The Role of Gender in Fun Home

Student Name Professor Name Course Date The Role of Gender in Fun Home Initially published in 2006, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel that gained both critical and commercial success. The story is about Alison and her closeted dad, Bruce Bechdel. Fun Home sheds light on how their relationship sees ups and downs, and the core theme of this memoir is gender. This theme is depicted through the sophisticated dynamics of family life, and as the story moves on, discussions about the literature, life, and death can be found in the text. Together, all of these things illustrate Alison Bechdel’s efforts to present a perfect portrait of her own life, with a special emphasis on her complex relationship with her father before and after his death. Alison Bechdel and her dad share various traits, such as they are queers, they love reading books, they like artworks, and they have a wish to be born with opposite sexes. It means Alison Bechdel wishes that she was born as a boy and her father wishes that he was born as a beautiful girl. Despite these so many similarities, both of them seem to have never forged an intense or strong bond because of their divergence in terms of og gendered affiliations and reserved personalities. On one side, Bruce (Alison’s father) tries to maintain his traits that are approached as feminine, and on the other side, Alison Bechdel accepts the fact that she is a “connoisseur of masculinity” (95). She thinks that since her childhood, she has loved wearing outfits that are made for boys. The divergence of the two characters in terms of their gender alignments creates a lot of tension between Alison and Bruce. We can also find Alison Bechdel saying that her father is her inversion and that she can be approached as an inversion of Mr. Bruce. She also mentions how she has struggled to maintain her masculinity and why and how her father tries to prevent her from telling this to the whole world. She thinks that her father’s attempts are useless and that it is up to her whether she wants to look like a girl or a boy. According to Alison Bechdel, the way her father approaches her can be regarded as “a war of cross purposes” which is “doomed to perpetual escalation” (...