Gender Identity In Bechdel's Fun Home

Launched on March 1959, the Barbie doll is a toy that was first put on display in New York. It quickly garnered a lot of attention with the target audience of the creators, young girls. This doll was different than its previous dolls because it was a doll that was an ideal representation of a woman. Thus allowing young girls to use their imagination to create and act-out what this doll’s life is like and what their future would potentially be. To successfully understand this toy, we must think like C Wright Mills, a sociologist who asks to use our sociological imagination, the intersection of one’s biography and history. This artifact reflects and perpetuates the dominant ideology of how to perform your gender the “right” way in the early 1960s. I will argue this demonstrates West and Zimmerman’s concept of “doing gender” which is clarified with Judith Butler’s concept of socialization of gender.

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

Feminist ideas are used throughout this story in both explicit and implicit ways to help describe the gender roles placed upon females in the 1950s. “That figure was a garish blond showgirl, a Hollywood ‘sexpot’ of no interest to intellectuals”. (Page 79) The author explicitly includes the

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.

Gidget, a 1959 film about a young girl who falls in love with surfing, helped establish a prominent foundation for surfing in California. To some, the film may simply be a feel-good story about surfing and American teen culture. To others, it’s about breaking stereotypical gender roles and their associated societal norms. The film released soon after World War II and the subsequent baby boom. This was a time with gave Americans a fresh new look on life, and a time when many young adults and teens had plenty of leisure time. “Gidget also marked the end of an era and the start of a new one.” Surfing and Gidget play a monumental role in shaping this new era by defying gender roles and leaving a lasting imprint on society.

Gender roles are a set of societal norms that dictate the different types of behavior which are generally considered acceptable for people based on their actual or perceived sex or sexuality. In the graphic novel “Fun Home: Old Man, Old Artificer” by Alison Bechdel and the story “Shiloh’ by Bobbie Ann Mason the main characters switch gender roles. These stories use irony to convey the gender roles men and women are supposed to have; however Old Man, Old Artificer reveals what happens when you try to cover up your secret by switching gender roles while “Shiloh” reveals that changing gender roles can cause a marriage to end.

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.

Before going in depth of the play, I would like to focus on Alison Bechdel works. Bechdel was born into a Roman Catholic home. Before the graphic novel of Fun Home, she was originally known for her “Dykes to Watch Out For”. This comic strip story ran from 1983 to 2008 and it represented lesbian popular culture at the time. You will follow the story of Monica Testa (or Mo Testa) with her friends on how they react to political events, such as Michigan Womyn’s Festival, and Gay pride parades that affect lesbian culture. Having read this comic myself, for a LGBT class in the University of Maryland, you get a slight understanding of what Bechdel is thinking. We see in the comic strip that she lives normally like other people and share those experience.

Barbara Perry’s article “Doing Gender and Doing Gender Inappropriately” addresses violence and gender, and how gender is influenced through the way it is perceived in society. The construction of gender comes in polar extremes, with masculine dominant men and feminine subordinate women. Gendered violence is used to control women as a class. It is a systematic tool used by men to reinforce gender norms and patriarchal ideas of masculine superiority and feminine inferiority. It “terrorizes the collective by victimizing the individual”. Like any dichotomy, it has scripts, and to deviate from these scripts will leave you labeled as ‘unnatural’ and ‘immoral’. These scripts “constrain everything from modes of dress and social roles to ways of expressing emotion and sexual desire”. In Judith Lorber’s “A World Without Gender” we are introduced to the possibility of eliminating gender and how “degendering [would] undercut the patriarchal and oppressive structure of Western Societies”.

Although Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home demonstrate pronounced differences in setting and design, both novels employ a reflective narration of the past to address common themes of trauma, unorthodox family relationships, and sexuality. Both stories utilize this retrospective narrative to expose masculinity’s stratified hegemony as a driving force of internalized shame, violence, and the death of self. As The Bluest Eye’s Cholly and Fun Home’s Bruce are examined in terms of hegemonic masculinity’s influence, the common themes in both works can be understood as a result of masculinity’s hierarchical ascendency.

West and Zimmerman claim that gender is not something we are but something we do.

A Doll House is a play that truly revolutionized the idea of gender role and social conformity. The idea itself is the root of many problems even in today's modern society. The main character Torvald Helmer is one of those who was raised by the idea of gender role and strong masculinity and was seen living by the standards that society assign him to. With his wife Nora, the character that plays center around to are quite the opposite. Nora may be seen as nothing but a wife to a husband yet she hold many secrets that only a broken mirrors can reveal in a male dominant society where men write all the laws. That immediately make her victims of failing to follow the societal norms that never gave her anything in the first place. The Theme of “A

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, focuses on Alison’s journey in comprehending troublesome family relationships along with the discovery of her own gender identity. In a particular scene, Alison encounters a woman truck driver that alters her views of gender conformity. Alison’s simultaneous class and race privilege allowed her to receive the education needed to break gender, class and binary mindset expectations, which enabled her to challenge societal norms.