...In the graphic novel Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, there is a panel in which a storm has struck the family home (179). The surprising thing about this storm was that it moved in a weird path around the home. Rather than running directly into the house it has curved and destroyed everything in its path around the house falling just short of making a complete circle. This notion of destruction and the house still standing is very allegorical because it represents the Bechdel’s family life. The structure which is the house is still there, but the outside is falling apart. When first looking at the panel the most visually striking thing is the fact that the front and back yards have been almost destroyed in a complete circle. This comes off as an...
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...In this paper, I argue that Alison Bechdel shows the reader that she and her father are inversions of one another through visual and textual evidence throughout Fun Home. The two are homosexual and struggle with expressing their true identity due to what society believes is the gender norm. Gender is so inescapable that in our society we assume it is in our genes and these definite responsibilities run the way we live in the most profound and inescapable ways. It makes it difficult for people to express who they truly are. Society has expectations of gender and gender norms. This is because gender is one of the ways that we as humans organize our lives. In the novel Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, the reader is able to see these societal expectations in the memoir....
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...Internal Truth Fun Home written by Alison Bechdel is a tragicomic memoir that is chronicle of her childhood and young adult life in Pennsylvania, focusing on her difficult relationship with her closeted homosexual pedophile father. The main focus in this memoir are sexual orientation and social gender role; which for both Bruce and Alison, was something they were about to learn. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), “Sexual orientation refers to an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions to men, women, or both sexes. Sexual orientation also refers to a person’s sense of identity based on those attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community of others who share those attractions”. Sexual orientation is something that everybody will experience sometime in their life, which for once allows us to be “standard”; but, the difference of identities is what makes us all anomalous. Within this world, society is made up of heterosexuals, homosexuals, and bisexuals, who are either feminine or masculine. Not one is better than the other, but particular identities like masculine females (dykes) or feminine males (fags) have the worst “to cope with the social stigma against homosexuality, [and] this pattern of prejudice can have serious negative effects on health and well-being” (APA) . We shall explore in further detail, how Alison’s open lesbian life succeeds against her father’s closet-hidden gay being and which is feminine or...
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...23 September 2015 Risks Worth Taking? A Reflection on the Effects of Memoirs The primary purpose of my research paper is to present a cross-section of the current conversations taking place around the way memoirs affect the writers who publish them. Based on my research, it appears that the effects tend to involve emotional and psychological consequences, as well as legal troubles in some instances. The discovery of this conversation helped me to refine my research topic into the question, “Do the benefits of publishing a memoir outweigh the risks of their effects for writers?” This research explores the positive and negative effects of memoirs on their writers to determine whether or not the risks are worth the rewards. Although writing a memoir can result in lawsuits and family discord, it more often proves to be therapeutic and can be the starting point of a nonfiction writer's career. What if I told you that memoirs are incredibly important to our society, because they document the human experience in such an honest way? Although they are valuable, they can also be risky. One key issue is that a memoir’s admissions risk causing major drama for writers, including legal trouble. In addition, they can be a catalyst for burning bridges with former employees. They can also potentially destroy long-term personal relationships. In this paper, I work to discover if it is worth all the drama to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. As I began my research...
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...Both Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Jay Fowler, are written in the first person. This allows the readers to get a deeper insight of the main characters’ perspective of the world. Similarly, they both analyze their families, in which the father is constantly the focus, although this is truer regarding Bechdel’s novel. The authors explore the similarities the main characters share with their fathers, as well as the controversies, conflicts, and preconceptions they face every day. In Fowler’s novel, the main character is a girl named Rosemary Cooke. She has a very unique sibling, a chimpanzee named Fern, who highly influenced Rosemary’s early development, at the same rate that she influenced Fern’s....
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...Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, appropriately sub-titled 'A Family Tragicomic', is a graphic novel style autobiography that revolves around the story of her complicated relationship with her father, and the realization of her own homosexuality. It is complex, intelligent and insightful. The story develops through the interweaving of Bechdel's memories of her childhood and the realizations she is able to make in hindsight. Bechdel challenges the concepts of gender roles, sexual orientation, and most importantly fatherhood through her own stories so that they may take on a deeper meaning in the end. Ultimately the question she aims to answer is: why am I am who I am? Secondary to this inquiry are related questions: how does a closeted gay father affect his daughter’s future homosexuality? Growing up, Bechdel and her father both struggled with gender roles. Bechdel's refusal to grow her hair long and her reluctance to wear dresses, skirts, or jewelry were the opposite of her father's preference for the effeminate; gardening, decorating, wearing fine creams and colognes. On page 96 the author reveals that her older cousins called her “Butch”, a nickname that reflected her success at acting masculine. To her ‘Butch” was the “opposite of sissy… it was clear to me that my father was a big sissy” (page 97). As a child Bechdel was acutely aware of the breech in conventional gender roles that occurred between her and her father and she resented it, even stating on page 96 that "where...
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...Comics as Archives: MetaMetaMaus Hillary Chute | University of Chicago Abstract: In the view of some critics, the form of comics is a locus of the archival, a place where we can identify an archival turn. Art Spiegelman’s Maus first and perhaps most forcefully established the connection between archives and comics. His groundbreaking work documenting his father’s experience in WWII Poland, where he survived internment in Auschwitz, is a visual narrative based on oral testimony that consistently heightens our awareness of visual, written, and oral archives, and where they interact, overlap, or get transposed one into the other. Hillary Chute recounts and interprets her collaboration with Spiegelman in the process of assembling MetaMaus, a book compiling interviews and archival materials on the making of Maus. MetaMaus, argues Chute, reflects the tension between different kinds of extant archives—oral, written, photographic—and the cross-discursive work of (re)building new archives that motivates Maus. Its defining feature is that it shows the materiality of Spiegelman’s archive; it is about the embodiment of archives. The subject of Maus is the retrieval of memory and ultimately, the creation of memory…. It’s about choices being made, of finding what one can tell, and what one can reveal, and what one can reveal beyond what one knows one is revealing. Those are the things that give real tensile strength to the work—putting the dead into little boxes. – Art Spiegelman (MetaMaus...
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