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" saying, "Proust refers to his explicitly homosexual characters as 'inverts.' I've always been fond of this antiquated clinical term...it's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex" (97).  

    These are not the only instances in which these ideas come up. Throughout the book, Bechdel expresses discomfort with her body, especially as she is going through puberty, and a desire to be more masculine in both form and expression. Additionally, in one of the only genuine conversations that she has with her father he says, "When I was little, I really wanted to be a girl" (221). Gender nonconformity and discomfort with gender roles are explicit for both Allison and her father, as well as represented as an extension of their queer sexualities. Gender is not really working for either of them.

    Bechdel seems to take the idea of sexual inversion very seriously, as much as she disavows it as "antiquated" and "clinical." This strikes me as odd because it draws a very distinct contrast with the way that queer identities tend to be discussed generally by contemporary queer figures and groups, as Bechdel acknowledges with her concession that the term is antiquated. Despite this, however, this idea maps quite well onto the narrative that she has created about both her and her father. When Allison sees the butch woman in the diner the recognition that she experiences is not a conscious realization of her sexuality--it is pretty clearly about gender expression (118). Being masculine and queer are inseparable parts of Allison's identity, to the point that much of her retroactive explanations of her sexuality have nothing to do with any kind of attraction to women but more to do with identification with men and a desire to be masculine. By her own admission, she does not realize that she is a lesbian until she reads that book in the bookstore, but she is well aware that of how she wants to present from an extremely young age (74). 

    What I mean by this is not that Allison's "reverence for masculine beauty" as she puts it is definitive evidence of her queerness, but more that she seems to think that it is (99). And to be honest I'm not sure that it isn't. She sees these as very delicately intertwined aspects of her identity, and even her father sees them as related enough to bring up his own struggles with gender when he's discussing his relationships with men with Allison. It is definitely important to acknowledge that much of this could be carefully crafted to create a sense of connection and emotional resonance between Allison and her father, but regardless I kind of like this idea of Allison and Bruce as inverts of each other, with many similarities but also a lot of crucial differences--namely Allison's openness about her sexuality and also her not preying on people with less power than her.