Recasting Gender Roles: Subversive Identities in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home Anonymous College

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home challenges both established gender roles and heteronormative identities. Gender is shown to be constructed, assigned through Western standards, and then practiced through performance. Bechdel’s graphic novel explores the destruction of feminine female/masculine male gender binaries and proposes a more fluid understanding of identity. In her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, theorist Judith Butler proposes that gender is not natural or innate, but rather a performance that is learned and repeated to “create the illusion of an innate and stable [gender] core.” Furthermore, gender is a construct, designed to benefit a patriarchal, heteronormative social structure. In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel challenges the binaries that represent a “dualistic vision usually in service of some form of essentialism”[1] (Marinucci 127). Following the concept of essentialism,[2] the dominant binary “refers to the coalescence of gender, sex, and sexuality into exactly two fundamentally distinct natural kinds: men and women”[3] (Marinucci 127). Natural kinds “depicts an orderly world that divides into thoroughly informative categories inclusive of all phenomena without leftovers or crossovers”[4]...