ipl-logo

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

1995 Words8 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Gender and roles of women in literature

Giulia Balestrieri Professor Evans 76106 C4
05 May 2023
Oh, I Love Being a Woman
Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, delves into her complicated connection with her closeted father, Bruce Bechdel. Bechdel’s book, which was released in 2006, explores gender, the coming-out process, and family relationships. Discussions of death, life, and literature help Alison explore these issues as she seeks to build a truthful portrayal of her connection with her father, particularly after his suicide. The novel can be better understood if one reads Judith Butler’s essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Butler’s theories on gender and performance provide a new lens through …show more content…

Bechdel digs at the transforming effect of literature, particularly for individuals who have been ostracized and restricted by society’s rules, through a non-chronological presentation of literary texts, images, letters, and newspaper clippings. Bechdel exemplifies the complexities of family relationships and how literature can play an important part in molding them. Her depiction of her own life and family demonstrates how gender, sexuality, and society conventions can cause friction and conflict. Alison and her father, on the other hand, were able to establish a level of intimacy they had never known before because of the transformational power of books. Fun Home is a very personal depiction of a family that transcends its unique environment and relates to the universal human experience of desire, belonging, and …show more content…

Alison Bechdel’s candid depiction of her personal path to self-discovery and acceptance has helped me understand the value of loving and embracing oneself despite societal expectations or biases. I have discovered that being comfortable in one’s own skin and sexuality can be a powerful and liberating experience, and I am thankful to have come across such an uplifting message through literature. My conviction in the necessity of representation and the power of narrative to affect societal change and acceptance has been reaffirmed by Fun Home.
7

Acknowledgements
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Catherine Evans for her unwavering support and kindness during this challenging semester. Her willingness to accommodate my needs has made a significant difference in my ability to navigate the difficulties I faced. I truly appreciate her understanding and dedication to her students, and I am grateful for her guidance and encouragement throughout the course.
Works Cited Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. Mariner Books, 2007.
Butler, J. (1988). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519-531. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893.

Show More
Related
1203 Words | 5 Pages

“My mother never accepted any of the young men, for in her eyes they seemed always a combination of the lazy, the effeminate, the dishonest and the unknown. They never seemed to do any physical work and she could not comprehend their luxurious vacations and she did not know whence they came not who they were.” (8) The mother grew even farther from her daughters, she had finally lost them completely. She had no respect for their curious need to read books and explore. Creating a tension not just between her and her daughter but the family as a

Read More
993 Words | 4 Pages

Even to this day, shame about one’s sexual orientation remains a prominent topic. Whether one identified themselves as gay, lesbian, and transgender, society viewed them and their actions as a sin, a crime, and a disease, which only increased the amount of shame–a painful feeling of distress or humiliation caused by the consciousness of wrong or fooling behavior–they saw within themselves. Then changes began to occur as a group of gays, lesbians, and transgender people confronted police in an event known as the Stonewall Riots or the Stonewall Uprising, which became a turning point for gay liberation. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a 1980s, family tragicomic-graphic memoir that addresses this perspective turning point through the use of the labyrinth

Read More
544 Words | 3 Pages

The Great Society On May 22nd of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke to the graduating class of the University of Michigan on The Great Society, saying "The Great Society rest on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time”, words that were spoken by President Johnson. The main passage of “The Great Society” by Lyndon Baines Johnson was mainly concentrated on eliminating poverty and racial injustice as revealed through his parallelism and anaphora. With this compelling speech, Lyndon inspired many young Americans to take actions to better their country using persuasive proofs such as ethos, logos, and pathos His persuasive techniques that applied directly to the students’ emotions inspired them to construct a better America just like President Johnson’s plan.

Read More
822 Words | 4 Pages

When reading an autobiography it is safe to assume that you are dealing with an unreliable narrator. This is the author’s story and no matter how objective they may try to be it will always be tainted with their own perspective of what happened since they were so close to the situations being described. So, one of the things someone writing an autobiography needs to be good at is tricking the audience into believing that their story is the truth. In Allison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, she uses a visual medium to help her accomplish this task.

Read More
574 Words | 3 Pages

Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” is an enthralling memoir about a young girl’s peculiar childhood, which involved her family’s funeral business, infatuating trips, family turmoil, solitude, and her befuddling relationship with her masterful artificer of a father; in which similarities ranged from obsessive compulsive disorders and literature to sexuality. The most profound being homosexuality. Bechdel utilized duo-specific, speech bubbles, as well as, subject-to-subject paneling to illustrate the complex father-daughter relationship where Alison and Bruce Bechdel perpetually attempted to compensate for each other’s eccentric gender behaviors. Initially, both Bechdals yearned for different genders, imposing expected behaviors upon the other.

Read More
960 Words | 4 Pages

Patriarchy presents the roles of men and women in a distinct form. Men are expected to be the dominant leader, strong, protector and sole provider where as women are subverted to the role of domestic duties, raring of children and fulfilling her man’s every desire without question or comment. In Lynn Nottage ’s play Poof! , she brilliantly portrays the roles of men and women, and experiments with the concept of changing gender roles that are characteristic of our society.

Read More
1471 Words | 6 Pages

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a debilitating disorder that affects all aspects of a person’s life. This project is inspired by Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, which depicts moments of the development of her OCD in her childhood to cope with her parent’s stressful marriage. Bechdel uses imagery to represent her obsessions and compulsions, which she diagnoses as OCD later on in life. Her behaviors included repetition of actions such as counting, fixing her shoes until they lined up, and writing “I think” after every sentence in her diary. At times, her ritualistic behaviors, which took large amounts of energy and effort, dictated whether she could move on to other tasks or pay attention to the world around her.

Read More
459 Words | 2 Pages

Judith Butler’s Gender Troubles emphasizes gender as the constant repetition of non-existent ideals to uphold a masculine-dominant culture. Likewise, “Body Politics” highlights this belief within the overtly feminine qualities of city women. As a whole, the poem contrasts idealized feminine “city women” with a “real woman” who possesses both feminine and masculine qualities. The mother figure challenges both the gender binary and the patriarchal order by rejecting the feminine gender norms of the society. This feminist reading of the poem makes many valuable and probable claims, however the feminist approach contains some weaknesses.

Read More
1682 Words | 7 Pages

Octavia Butler is an Afrofuturist, science fiction author who writes many dystopian stories that allude to questions about gender, social structures, and an individual’s ability to control her body and sexuality. When people think of speculative and science fiction they tend to think of nerdy white men writing stories about space and light sabers, but Octavia Butler challenges this stereotype herself by being one of the few African American women in this genre. In Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction short story “Speech Sounds” there is a reversal of gender roles and a strong idea of feminism that is portrayed through the main character Rye. There is also the use of simile and metaphor to help point out flaws in the social structure of the story and the world of the reader.

Read More
1442 Words | 6 Pages

Many people have difficult relationships with family members but few are as explicit and ironic as Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her father. In her memoir Fun Home, Alison writes of how her homosexual father, in an effort to hide his sexuality, diverts attention from his family to his reputation. Alison Bechdel explains how her father’s obsession with perfection failed their father-daughter relationship using her experiences with literature, visual representation where words fail her and thoughtful reflection on her father’s shortcomings. Her using these literary methods to describe her father show the reader how she has overcome her upbringing and brought clarity to herself after her father’s death and how others can do the same. Fiction gives readers the ability to connect with characters as they develop and grow throughout their story.

Read More
1621 Words | 7 Pages

Chad Blenz Deniz Perin ENG 121 08 December 2014 Published in 2006, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir that brought great success to Alison Bechdel and her work. Fun Home explores the relationship between Alison and her homosexual father, Bruce Bechdel, to shed light on ideas such as gender, coming out with your sexuality, and the complex dynamics within their family. With further analysis we can see that these key ideas are facilitated through discussions of death, life, and literature–provoked by Alison’s efforts to illustrate a truthful portrait of her complicated connection with her father, specifically after he commits suicide. Alison Bechdel is not only the main author and narrator but also the main protagonist through out the graphic memoir.

Read More
1164 Words | 5 Pages

Olivia Clarke’s essay called “One Percent of Me” discusses the harsh reality of high school and the effects it causes in your adult life. She goes into depth about her struggles with being the only African American woman in town, the effects it started to have on her once she entered high school ongoing into her adult life. The struggle of her race being a leading factor of not fitting in enough for White people nor Black people that surrounded in certain points of her life. Dealing with not fitting into the image that in advertised around us, body image is a huge problem within young children. Clarke eventually learning in her adult years that she is not identify by her image but by her experiences.

Read More
1521 Words | 7 Pages

Feminist theatre was a voice raised against this perspective. It was the construction of a counter cultural politics where women pushed themselves towards the subject position. Feminist theatre argues in favour of the potential of theatre to revise representations of gender differences on the

Read More
545 Words | 3 Pages

Societal norms have always dictated the way people behave, but through time people have stood up to these standards to fight for their beliefs. The book Homegoing and the Poem “Give your daughters difficult names'' demonstrates resilience by defying the norms set by society. Homegoing does this by displaying acts of courage that helped enslaved people escape, while the poem “Give your daughters difficult names” does this by inviting people to be proud of their culturally significant names, despite experiencing resistance from society. The book Homegoing shows resistance through the character

Read More
826 Words | 4 Pages

This novel is also autobiographical. Throughout history, women have been locked in a struggle to free themselves from the borderline that separates and differentiate themselves from men. In many circles, it is agreed that the battleground for this struggle and fight exists in literature. In a

Read More

More about Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Related Topics

Open Document