The graphic memoir Fun Home and the short film Pariah both contribute to a conversation on intersectional politics regarding respectability and normativity. The Bechdel family in Fun Home maintain a perfectly respectable familial façade to the external world even as the complications of Bruce Bechdel’s sexual appetites and inclinations threaten to tear the family apart internally. Likewise, Alike’s gender identity and sexuality creates a conflict in her family as they try to uphold middle-class respectability. In both contexts, respectability intersects with normativity and performance of normativity, however, both texts also challenge assumptions about the ways in which respectability politics intersect with normativity, especially in regards to family and kinship dynamics.
Respectability politics plays a huge role in the everyday life of the Bechdel family because Bruce constantly negotiates his queer identity by hiding his actions from the outside world. Even though he engages in illicit sexual acts with young men, he hides behind his family name and his good standing within the community. Therefore, he remains respectable while also hiding his proclivities from his family and forcing them to broker the family dignity through performance. Furthermore, Bruce hides the chaos of his family life and can still find acceptance within the larger society. Helen, and the children provide Bruce with protection and ensure the continuation of a perfect nuclear-family
I would like to tell you about, Home of the Brave, by Katherine Applegate. This fiction book is about a young boy named Kek who is an immigrant from Sudan, Africa. He lived in Sudan his whole life until ten, but, has to move to America after a tragedy. It is hard for him to move to America. He holds on to hope no matter how hard things get and he has a lot of important new adventures in this country, that help him become a better person.
The film, The House I live In, opened my eyes to the severity of unfair law enforcement and the depths of the battle with war on drugs. Theoretically, the more people are being arrested for drugs, the cheaper, purer, and more available the drugs become. Making these arrests are not helping get the drugs off the streets, it is only opening up more opportunities for other people to pick up the business.
The film Pleasantville directed by Gary Ross is about two modern teenagers, David and his sister Jennifer, somehow being transported into the television, ending up in Pleasantville, a 1950s black and white sitcom. The two are trapped as Bud and Mary Sue in a radically different dimension and make some huge changes to the bland lives of the citizens of Pleasantville, with the use of the director’s cinematic techniques. Ross cleverly uses cinematic techniques such as colour, mise-en-scene, camera shots, costumes, music and dialogue to effectively tell the story.
We are all living in a society that is filled with social expectations of gender. From our early age, we seem to be able to response to these expectations accordingly. For example, we notice Barbies are for girls while robots and cars are for boys only. In the “Performative Gender”, “Doing Gender”, and “Nerd Box”, authors all indicate gender is learned instead of inherited. They bring out their insightful observation and critical personal experience to illustrate how the social expectations with punitive effects construct our gender unconsciously. These articles provide a great lens for us to understand the mental state and behaviors of the main characters in Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel portrays how living in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania during the 1930s not only repressed both her father, Bruce, and her from coming out as a homosexual and genderqueer, but also trapped her mother, Helen, in her “women box”. Through the graphic memoir, Fun Home is able to present the struggling process that one may need to go through before admitting one’s unusual gender identity and sexual orientation.
The use of technology has catalyzed society into an era that is increasingly interconnected yet impersonal at the same time. Despite technology’s endless list of assets, many fail to acknowledge its shortcomings when mentioning what is lost as a result of using it. Although in “Great to Watch” by Maggie Nelson, she is not afraid to share her skepticism of technology, as well as the role it plays in desensitizing individuals on a day-to-day basis. The internet is an invaluable resource to many because it is a public domain for sharing ideas, opinions, and knowledge that any and everyone can have access to. In a sense, it does not restrict what someone may see or do, and this can either be a good thing or a bad thing. The booming use of new media
The family has always been a unit that calls for the belonging of the kin. It calls for more than blood relations, but also a relation with ancestry, history, ethnic origins, etc. It serves as the most basic political unit that many can relate too, however, the term family carries a more diverse and complex role that is seen to evolve throughout the years. With the modernization of the human civilization leads to an evolution of thought, morality, and ideology. What was once the idealized nuclear family, is now criticized by many modern day thinkers as it invokes a heteronormative that oppresses any other forms of family and sexual relationships. This concept can be seen in the given article by Bell Hooks. In Hooks’ document, she talks about the racist oppression of sexist domination towards back women. There is a focus on black women in reference to their place in the community, the home, and the home to which they are serving to (Hooks, 1990). Her views show the heavy responsibilities of black women as it reflects their privileges and lifestyle. The second document by Michelle Owen examines the normalization of queer as seen in the Canadian Legal Landscape, assimilation debates, and works to that aim to break the heteronormative family lifestyle (2001).
To my understanding, the movie Home for the Holidays not only reveals a lot of potential family conflicts, but also reflects a lot of different communication approaches of the various family members. As a foreigner, I have never experienced Thanksgiving homecoming dinner before, so I may cannot understand some of the holiday customs in the movie, but I found out that their family interactions are interesting indeed.
In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, the author enlightens us with her struggles in determining her gender identity and sexuality. She does this in a very unique fashion. Alison, throughout the novel, uses specific pieces of literature and writing in order for the reader to decipher her true emotions and feelings toward her sexuality. On top of that, Bechdel writes her story in order to show how these objects play a much deeper role between not only comprehending her sexuality, but her understanding of her choppy relationship with her father. The end result is a series of connections that bring the two closer together than they ever were.
During the end of the 3rd Century, the Playwright Plautus wrote many of the first Roman comedies. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a musical comedy film adaptation of Plautus's comedies.Set in ancient Rome, many aspects of Roman theatre, including stock characters, were included in the film’s production. While the film is based off of multiple comedies, Plautus's Pseudolus character Calidorus is nearly identical to the film’s Hero. During the time Pseudolus was written, the Crisis of the Third Century led to up to 25% of Roman population being comprised of slaves(Southern). Of the many stock characters Platus included in his comedies, Calidorus/Hero, the son of Pseudolus’s owner and the stock character adulescens, best
Until quite recently, the traditional view of family that has predominated society has been comprised of gender roles. The “ideal” family in the past has consisted of a white, middle-class, heterosexual couple with about 2.5 children. In this heteronormative nuclear family, the father is the head of the household and the breadwinner of the family, while the mother is the one who cares for the children and completes household duties. Of course, most families do not fit into this mould and those who do not fit have been repeatedly marginalized due to their differences. It is no question that race, class, sexuality, ability, and many other identity markers intersect in how forms of family may vary. As explained by the concept of intersectionality, gender must be analyzed through a lens that includes various identity markers which contribute to how an individual experiences oppression. It is through the use of intersectionality, the discussion of patriarchy, and the deconstruction of “family” that bell hooks (1990) and Michelle K. Owen (2001) paint family as a site of belonging and contestation.
In this chapter, I present how two pop cultural sites—The film The Kids Are All Right, the television series The Fosters—represent butch motherhood. My intention is to expose the discourses in action to reveal how they operate and contain instruction that delivers as disciplinary performance. I divide the following sections into individual discussions of each cultural text to reveal the cogs within each site. I then compare and contrast both texts to investigate the tensions between both productions and how the discourses thematically collude. Finally, this comparative analysis considers the disciplinary discourse that develops in accord with gender and motherhood.
There are millions of movies in the world, yet Safe Haven is one of my favorites. Safe Haven is a movie that was released in 2013 by Temple Hill Entertainment. Safe Haven is about a young woman who is running away from her abusive husband. She runs away from Boston to a small town in North Carolina. After becoming a waitress at a local restaurant in her new town, Katie befriends a single father of two. It seems like her new life is going well in her new, small town, until her secret past finally confronts her new life. The intended audience for this movie are those who are of 13 years and older, because this movie is rated PG13 (“Safe Haven 2013.) I would recommend this movie to people who enjoy romantic movies, but also dramas, because this movie will definitely keep viewers on the edge of their seats.
In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel demonstrates how myth and stereotyping contribute to the construction of prejudice. Alison’s father, Bruce Bechdel, lived a false life by denying his sexual orientation and created the illusion of a “normal” family life. By marrying a female and creating offspring, he perpetuated the public illusion that he had the perfect home and family. Despite this myth of perfect domestication, the true private life of the Bechdel family could be described as dysfunctional. Bechdel “witnessed only two gestures of action between” (Bechdel 68) her parents, which consisted of her father giving her mother “a chaste peck before leaving on a weekend trip” (Bechdel 68) and one time when her mother “put her hand on his back” (Bechdel 68) as they watched television. Bechdel writes how on both occasions, she “was astonished and discomforted” (Bechdel 68) and suggests that both her mother and father preferred “fiction to reality” (Bechdel 85). Both Bruce Bechdel and his wife, lived in a world where they did not acknowledge reality; it was easier for them to live a lie then to come to terms with Bruce’s homosexual identity. The conflict within the family could be attributed to Bruce’s suppression of his sexuality, which in turn, could be attributed to growing up in a time period when it was
Traumatic experiences, difficult home lives, and the effect of drugs can leave a significant imprint on the rest of an individual’s life. The context which individuals are surrounded by during their developmental years has a significant impact on their mental health and development. In the documentary, The Bad Kids this idea is depicted through the portrayal of adolescence and early adulthood periods of the individuals at Black Rock Continuation High School. The film portrays the lives of at risk teens, who are given a second chance to get their life on track and earn a high school diploma. However, there are complications and set-backs that are holding them back from accomplishing their goals.
Annie Hall, an American romantic comedy released in 1977 retells the story of a man named Alvy Singer (portrayed by Woody Allen) and his attempt at comprehending why his relationship with Annie Hall failed. Annie Hall incorporates many cinematic techniques into its story which help solidify its place regularly on lists of best comedies (Snider). It uses conflict, different types of narratives and a classic three act structure. The movie beautifully conveys a story in New York in which one really feels the characters are actual citizens and not actors (Barsam 166).