Alison Bechdel's Fun Home challenges both established gender roles and heteronormative identities. Gender is shown to be constructed, assigned according to Western standards, and then enacted through performance. Bechdel's graphic novel explores the breakdown of female/male gender binaries and offers 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 a core [of gender] innate and stable. Furthermore, gender is a construct designed to benefit a patriarchal and heteronormative social structure. In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel challenges binaries that represent a “dualistic vision generally in the service of a certain form of essentialism”[1] (Marinucci 127). Following the concept of essentialism[2], the dominant binary “refers to the fusion of gender, sex, and sexuality into exactly two fundamentally distinct natural types: men and women”[3] (Marinucci 127). Natural species “represent an ordered world which is divided into perfectly informative categories including all phenomena without remainders or crossings”[4] (Marinucci 127). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Fun Home is therefore a novel of “crossings”, of subversions and inversions of staged identities. The narrator describes Alison's Bruce's sexual identities as "inversions of each other". Theorist Julia Watson explains that "inversions" refer to both "the derogatory psychoanalytic term from the turn of the century [for homosexuality] that Proust used, but also as inverted versions of each other in the family"[5 ] (Watson 135). She argues that the narrator "presents Alison's rejection of femininity as compensation for her father's lack of virility, and his insistence on her 'feminine' dressing and behavior as a projection of his own desire to express femininity »[6] (Watson 135). . Referring to Michael Proust, "[the term 'invert'] is imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with their sex"[7] (Bechdel 97). But the narrator proposes another development: “But in the sample, certainly, composed of my father and me, that is perhaps enough”[8] (Bechdel 97). Bechdel shows several scenes where Bruce attempts to force Alison into a female gender role. In a scene where Bruce and Alison are both dressing up for an event, Bruce criticizes Alison's attire, saying, "You can't go out to dinner like that." You look like a missionary”[9] (Bechdel 98). He demands that she wear pearls; when she refuses, Bruce shouts, "What are you afraid of?" To be beautiful? Put it on, damn it! »[10] (Bechdel 99). Although the narrator implies that the motivation is for himself, Bruce attempts to impose a gendered appearance on his daughter. In a similar scene, Alison returns from an afternoon with her male cousins ​​and her father scolds her for not wearing a barrette. Nicknamed "butch" by her male cousins, Alison criticizes her father by calling him a "sissy", a designation for the identity he imposes on her. While Bruce represses Alison's initial displays of masculinity, he expresses the femininity in him through her. In the surprisingly literal mirror scene, father and daughter stand next to each other in front of the mirror, Alison thinks, Not only were we inverts, but we wereinversions of each other. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him…he was trying to express something feminine through me[11] (Bechdel 98). As Watson says, the narrator frames this negotiation through which she and her father exchanged versions of conventional femininity and masculinity as a means of enacting their refusal of conventional heteronormative gender roles. In this version of the coming out story, there is no simple narrative of rebellion against parental restrictions through transgressive performances; rather, she and her father are linked by both a struggle of wills and a deep affinity of desires[12] (Watson 136). Remembering the young men of her childhood, Alison identifies the ideal masculinity she dreams of. Bechdel challenges cultural expectations by commandeering terms of queer identification and enacting associated identity, particularly the masculine designation “butch.” Butler posits that for some, the use of such terms appears to demonstrate heterosexuality by creating heterosexual roles in same-sex relationships. However, she says that "the terms queens, butches, women, girls, even the parodic reappropriation of dyke, queer and fag redeploy and destabilize the categories of sex and the initially pejorative categories for homosexual identity"[13] (Butler 156 ). Butler suggests that the structuring presence of heterosexual constructions within gay and lesbian sexuality does not mean that these constructions determine gay and lesbian sexuality… but they can and do become the site of competitions and parodic exhibitions which deprive the obligatory heterosexuality of its claims to naturalness and originality. [14] (Butler 158). The divide between homosexuality and heterosexuality is arbitrary; To assert homosexuality as different from heterosexuality is to be complicit in repression and segregation. Alison's expression of masculinity challenges heteronormative understandings of gender. There is a scene in Fun Home that is crucial to the development of Alison's lesbian identity. Bruce and Alison are having lunch together at a truck stop when they see "a most disturbing sight"[15] (Bechdel 117): a butch woman enters the restaurant and Alison's gaze is drawn to her. According to Marinucci, a butch femme is a woman who “exhibits a traditionally masculine personal style without identifying as trans”[16] (Marinucci 125). This moment is crucial for Alison because, for the first time, she recognizes the feminine masculinity of her own identification: "like a traveler in a foreign land who meets someone from home – someone you never speak to, but which we know by sight – I recognized it with a surge of joy”[17] (Bechdel 118). In another scene, older Alison and her friend Beth perform drag in Bruce's clothes; childish play “[feels] too beautiful to be really good”[18] (Bechdel 182). Alison subverts the hegemonic gender model because “by imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the initiative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency.” In Alison's refusal of forced heteronormative behaviors, Bechdel "rewrites features of this narrative to emphasize her transgender identification with the repressed desire that underpinned her father's open heterosexual conformity"[19] (Watson 139). Furthermore, Alison's recasting of her gender role proves that gender is a performance – a performance that is an imitation of other performances, inherently subversive because it shows the illusory nature of identity. Bechdel focuses on the performativity of gender. The panel where Alison resists Bruce's control of her appearance plays out”.