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 feminine/masculine masculine 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 [gender] core and stable." Furthermore, gender is a construct, designed to foster a patriarchal and heteronormative social structure. In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel challenges binaries that represent a “dualistic vision usually in the 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 two precisely distinct natural types: men and women”[3] (Marinucci 127). Natural genera "represent an ordered world that is divided into carefully informative categories including all phenomena without leftovers or crossovers"[4] (Marinucci 127). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on 'Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned'? Get an original essay Fun Home, therefore, is a novel of "crossover", of subversions and inversions of the identities represented. The narrator describes Alison's Bruce's sexual identities as "mutual inversions." Theorist Julia Watson explains that “inversions” refers both to the “turn-of-the-century derogatory psychoanalytic term [for homosexuality] used by Proust, but also to the 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 masculinity, and her insistence on dressing and behaving 'femininely' as a projection of her desire to represent femininity "[6] (Watson 135) . Referring to Michael Proust, “[the term “inverted”] is imprecise and insufficient, as it defines the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his sex”[7] (Bechdel 97). But the narrator offers another development: “But in the sample certainly made up of me and my father, perhaps that is enough”[8] (Bechdel 97). Bechdel shows several scenes in which Bruce tries to force Alison into a female gender role. In a scene where Bruce and Alison both dress up for an event, Bruce criticizes Alison's dress, saying, “You can't go out to dinner like that. You look like a missionary"[9] (Bechdel 98). He asks her to wear pearls; when she refuses, Bruce yells, “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 tries to force an appearance of gender in his daughter. In a similar scene, Alison has returned from an afternoon with her male cousins ​​and her father scolds her for not wearing a hair clip. Called "butch" by her male cousins, Alison criticizes her father as a "sissy," an identity designation he imposes on her. While Bruce represses Alison's early displays of masculinity, he expresses the femininity within himself through her. In the surprisingly literal mirror scene, father and daughter stand next to each other in front of the mirror, Alison reflects, not only were we inverted, we were the inversion 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 he saysWatson, the narrator frames this negotiation through which she and her father displaced their respective versions of conventional femininity and masculinity as a way of enacting their rejection 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 both by a contest of wills and by a profound affinity of desires[12] (Watson 136). Remembering the young men of her childhood, Alison identifies the ideal masculinity she craves. Bechdel challenges cultural expectations by appropriating terms of queer identification and interpreting the associated identity, particularly the male 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, he states that “the terms queens, butches, femmes, girls, even the parodic reappropriation of lesbian, queer and fagot redistribute and destabilize sex categories and the originally derogatory categories of homosexual identity”[13] (Butler 156). Butler suggests that the structuring presence of heterosexual constructs within gay and lesbian sexuality does not mean that such constructs determine gay and lesbian sexuality... but they can and do become the site of parodic contests and demonstrations that deprive compulsory heterosexuality of its claims of naturalness and originality. [14] (butler 158). The divide between homosexuality and heterosexuality is arbitrary; affirming homosexuality as divergent from heterosexuality means being 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 restaurant when they see "a truly disturbing sight"[15] (Bechdel 117): a butcher enters the diner and Alison's gaze is drawn to her. According to Marinucci, a butch woman 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 can recognize the feminine masculinity of her own identification: “like a traveler in a foreign country meeting someone from home – someone they have never spoken to, but know by sight – I recognized her with a rush of joy”[17] (Bechdel 118). In another scene, an older Alison and her friend Beth play dress-up in Bruce's clothes; children's play "[seems] too good to actually be good"[18] (Bechdel 182). Alison subverts the hegemonic model of gender because “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the agency structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency.” In Alison's rejection of forced heteronormative behavior, Bechdel "rewrites the characteristics of that narrative to insist on her gender identification with the repressed desire that underpinned her father's evident heterosexual conformity"[19] (Watson 139). Furthermore, Alison's reformulation of her gender The role demonstrates 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 in which Alison resists Bruce's control over her appearance is set in the chapter titled "Old Father, Old Artificer," which introduces Bruce's "monomaniacal restoration of our old house" [20] (Bechdel 4). Alison it seems”.