Quick – name a film that 1) has two female characters 2) who talk to each other 3) about something other than a man? Tougher than you might think, right? If you’ve seen this quiz before, thank Alison Bechdel – artist, feminist icon, and newly minted MacArthur Genuis. She’s in good company. Her fellow Genius award winners – 21 in total– include Act of Killing documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer, civil rights lawyer Mary Bonuato, and saxophonist Steve Colman.

The now-famous Bechdel Test caused a stir when it was first posted as “The Rule” in cartoonist Bechdel’s comic strip “Dykes To Watch Out For” back in 1985. But it was the Internet that gave her posits on women in film a new life when Feminist Frequency posted a piece on “The Rule” to its YouTube channel in 2009. This reignited a conversation about the portrayal of women in the media that moved quickly out of gender studies classrooms and into mainstream coverage.

The popularity of the Bechdel Test spawned a host of trend stories from across the entertainment world—headlines like “10 Surprising Films That Pass the Bechdel Test” and “Superhero Movies That Pass the Bechdel Test” spring up every so often and her theory has almost become a household term, with critics putting video games and music videos to the test and even adapting the rules to analyze other underrepresented minorities in the media. In a move cheered by women in film proponents, a movie theater chain in Sweden recently announced they would mark films with a Bechdel Test “seal of approval.”

Bechdel has been hesitant in the past about her association with the now-famous test. On her blog, she writes that it’s not her idea alone – it’s a distilled interpretation of a chapter in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which discusses a (fictional) novel that features two female protagonists. “I am pretty certain that my friend Liz Wallace, from whom I stole the idea in 1985, stole it herself from Virginia Woolf. Who wrote about it in 1926,” Bechdel writes.

She also addresses her role in the larger discussion of women’s representation in media:

I have always felt ambivalent about how the Test got attached to my name and went viral. (This ancient comic strip I did in 1985 received a second life on the internet when film students started talking about it in the 2000′s.) But in recent years I’ve been trying to embrace the phenomenon. After all, the Test is about something I have dedicated my career to: the representation of women who are subjects and not objects. And I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago. But I just can’t seem to rise to the occasion of talking about this fundamental principle over and over again, as if it’s somehow new, or open to debate. Fortunately, a younger generation of women is taking up the tiresome chore. 

So perhaps the MacArthur award of $625,000 will allow us to see more exciting work from Bechdel and allow her to be recognized in the various art forms she pursues, and not only the test that bears her name. Her work since 1985 includes the continuation of her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For through 2008 and then two graphic novels – Are You My Mother (2012) and Fun Home (2006), which was made into a musical at the Public Theater in New York.

By Laura Hertzfeld

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