co-constructed a universalizing gaze that shaped how characters looked and looked at each other. These images then influenced how future audiences perceived the comic, prompting them to write to Bechdel, thereby perpetuating the feedback loop.
In conclusion, Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For evidences a universalizing gaze in the interplay between Bechdel’s art style, her characters’ gazes, and the ways in which readers viewed and responded to her work. These three elements do not exist independently; instead, by juxtaposing simply drawn lesbian characters with detailed backgrounds, Bechdel orients her readers to see bodies typically presented in the comics medium as specific and ‘other’ as universal and aligned with Mulvey’s male “look-er.” Her strips’ placement in feminist and LGBTQ+ papers also correctly oriented her readers to respond to her comic from a similarly universalizing perspective. Concurrently, readers’ letters informed future episodes and shaped Bechdel’s character and narrative decisions. Through the communal deployment of a universalizing gaze, Bechdel’s strip celebrated both the aspects of lesbian life that set her community apart from the mainstream and those that made them similar. She thereby made her lesbians ‘universal’ while refuting the possibility of such a positionality; as she asks her readers on the concluding page of the “Cartoonist’s Introduction” to The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, are lesbians “essentially the same? Or essentially different?” (Bechdel, 2008: xviii).
Notes
1.		The limits of comics’ ‘universality’ are not true only of female readers; Johnothan Flowers discusses how Black readers are similarly unlikely to see themselves within ‘universal’ faces (2020), and Neil Cohn shows how factors including age, nationality, and neurodiversity all impact comics reading (Cohn, 2021).
2.		While there are no comic strips by Women of Color focused on lesbian characters that mirror Dykes in terms of length and the extent of syndication—speaking to the ways Bechdel’s class and racial privileges influenced her success—readers might be interested in comics such as Tee Franklin and Jenn St-Onge’s Bingo Love (Franklin & St-Onge, 2018) for examples of how Black authors portray race in comics with lesbian protagonists.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.
Notes on contributor
Cassia Hayward-Fitch (she/her) is a visiting fellow at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, from whom she received a PhD in American Studies in June 2025. Her doctoral research was funded by a University of East Anglia Doctoral Studentship in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is the 2023 recipient of the International Comic Arts Forum’s Lent Scholarship in Comics Studies. She has been published in the International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 25, No.1, Spring/Summer 2023, and has upcoming publications in Closure (Spring 2026) and in the edited collection Disability in Comics and Graphic Narratives, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.
ORCID
Cassia Hayward-Fitch http://orcid.org/0009-0009-6175-3827
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