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Gender Identity In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

518 Words3 Pages

The graphic novel titled “Fun Home’ by Alison Bechdel is an autobiography that follows Alison’s life growing up along with her family and shows us her personal struggles. Alison goes through a lot in the book, including coming to terms with being a lesbian, trying to understand her gender identity, dealing with the death of her father, and living in a house and being part of a family that is falling apart because it was built on a lie. This graphic novel focuses on Alison and her father, Bruce, and the fact that they are both struggling with coming to terms with their own sexuality and are also struggling with their gender identity from very early on in both of their lives. Gender identity and struggling with sexuality seem to be the main themes throughout the book, and are connected to the symbols of the book, the tone throughout the novel, and the irony that we the audience can see in the way the characters are acting. A symbol that really …show more content…

We learn very early on that Bruce has an obsession of sorts when it comes to decorating his and his family’s house. We learn from Alison that Bruce likes to take what other people might view as garbage and fix it up and find a place to put it in his house. Alison talks about how much she dislikes the way that her father decorates the house, and also all of the things that he makes he keep in her own room. The way that Bruce decorates the house makes it seem like a maze. People who come to visit the Bechdel family often get confused or even lost in the house because of how the house is decorated and the amount of decorations that he has put in it. My interpretation of the house and what it symbolizes would be the maze of life and the confusion that both Bruce and Alison are going though

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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.

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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.

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