Fun Home
Throughout our lives, we are all living in a society that fills with social expectations of gender. We response to these expectations at our early age. For example, noticing 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, …show more content…
In “Performative Gender”, Butler points out that, “ as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Discrete genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished.” The restraint and pressure are anywhere in the comics, but the most critical example can be found on page 118. While Alison and Bruce are having lunch at a restaurant, they both recognize a chunky lesbian with hair short like a man, dressing in a virile shirt. With an unpleasant but solemn look, Bruce asks Alison, “is that what you want to look like?” Alison dares not confess her will, so she tells a lie. Bruce’s sign of disapproval demonstrates the punishment of not conforming to the social norms, and he forces Alison to act and dress more girly so she can meet the norm of gender. Influenced by all these subtle social gender signal, Alison is ashamed to find that her gender identity mismatches with her biological sex, and she is threatened not to open up honestly and live the real her in the beginning. Eventually, this sense of shame has developed into self-denial; Alison is suffering the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder for a long period while she is still having great doubt and uncertainty on coming out confession. On the other hand, Bruce is also in the same case. Alison once describes him as “libidinal manic martyred”. Even though Bruce and Alison are living in a splendid house and doing remarkably well in their fields of work, both Bruce and Alison have a low self-esteem over a certain periods as they are being punished for falling outside of the gender
Throughout our lives, we are all living in a society that fills with social expectations of gender. We response to these expectations at our early age. For example, noticing 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, …show more content…
In “Performative Gender”, Butler points out that, “ as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Discrete genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished.” The restraint and pressure are anywhere in the comics, but the most critical example can be found on page 118. While Alison and Bruce are having lunch at a restaurant, they both recognize a chunky lesbian with hair short like a man, dressing in a virile shirt. With an unpleasant but solemn look, Bruce asks Alison, “is that what you want to look like?” Alison dares not confess her will, so she tells a lie. Bruce’s sign of disapproval demonstrates the punishment of not conforming to the social norms, and he forces Alison to act and dress more girly so she can meet the norm of gender. Influenced by all these subtle social gender signal, Alison is ashamed to find that her gender identity mismatches with her biological sex, and she is threatened not to open up honestly and live the real her in the beginning. Eventually, this sense of shame has developed into self-denial; Alison is suffering the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder for a long period while she is still having great doubt and uncertainty on coming out confession. On the other hand, Bruce is also in the same case. Alison once describes him as “libidinal manic martyred”. Even though Bruce and Alison are living in a splendid house and doing remarkably well in their fields of work, both Bruce and Alison have a low self-esteem over a certain periods as they are being punished for falling outside of the gender