Gender Roles In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

In psychology, the debate of whether nature or nurture has a bigger impact on a child’s life has been an on-going argument for many years. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel is a graphic memoir about the death of her father and her coming of age. This novel takes the reader through events in her life that may seem insignificant but reveal to have had an impression on her life. By exploring her childhood memories in hindsight, Bechdel questions gender roles, contrasts her and her father’s acceptance of sexual orientation, and gives insight to her family’s relationship, thus demonstrating the importance guidance and nurture has on a child’s future. Throughout her childhood, Alison struggled with conforming to a female’s gender role. Correspondingly her father, Bruce, also struggled with male gender roles during the same period of her life. Some of these struggles were very obvious, such as when Alison refused to where dresses and skirts, and Bruce’s hobbies of gardening and decorating their house. However, there were also struggles that were private. For Alison, these were her objections to growing breasts and her developing …show more content…
Through these memories, Alison explains how her and her father, Bruce challenged the societal norms of their genders by being less masculine and feminine. She also contrasts how her and Bruce came to accept, or reject, their sexuality throughout their life. Alison also explains the lack of parental guidance in her life due to her family being so distant from each other, her father especially. This novel supports that nurture has a larger effect on a child in the future than nature because Alison did not have nurture in her life. With the lack of nurture from her father, Alison had to make up for him by becoming more masculine and learned to not rely on men, which in turn affected her