Identity In Fun Home

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.

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.

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, documents the author's discovery of her own and her father's homosexuality. The book touches upon many themes, including, but not limited to, the following: sexual orientation, family relationships, and suicide. Unlike most autobiographical works, Bechdel uses the comics graphic medium to tell her story. By close-reading or carefully analyzing pages fourteen through seventeen in Fun Home one can get a better understanding of how a Bechdel employs words and graphic devices to render specific events. One can also see how the specific content of the pages thematically connects to the book as a whole. As we will see, this portion of the book echoes the strained relationship

The process is characterized by hiding one’s own authenticity from the world, in hopes of conforming and fitting into his or her own norms. This was explained well by my own example of a friend that found it mandatory to hide his sexual orientation from his family and the society he was surrounded by, for fear of ridicule or neglect. In exchange for the protection it gave him from his surroundings, all it offered was a very limited existence, making him unable to express his stance on many topics or even on who he truly was. The inability to express his True Self helps explain how it ties into civil rights, constantly discouraging change in favor of a more submissive approach, merely allowing individuals to blend in with those around them, as opposed to speaking out for

Instead, the article further educated me on the inner thoughts and experiences that are associated with being FTM transgender or transsexual. As a cisgender individual, or someone whose gender and biological sex are the same, I am unable to empathize or related to the experiences of transgender and transsexual people. The inside look that the article provided me was appreciated and granted me a deeper understanding of what it is like to be transgender or transsexual, especially regarding how they are socially perceived. Before reading the article, I knew that transgender and transsexual individuals did not feel that their gender matched their biological sex. Through the article, I learned that while that may be true, they do not always feel pressured to change how they physically appear to identify as a gender other than one representative of their biological sex. There are many factors they consider when choosing to transition or not. The factors include: how they want to be perceived in social interactions – as a man or not as a man -, family and friends, loss of their trans or queer identity, and feeling like their gender and sex match (Dozier, 2005). However, regardless of if they transitioned, once the individuals were accepted as their desired gender, the individuals felt more comfortable breaking gendered norms, like presenting as a male but wearing nail

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.

Imagine, you go to work in your dress shoes, black suit, buzz-cut hair, red power tie, and nobody pays you a second look. But, the second you get home, you kick off your shoes, and don high-heels, the suit is replaced with a dress, your short wig is taken off, and you let your long curls fall, and your tie is in the closet, with a necklace in its place. Such hiding of true feelings is not an unheard concept in the transgender world. Millions of transgender people will never express their true feelings in their lifetime. This is similar to The Intruder by Andre Dubus, Kenneth Girard a

Growing up I always felt the need to hide my true feelings about certain topics and ideas. I never truly got to express what I was really interested in, in fear of being outcast from everyone else. Even in the comfort of my own home, where the household culture was one that followed the ‘stereotypical’ African American culture that listened to hip hop and R&B and didn't like to associate themselves with anything that didn't fit into their box of what a black girl should and should not like. I sincerely felt alone. This lasted through much of my childhood and got progressively worse once I entered my preteen years. Once I started middle school,I felt the need to suppress who I was as a person and mindlessly follow trends and fads that I wasn't

Stebbins discusses Alison’s use of literature to attempt to explain her father’s death, as well. Yet, expands on this by saying that she still lacks the clarity and understanding of her father’s “true” identity versus the one he projects towards society. Stebbins describes the evasiveness of sexuality depicted by Bechdel and uses the example of Alison’s way of coming out to support this. She asserts that lesbian is an inadequate description of Alison’s sexuality, which Bechdel also remarks in the text. Nevertheless, this article is a little lacking in that it focuses mostly on how Bechdel’s literary techniques affect those reading and says less about the effect on Bechdel.

A quote by the author that highlights this idea of not being able to be who you are is, “I wanted to be a princess and a prince; but I would never have said so, then”. This emphasizes the underlying fear many have of being judged by the outside world. It is very unfortunate that so many are still unable to say the things they wish to say and dress the way they want to dress because society perceives it to be unacceptable or wrong.

In a lot of places around the world more and more people are coming out as “Transgender.” The term transgender means that the person’s gender identity does not correspond with the gender they were assigned as having at birth. From personally having a transgender boyfriend I have since realized that these people experience a lot of discrimination in and from society. Many people simply just do not understand what the term transgender means and they see it as someone just “wants to be a man” or “wants to be a woman.” While there may be people who present it this way, it is more so that the individual just “feels” different, and “feels” as if they are “in the wrong body.” Some people experience this feeling at a young age as my boyfriend did in his elementary age. We live in a world who put these people down for being who they truly are, and no human being wants or needs that.

Part graphic memoir and part psychoanalytical study, Alison Bechdel’s, Fun Home, is a charming story about a girl’s search for identity within an unconventional family. The novel style autobiography frames Alison’s childhood and adolescence as she struggles with themes of sexual confusion, gender identity, and convoluted family dynamics. These ideas are explored through the examination of Alison’s relationship with her father, and their shared passion for literature.

It is no secret that when Alison Bechdel was a child, homosexuality was not exactly met with open arms. Due to the unpleasant views many heterosexuals had in regards to homosexuality, Alison Bechdel was at first quite cautious when it came to being open about her newfound sexual orientation; however, she eventually opened herself up to her family, friends, and the world about who she is and did not let the political prejudices of others stop her. This is evident when Bechdel writes, “It was in that tremulous state that I determined to tell my parents. Keeping it from them had started to seem ludicrous anyway” (76). Here, Bechdel decides to come out to her parents, deciding that it was absurd not to tell them. Evidently, the prejudices of society could not keep Alison Bechdel down, and this resulted in her personality being shaped by the courage of being oneself, which is hardly an easy thing to

My identity crisis started when I was about 9 years old. The realization that I was different from friends, family, and my classmates were scary and hard to bare. As a young child, we are taught and framed to be a certain way, think a certain way, and live a certain way according to the family structure. Like most young girls I often fantasized about my wedding. What type of dress I was going to wear, what colors I would pick and what type of dress my wife would choose. My fantasies were often disrupted by the sound of my mother’s voice instructing me to complete a task, or letting me know she was home. At that very moment internal shame, and denial would set in. This is not normal, a wife, why was I thinking about a wife? I don’t like girls! I like Josh. That’s who I will marry, Josh.

When I was adolescent, I was strongly influenced by my cognitive development, experiences and people around me. First, I experienced typical psychological reactions which adolescences are likely to have: I had a lot of experiments; I had imaginably audience; and I experienced identity crisis. I was a person who had a lot of experiments. Because I was a late bloomer, I was not as feminine as other girls. However, I thought that I should behave more feminine to be an adult. Therefore, I suddenly changed my behaviors. For examples, I changed the way to talk and wear: I used the woman like way to talk and wore very feminine clothes. These experiments often surprised and confused people around me. Naturally, these changes did not last