Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Themes

Media Analysis on Fun Home by Alison Bechdel: Whiteness and White Privilege
The novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel is about the Bechdel family, and the struggles that they endured during their lifetime. The Bechdel family lived in a town in Pennsylvania and directed a funeral home business. Alison’s father Bruce was having sexual relationships with men and boys, the mother Helen, was fully aware of Bruce’s adulterous actions. Alison discovered at an early age that she wanted to dress as a boy and she eventually concluded that she was attracted to women, and at the age of 19 she came out as a lesbian. Not too long after she told her mother that she was a lesbian, her mother revealed that she asked Bruce for a divorce, within two weeks of the revelation Bruce died. Alison suspected that it was a suicide when she began to discover evidence that would correlate to his death. The themes that were present in the novel range from gender identity, repression,

Regarding Alison’s education, it was essentially a given, there was no discussion on the difficulty of financing or applying for a college, she also had an accessible community of other white individuals which openly allowed her to explore her sexual and emotional identity without prejudice. In White Privilege Peggy states, “My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make (McIntosh 90).” not a single member in the Bechdel family struggled with progressing their careers due to social disadvantages of race. The mother never faced discrimination due to a lack of privilege in her acting career and the same can be said about the father and Alison, which allowed them to live comfortably and