The Child of Fun Home
Put simply, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is an autobiographical graphic novel about what it means to reject “the Child”: the unwilling heir to family and society that we project our future onto. To continue the legacy of the Child is to turn the eternal wheel of heteronormative succession, a subservient maintenance of a status quo embedded deep within society. Diametrically opposed to “the Child” then is queerness, the simple act of refusing the reproductive and reductive fate placed upon all others. What makes queerness “queer”, at least in the way Edelman defines the term, is that it serves as a rejection of societal standards while also being defined by those same expectations. Maimonides said that God could not be described, …show more content…
Trapped in the minutiae of a man who “treated his furniture like children and his children like furniture” (14), Alison deliberately puts herself in harm’s way with unmistakably queer interests and predispositions, sacrificing her place in the endless cycle of heredity in order to live her life on her own terms. Even at a young age, Alison tries to convince her brothers to “call me Albert instead of Alison” (112) and manages to “argue compellingly for the right to exchange my tank top for a pair of shorts” (73), signing her name on the “unspoken compact” with her parents that she “would never get married” in order to “carry on the artist’s life they had each abdicated” (73) Considering that the reader is informed of this by the novel she ultimately wrote, they fully well know she managed to achieve the artist’s life, but at that moment in time such a claim is a bold one. The destiny of the Child, to carry the legacy of humanity into a presumably ever-righteous future, is plainly and squarely rejected by Alison far before she realizes the consequences for doing so. Alison’s dismissal of the reproductive fate inevitably shackled upon her by both society at large and those around her is an indelibly political act - “political not in the partisan terms provided …show more content…
It is the willingness to look past the sanctity of the Child and the heteronormative order it has come to represent and abandon a line of succession that stretches through the eons.
Far from partaking of this narrative movement toward a viable political future, far from perpetuating the the fantasy of meaning eventual realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form. (Edelman 4)
Queerness has no concrete identity outside what heteronormative society is not. It is a chameleon, adopting whatever habits or trappings have been deemed beyond the pale by the establishment the Child serves to keep alive. In their joint rejection of the promise of the Child, Bruce and Alison both show indifference to the fate of the next generation, but while Alison willingly casts aside her own future, Bruce offers his own children as sacrificial lambs so that he may remain in
Put simply, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is an autobiographical graphic novel about what it means to reject “the Child”: the unwilling heir to family and society that we project our future onto. To continue the legacy of the Child is to turn the eternal wheel of heteronormative succession, a subservient maintenance of a status quo embedded deep within society. Diametrically opposed to “the Child” then is queerness, the simple act of refusing the reproductive and reductive fate placed upon all others. What makes queerness “queer”, at least in the way Edelman defines the term, is that it serves as a rejection of societal standards while also being defined by those same expectations. Maimonides said that God could not be described, …show more content…
Trapped in the minutiae of a man who “treated his furniture like children and his children like furniture” (14), Alison deliberately puts herself in harm’s way with unmistakably queer interests and predispositions, sacrificing her place in the endless cycle of heredity in order to live her life on her own terms. Even at a young age, Alison tries to convince her brothers to “call me Albert instead of Alison” (112) and manages to “argue compellingly for the right to exchange my tank top for a pair of shorts” (73), signing her name on the “unspoken compact” with her parents that she “would never get married” in order to “carry on the artist’s life they had each abdicated” (73) Considering that the reader is informed of this by the novel she ultimately wrote, they fully well know she managed to achieve the artist’s life, but at that moment in time such a claim is a bold one. The destiny of the Child, to carry the legacy of humanity into a presumably ever-righteous future, is plainly and squarely rejected by Alison far before she realizes the consequences for doing so. Alison’s dismissal of the reproductive fate inevitably shackled upon her by both society at large and those around her is an indelibly political act - “political not in the partisan terms provided …show more content…
It is the willingness to look past the sanctity of the Child and the heteronormative order it has come to represent and abandon a line of succession that stretches through the eons.
Far from partaking of this narrative movement toward a viable political future, far from perpetuating the the fantasy of meaning eventual realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form. (Edelman 4)
Queerness has no concrete identity outside what heteronormative society is not. It is a chameleon, adopting whatever habits or trappings have been deemed beyond the pale by the establishment the Child serves to keep alive. In their joint rejection of the promise of the Child, Bruce and Alison both show indifference to the fate of the next generation, but while Alison willingly casts aside her own future, Bruce offers his own children as sacrificial lambs so that he may remain in