Gender Identity In Alison's Fun Home

In this chapter of Fun Home, gender identity is a prominent theme that Alison explores. Ten-year-old Alison begins to recognize that she desires to be more masculine then Bruce wants her to be. Bruce is constantly on Alison about keeping a barrette in her bangs because “it keeps the hair out of your eyes”, to which Alison replies, “So would a crewcut” (96). The reader can see on page 99 as Alison gets to be a little older, her father tries to get her to wear pearls. When she tells her father that she won’t wear them, he yells at her posing the question, “What’re you afraid of? Being beautiful”? It seems that Bruce tries to pressure more feminine qualities on her, like the barrettes and the pearls, because he envisions that femininity for himself. Alison states it perfectly

At a diner, they saw a woman dressed like a man which puzzled young Alison because she “didn’t know there were women who wore men’s clothes and had men’s haircuts” (118). Her father seems a bit disgusted with this when he asks Alison, “Is THAT what you want to look like” (118)? She felt that she had no other choice but to reply no to this question but has since come to understand that the “surge of joy” (118) she felt when she saw this butch woman was exactly how she wanted to look. Another time, Alison found an old photograph of her father posing elegantly in a women’s bathing suit. Alison was also struck by another picture she found of her father at twenty-two sunbathing on top of his fraternity house. She compares this picture to a photo of herself at the same age. Alison wonders “was the boy who took it his lover” (120) “as the girl who took this Polaroid of me on a fire escape on my twenty-first birthday was mine” (120). The fact that Alison can see a strong similarity to the father she never felt she really knew was probably a brief therapeutic moment in her