The Role Gender Expression Plays in Bruce and Alison's Relationship

 Gender expression plays a huge part in the relationship between Bruce and Alison in Fun Home. Bruce seems to carry a lot of shame with him as regards to his sexuality. I think one of the main reasons he is so adamant on keeping Alison as ‘feminine’ as possible is to help her avoid the same shame he carries with him everyday of his life. When I was first thinking of why Bruce didn’t want young Alison to leave the mainstream ideas of gender identity I thought it was because he was bitter and didn’t want anyone to have a good experience with expressing their gender identity because it would trigger a thought in him that his life didn’t have to turn out the way it did which would fill him with regret. But after finishing the novel I feel like Bruce’s cold and aggressive attitude towards young Alison probably stemmed from his lack of ability to connect with young children. As Alison gets older Bruce’s hostility melts away and the two grow close through their love of literature. Bruce also becomes one of Alison's main mentors(?) and supporters after she comes out as a lesbian to her family. Bruce encourages her to explore and he even seems to be somewhat inspired by Alison's lack of embarrassment and shame. This is why it seems like the reason Bruce was so adamant on Alison staying in a traditionally feminine role when she was little was because Bruce was kind of projecting his shame onto Alison and from his perspective protecting her from the social stigma of not adhering to the norm.

The same way Bruce seems to be projecting his own shame of his gender identity onto Alison. Alison's Gender expression is partially a response to he fathers actions. Alison admits that she was trying to compensate for the lack of masculinity in her father by expressing it through herself. So the same way Bruce was trying to keep Alison from carrying the same shame he did, Alison was trying to create masculinity because she felt it was lacking in her household. While Bruce wanted Alison to wear matching necklines and barrettes, Alison's wanted to get a custom made suit and learn about menswear. Bruce constantly shutdown Alison's interest in menswear and Alison constantly expressed frustration towards the feminine clothing Bruce forces her to wear. This created a distance between the two characters and kept the two at odds constantly throughout Alison's childhood. 

Despite the disconnection that the two face due to their different gender identities/expressions Bruce and Alison do have a brief connection through the subject. On page 220-221 Alison and Bruce are in their car talking and Bruce briefly opens up about how he used to want to be a girl and would dress up as a girl. After learning the piece of information Alison grows excited and tells her father about how she used to want to be a boy and would dress in boys clothes. But Alison's excited response was replied to with silence. Just when the two began to have a genuine and personal connection and grew closer Bruce shut down and the two returned to having the same intimate distance they've had with each other throughout the entire novel. (By intimate distance I mean that the two are close in some respects but they also seem to lack the ability to truly connect past surface level things like books. They are intimate but when it comes to expressing personal things they(Bruce specifically) can't). 

This blog post was kind of a bunch of random ideas about Bruce and Alison's relationship thrown together but what do you think? What role does gender expression play in their relationship?


Comments

  1. Chloe JungApril 21, 2023 at 8:04 PM

    I agree with a lot of your comments about Bruce and Alison's differing gender expressions causing conflict! I also think that Bruce might have felt jealousy for the potential of Alison as a female to express her femininity. Meanwhile, Alison might have felt frustrated that Bruce was trying to control her self expression. Great post!

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  2. MitchellApril 23, 2023 at 11:45 AM

    It's interesting to me how Alison Bechdel's understanding of these little "gender skirmishes" with her father are understood differently by her "now," at the time she is writing the book, than she would have understood them at the time or even in her later childhood. What might look like a rather common case of a traditional dad who doesn't like his daughter dressing in nontraditional "tomboy" styles (this used to be the term for mild gender nonconformity in girls--girls who did things like play sports or run), in light of the revelations at the end of his life, are reconsidered as a kind of sublimated surreptitious gender expression of his own. It reflects the odd dynamics of this whole book: we are never getting an unfiltered "reality" of Alison's younger childhood; we see how she NOW views this same stuff while trying to project certain motives and feelings onto her father. And they timidly START to talk about this stuff in the scene in the car, but it never gets off the ground. There we see Alison just beginning the process of revising her views of her own childhood, the end result of which is reflected in the book.

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  3. Luke YouApril 23, 2023 at 6:17 PM

    Although I don't exactly like Bruce, my feelings about him did change throughout the novel. I slowly understood him more but still didn't necessarily agree with the way he did things. It's just hard to change the way you think about things when you've been taught a certain way your whole life, and for Bruce that meant he would continue to feel shameful about wanting to be more feminine.

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