Resistance To Gender Norms In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Bechdel’s fight for her gender identity was a constant in Fun Home, as was Bruce’s attempts to force femininity onto her, driven by his need to express his gender identity vicariously through her. Bechdel’s writing explains the obvious expressions of gender identity such as page 14 when Bruce decorated Bechdel’s room femininely despite her protests, prompting her to claim that her house was going to be made of all metal. But the illustrations depict the less obvious manifestations of gender identity. On page 95, we see Bechdel calling herself a, “connoisseur of masculinity,” with a Western film playing while her father is in the background arranging flowers (Bechdel, 95).

She looked at herself as a woman and preferred to be with straight men and often got discriminated against for this. She states, “My father hated the way I was…his whole side hated the way I was,” (Berendt 105). She talks about how horrified they were when she arrived at her father’s funeral in a dress and a boy on her arm. She also discusses the difficulties she faced dating black men. Once they discovered her “T” they were often disgusted, one even held a gun to her head. This was her reasoning behind only dating straight white men, because they were often accepting. Because homosexuality was viewed as wrong and they were often harshly discriminated against, not many of them made it known.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is an autobiography written by Alison Bechdel. The graphic novel takes its readers through Alison Bechdel’s childhood using engaging diction and detailed drawings. One of the big themes of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is the discovery of one’s sexual orientation. Over the course of her life, Alison Bechdel eventually comes to the realization that she is a lesbian. Ultimately, Alison Bechdel uses this novel to recount her experience of events that helped to shape her personal identity, which resulted in a transformation of the way she sees herself. In the end, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a wonderful narrative that shows its readers the complexity of personal identity, and how things like love, the values of

In the following essay, I shall be exploring the representation of identity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, mainly through a postcolonial feminist lens. My analysis will focus on Bruce and Alison’s interactions with each other and how Bechdel deconstructs the stereotypical ideals of gender roles and sexuality, via intertextual references.

In Alison Bechdel 's Fun Home, there is a focus on a sculpted perception of gender roles produced by society and a great emphasis on how Bruce and Alison challenge these strict gender specific characteristics. Through Bruce’s femininity and Alison’s masculinity along with their homosexuality, they are able to go against the norms and the collection of rules set by society. It is also through their struggle with gender roles that one is able to understand their sexual orientation. Although Bruce and Alison seem fairly different from one another, there are elements that pull them closer together revealing their similarities.

In Fun Home, Alison’s dynamic with her father is damaged to a certain extent and she finds inspiration in how she wants to not make her life the way that she grew up. Just like Alison, Sara in The Bread Givers, finds inspiration in the dynamic with her own father because she wants to have a life of her own choosing, but she thinks so highly of father and his love for books and knowledge. These two girls both look up to their fathers to a certain extent but at the same time they each find resentment in the culture norms that their fathers push towards on them. Both Alison and Sara are damaged by their fathers dynamic within the family but they both find inspiration to not get overshadowed by who their fathers are and want they may want for them but a life of their very own.

There are many things about the Bechdel family that set them apart from the average American household. The most the obvious difference is that they run a funeral home. Her childhood memories are of her and her brother being the home and among the caskets. One of the most important moments with her father, in fact, was when there was a body in between them and her father asked her to hand her scalpel. Their actual home however was also quite extraordinary due to her father's consistent and almost compulsive modifications to their home. Later on she will realize that her own sexuallity makes her unusual and her family has to deal with that as well. Alison is no stranger to the feeling of being “the other” however in her family, these feelings

Allison actually was born a “bastard” (Amazon 78), and her life was further complicated through dealing with her

In Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel composes a graphic memoir to inform readers about her journey of coming out as a lesbian to her parents. To add to this note, Bechdel also gives details about her family and how she discovers her father’s true sexuality – he is attracted to males. She builds the story around the tragic event of her father’s mysterious death.

Early on in her childhood, Alison came to the realization that her family was different. As individuals, and as a unit, they were just plain weird. Unlike most young girls, Alison lacked a strong bond with her parents, most notably her father, Bruce. Because they both display introverted personalities and had divergent gender identities, Alison and her father never devised a solid relationship. Bruce is described as possessing generally feminine qualities having passion for fine art and sophisticated interior design; whereas Alison claims to have become “a connoisseur of masculinity at a young age” (95). Neither of them fit their stereotypical role within the family; Bruce didn’t act like a macho-man dad, and Alison wasn’t playing dress up with all the other little girls. Though their personas seem compatible, the stark difference in their gender affiliations was a source of great tension between Alison and her father.

Although Alison tried “earnestly” to connect with her mother in the same way she tried to write in her diary, in the end, all that was left of the story of their relationship was blank pages. There could have been a connection there through their shared love

It is in her Prologue that she begins to use biblical allusions. She mentions King Solomon and Abraham, justifying her five marriages by saying that many of the religious greats had several wives. By comparing herself to these religious figures, Allison wants to make it clear that she has enough authority to dictate the validity of marriage. This authority was given to her by God just as it was given to the fathers of Christianity, and in addition to being blessed with authority she was given sexuality. There is a spiritual connection between

There are many scenes where Alison has different hair colors and looks, and at one point she even takes on another identity. Her alter ego was a girl named Vivian Darkbloom, and Alison made Vivian into everything that she wanted to be, but wasn’t. There is one scene were Alison is talking to Hannah and she says “Sometimes I like pretending that I’m somebody else, haven’t you ever tried it?” (King, 2010). When Alison says this to Hannah, she says it in a tone of voice that makes the audience believe that Alison believed it was normal to take the place of another.

“Fun Home” examines the relationship between Alison and her father, Bruce, throughout the story. Their sexuality and love for literature make them seem extremely similar, but in Alison’s memoir, it is made known that Alison struggles to have a bond with her father and they have as many differences as similarities. Alison and her father are both queer and wish they were born of the opposite sex, creating a connection between them. Although, Alison and her father can relate to one another’s sexuality, they deal with their sexuality distinctively. Bruce has hid his sexuality his entire life by marrying, having kids, and having secret affairs with young boys.

There is much debate that homosexuality is a developmental problem caused by a weak bond between a father and son during one’s childhood. A failed relationship with one’s father can lead the boy to not fully internalize male gender identity and develop homosexually (Baird & Baird, 1995). Consider the gender development of identity. Infants indentify with their mother who is the first and primary source of nurturance and care. As girls age, they continue to identify mostly with their mother and boys shift towards their father. Through a father-son relationship, masculine identification is attained which is necessary if the boy is to develop a normally masculine personality (i.e. heterosexuality). This development task helps explain why boys have more difficulty than girls in developing gender identity and may also explain the higher ratio of male to female homosexuality (Baird & Baird, 1995). It is important that