What does "sexual inversion" mean for Bruce and Allison in Fun Home?
It's pretty clear throughout Fun Home that Allison Bechdel really wants to view her and her father, Bruce, as complementary opposites. She frames their lives as parallel but conflicting, and in the end, her coming out coincides with her father's death. The end of his story is the beginning of hers or something along those lines. One of the most interesting elements of this parallel that she draws was their complimentary relationships with gender. Early in the book Bechdel introduces the idea of her and Bruce's conflicting worldviews, representing this duality in extremely gendered terms "I was Spartan to my father's Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly... Utilitarian to his aesthete" (15). Here she connects herself to masculinity, aggression, and practicality, and her father to feminity, weakness, and, importantly, useless decoration that she frames as artifice or deception. Later she introduces the idea of "sexual inversion" s...