Alice Keeney/For The Washington Post via Getty Images.
Time reported, Sept. 17 that among the 21 recipients of the 2014 MacArthur Prize, Alison Bechdel, the woman who introduced theBechdel test, had been chosen. This fellowship is often referred to as “the genius grant” and is given to people who have exhibited extraordinary achievement, creativity and also potential in the arts, humanities, social issues and the sciences.
The cartoonist has won many other awards including Lambda Awards for Lesbian Memoir, Biography and Humor a GLADD Media Award for Outstanding Comic Book, a Stonewall Book Award for Non-Fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is always working on her art, it seems. Currently, she is at an artist residency in Italy.
Bechdel told the LA Times that the award money from the MacArthur Prize would allow her to “take some risks, do something new -- to really plunge into” her work. The fellowship money will essentially provide a lot of security for the artist and writer.
The call came as a big surprise. Bechdel said that when she realized that she was receiving the prestigious grant from the MacArthur Foundation, it had set her world to “spinning.” She is only the second graphic novelist to have become a MacArthur Fellow.
In 1985, Bechdel introduced an idea that would change the way many viewed women in film and even fiction. The idea was credited to Bechdel’s friend Liz Wallace but became common knowledge shortly after Alison Bechdel featured the idea in her comic Dykes to Watch Out For. The idea states that more often than not, film and fiction feature token female characters who never pass what has become known as the Bechdel or Bechdel/Wallace Test. In order to pass this test, the work in question must feature two women who talk directly to each other about anything other than men for the full length of the film.
*originally published on the now defunct Examiner.com
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