Anindya
Syam Choudhury and Kinshuk Chakraborty
Dr. Anindya Syam Choudhury is an Associate Professor
in the Department of English, Assam University, Silchar, Assam. His current
areas of interest include World Englishes, the politics of English(es) in
postcolonial contexts, language-literature interface areas like Stylistics,
postcolonial literatures in English(es), especially writings in English from
India’s Northeast.
Kinshuk Chakraborty is Ph.D. scholar in the Department
of English, Assam University, Silchar. He is pursuing his research work in the
domain of revisionist mythology in post-millennial Indian fiction in English.
Abstract:
‘Postfeminism’ is a term that is often used to
describe a media and publishing phenomenon, with the societal perception that
many or all of the goals of feminism have already been achieved. This
perception, however, ironically contradicts many essential feminist ideologies.
In fact, postfeminism may purport to be a powerful tool for women but it also
insinuates that women lack agency, saturating the media with examples of ‘girl
power’ and ‘real’ depictions of women, merely to make women consumers of their
own selves. This article begins with a discussion of what constitutes
postfeminism and a postfeminist world-view before dwelling on how comic books
constitute a significant part of this postfeminist media culture. Comics are a
unique popular-culture art form with the potential to inform, persuade, and
model attitudes and behaviours. Although they are often overlooked as potential
research materials, comics provide powerful and reflective messages about
varying cultures, and garner the possibilities to challenge the prevalent
status quos and develop profound meaning that challenges conventional
narratives. However, this potential to challenge cultural norms in comics is,
in many cases, warped and manipulated by ideological impositions and consumer
backlash. It has been found that comic book narrative structures device a model
of ‘consistent’ storytelling and stereotypical character delineations to
attract and satisfy the readers while being conscious of the power structures
that arouse such forms of ‘consistent’ creations. In this context, it may be
pointed out that comic books also attempt to subtly critique these very power
structures through the incorporation of minute cultural analysis and
problematic character developments in them. Popular comics with female
protagonists or with a female congregation appear to be primary instances of such
kind of narrative modeling. In such comics, women are often defined in the
postfeminist sense of empowerment and sexual freedom, but only through their
engagement with the consumer culture. What is reinforced through the strategies
of postfeminism is the idea that through consumerism and overt displays of
sexuality, women can assert a deeply feminized power but with the demand that
women buy and display specific, culturally aligned performances. Initially, there have been attempts to
manipulate these cultural implications by adhering to their principles while
subtly critiquing and commenting on them. The representation of Wonder Woman’s in
Ms. magazine, an American liberal
feminist magazine, was one such attempt, trying to incorporate feminist
ideologies under the guise of popular representations of women. But such
representations have, since then, only helped in reinforcing those prevalent
popular conceptions. While Wonder Woman’s legacy had become one that meant that
empowerment happens by being overtly sexual, the primary goals of Ms. magazine
failed to reach out to people because it was hard for many women to relate to
characters like Wonder Woman. Although there have been attempts to create more
relatable female comic book characters, they also appear to have fallen prey to
the dictates of the popular/consumer culture. Detective Comics’s Harley Quinn
and the female superhero team ‘Birds of Prey’ provide crucial examples for
understanding the postfeminist representations imbibed in comic books. Marvel Comics’s
Araña (Anya Corazon), Dust, and Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan) also provide
significant case studies of the postfeminist world-view and its implications
upon the racial and religious quandary of such narratives. This paper would
attempt to look at such comic book representations related to the
aforementioned female characters (and also refer to their motion picture and
animated series counterparts) through specific lenses of feminism(s) and gender
studies to enquire into the mechanisms of postfeminist representations and
their intricate association to consumer culture.
Keywords: Comic books, consumer culture, Ms. Marvel,
postfeminism, superheroines, Wonder Woman
The Postfeminist World-view: Different and Differing Perspectives
The term ‘postfeminism’
has been mired in controversies of various kinds right since its inception in
the 1980s. While, as Sarah Gamble points out, there has been a bit of confusion
around postfeminism (as also around postmodernism) primarily because of “the semantic uncertainty generated by the
prefix”, with ‘post’ being usually taken to mean ‘after in time or order’ and not
exactly “rejection”, scholars like Tania Modleski (in Feminism
Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age) and Susan Faludi (in Backlash: The Undeclared
War Against Women)
have been quite
forthright in their description of postfeminism as essentially anti-feminist
(37). Modleski, for instance, has stated that postfeminist texts “are
actually engaged in negating the critiques and undermining the goals of
feminism”, thereby “delivering us back to a prefeminist world” (3). In a
similar vein, Faludi has portrayed postfeminism as a kind of anti-feminist
backlash, resulting in the undoing of the ground gained by feminism:
Just when record numbers
of younger women were supporting feminist goals in the mid-1980s (more of them,
in fact, than older women) and a majority of all women were calling themselves
feminists, the media declared that feminism was the flavour of the seventies
and that ‘postfeminism’ was the new story – complete with a younger generation
who supposedly reviled the women’s movement. (5)
This
attack on postfeminism, through the rhetoric of relapse, is counterpointed by
‘sex-positive’ (post)feminists like Naomi Wolf, Katie
Roiphe, Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia et. al., whose work “is
underpinned by a binarised distinction between ‘victim feminism’ and ‘power
feminism’” in which the latter is positioned “as the only viable way in which
to counteract the supposed lack of agency in victim feminism” (Gillis and
Munford 167). Advocating ‘power feminism’, Katie Roiphe, in The Morning
After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, for
instance, decries the inappropriate image of the victimisation of women (which,
in her opinion, furthers the perception of women as sexual objects) fostered by
second-wave feminism in the following manner:
The image that emerges from feminist preoccupations with rape and sexual
harassment is that of women as victims…. This image of a delicate woman bears a
striking resemblance to that fifties ideal my mother and the other women of her
generation fought so hard to get away from. They didn’t like her passivity, her
wide-eyed innocence. They didn’t like the fact that she was perpetually
offended by sexual innuendo. They didn’t like her excessive need for
protection. She represented personal, social, and psychological possibilities
collapsed, and they worked and marched, shouted and wrote, to make her
irrelevant for their daughters. But here she is again, with her pure intentions
and her wide eyes. Only this time it is feminists themselves who are breathing
new life into her. (6)
In this context, mention
may be made of an incident narrated by Misha Kavka (in her article titled “Feminism,
Ethics, and History, or What is the ‘Post’ in Postfeminism?”) when she saw a
sticker reading “I’LL BE A POSTFEMINIST IN A POSTPATRIARCHY” stuck onto the
doors of “out-and-out second-wave
feminists” (29). Kavka considers this instance to infer that while postfeminism
initially began as a theoretical approach to deconstruct the aging concept of
feminism, it soon turned into a completely new concept which attempted to look
at itself as a signifier of historical periodization. The ‘post’ of the term ‘postfeminism’,
thus, potentially signifies a movement ‘after’ feminism in a chronological sense.
In the words of Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, when used in this sense,
postfeminism might be said to mark an “epistemological
break within feminism” which “implies transformation and change within
feminism that challenges ‘hegemonic’ Anglo-American feminism” (3). When
considered in such a way, a postfeminist approach might address the theoretical
gaps of second-wave feminism, which has often been criticized for its white,
middle-class, Anglo-American bias with regard to the issue of oppression of women.
In many ways, then, postfeminism
has often been seen as a phenomenon drifting away from the ideals or goals that
constituted the core of feminism. This wavering away from the goals has caused
a sort of detachment and this makes those goals and ideals seem to be something
of the past. As a result, there is a sense of simmering nostalgia attached with
those detached values and goals and gender traditionalism. However, while postfeminism
has been seen to exhibit a reactionary stance, it cannot be denied that
postfeminism inextricably relies on feminism to function as a discourse. This
“double entanglement” of postfeminism, leading to a complexification of the
backlash argument (“Postfeminism” 28), has been pointed out lucidly by McRobbie,
who remains one of the pioneering commentators on the complex relationship
between feminism and postfeminism:
[P]ostfeminism . . . [refers] to an active
process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s come to be undermined. .
. . [T]hrough an array of machinations, elements of contemporary popular
culture arc perniciously effective in regard to this undoing of feminism while
simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a well-informed and even
well-intended response to “feminism.” (“Postfeminism” 27)
Another important facet of postfeminism is its
fascinating resemblance to neoliberal culture. Dane Richardson and Victoria
Robinson, in their book Introducing Gender and Women's
Studies, describe neoliberalism as a framework that
espouses the idea of liberating the markets and leaving them to the freeplay of
the market forces and withdrawal of government control on issues like social
welfare. They also argue that it is useful to think of neoliberalism “as a form
of regulation or governmentality and an ideological framework of ideas and
values that emphasise commodification and consumerism, professionalization and
managerialism, and individualism and freedom of ‘choice’” (xxi). The neoliberal
stratagem makes empowered women responsible for her individual choices –
choices which tend to cater to a consumerist culture. In essence, the choice
rhetoric is one of the main foci of the postfeminist world-view.
In this scenario, a woman’s ‘choices’ based on
her own ‘self’ takes a detour from the political to the personal as she is now empowered
because she can choose, as the postfeminist rhetoric would suggest, as opposed
to a time in the very distant past where she may have been forced to live a
certain type of life. In a particular situation, an ideal postfeminist subject,
despite having a plethora of choices and options to choose from, tends to
choose a specific criterion which is rendered desirable to her. Tasker and
Negra point out that “postfeminism is white and middle class by default” (2),
but the postfeminist stance towards racial discrimination triggers the gory
history of marginalization of the women of colour. Though the postfeminist
world-view guarantees individual space to women, including those coloured, a
careful observation reveals how it caters to the needs of white women and accords
them a privileged status. While women of colour do appear in postfeminist media
texts, the focus is overwhelmingly on assimilation as well as respectability.
While the postfeminist culture staunchly believes in a situation where all
‘empowered’ women have access to equal opportunities, the plight of women subjected
to racial discrimination is pitiful because it does not seem to do enough to accord
them the dignity of existence.
Postfeminism and
Wonder Woman, the First Superheroine
In the light of the above discussion
on the postfeminist world-view, it would be interesting to analyse the noticeable changes that have occurred in the
last few decades in the domain of superhero comics, especially with regard to
the issue of the representation of women characters. Historically
under-represented or misrepresented, superheroines became more prevalent in the
1960s and 1970s, when more and more female-led titles and powerful female
characters appeared in a male-dominated world. While many second-wave feminists
were involved in Black and Hispanic civil rights movements, as well as the
emerging politics around gay and lesbian rights, “it
is the intersecting of a range of concerns, including gender, sexuality, race,
ethnicity, age, and class, that came to be the defining element of the
so-called third-wave in the early 1990s, and is the key to understanding recent
shifts in representations of gender in superhero comics”, as Curtis and Cardo
point out in their article “Superheroes and third-wave feminism” (382). An understanding of this is important for
appreciating the recent shifts in the representations of gender in superhero
comics. While diverse superheroines began to appear in the later decades of the
20th century, their representation had its ‘real’ initiation through
the figure of Wonder Woman although Fantomah, created by Fletcher Hanks,
predates her by a couple of years. While
different interpretations of the character have emerged over the years, the
most common Wonder Woman origin story is the one in which Queen Hippolyta of
Themyscira created a clay sculpture of a little girl and begged the Greek
goddess Aphrodite to bring her to life. The child named Diana grows up and
trains herself in the island of all-women Amazon warriors. The island is hidden
from the rest of the world, until an American spy pilot in World War II, Steve
Trevor, crash-lands there. Diana then leaves Themyscira to join the war effort,
adopting the name ‘Wonder Woman’. In some recent works like Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Tim Hanley’s Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious
History of the World's Most Famous Heroine and Noah Berlatsky’s Wonder Woman: Bondage
and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948,
the authors have tried to unravel several deeper mysteries behind Wonder
Woman’s origin. Berlatsky
in his work, for instance, has pointed out how Marston (the creator of Wonder
Woman), a psychologist, developed his “DISC theory, which referred to Dominance,
Inducement, Submission, and Compliance” and applied it to his creation of
Wonder Woman (8). Throughout the years that Marston wrote and developed the
comic character, images of bondage and extreme violence were an inextricable
part of the character of Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman, for instance, could be
seen either chained or subduing others with her own lasso on a regular basis. The
chaining of Wonder Woman could be regarded as symbolising the struggles of
women during the
Suffragette Movement in the United States, and the breaking of the
chains possibly symbolised the breaking free of women from social fetters put
in place by patriarchy. In the words of Finn, Marston used Wonder Woman to
promote his ideological agenda of “women’s political power, economic independence, and social
authority” although “the comic book’s persistent bondage theme” and her skimpy
costume “undermine Wonder Woman’s agency and relegate her to an object of male
fantasy” (7). After
Marston's death in 1947, the character was stripped of her super-abilities and
new storylines were created to display Wonder Woman as having greater agency in
leisure. This new interpretation provoked a critique by prominent feminist,
Gloria Steinem, who then put Wonder Woman in her classic costume on “the
cover of the first stand-alone Ms.
magazine in July 1972” (Berlatsky 14). Although the extent of bondage in the comics decreased since
Marston's time, it still retained its popularity among the readers, and even
Steinem had been enthusiastic about this version of Wonder Woman’s character.
In this context, Berlatsky in his book points out that "images of disempowerment,
then, may be popular with women because they mirror women's actual
disempowerment" (13). Berlatsky takes the example of Wonder Woman #13 (which was reprinted in the 1972 Ms. collection) where there is a crisis
in Paradise Island and the Amazon women require Wonder Woman to show them how
to “snap the heaviest chains, and giant boulders” (14). Though the story ends
with the Amazons succeeding in their quest under Wonder Woman’s supervision,
the imagery of bondage hardly diminishes, as “the Amazon girls, all
dressed in short, flirty skirts, are shown winding ropes and chains around the
(as always) be-swimsuited Wonder Woman, tying her fast to a wooden pole . . .” (15). In this regard, Berlatsky asks
the following questions:
Why does raising women’s
self-esteem require bondage imagery exactly? Isn’t there a way we could get the
feminist message without the cheerful-yet-kinky sexual charge? (15)
Hence, although Wonder Woman may appear to be a representation of
women empowerment and may seem to promote homogeneity among women, the methods
used in representing such empowerment are problematic and the homogeneity
appears forced. From a postfeminist worldview, the Wonder Woman in chains (although
she undergoes various transformations with regard to her dress, weapons, etc.,
over the many decades of her existence) would possibly represent a kind of
‘victim feminism’ (which was discussed earlier), without much agency,
independence and freedom of choice. However, Wonder Woman also seems to “enact
patriarchal notions of strength" and becomes a kind of hybrid entity where a woman “must
meet masculine measures of success” while still upholding her femininity (Laura
Lane et al. 498). This is a
quintessential postfeminist framework into which Wonder Woman seems to fit.
Comics, Postfeminism and the Representation of
Contemporary Superheroines
There is no
gainsaying that comics are a unique popular-culture art-form with the potential
to inform, persuade, and model attitudes and behaviours. As Groensteen points
out, comic books are a “story-related pleasure”, an “art-related pleasure”, and
a “medium-related pleasure”, a combination that cannot be found in any other
medium whether it be film, television, photography, or novels (10). In a
similar vein, Duncan and Smith opine that “at their best, comic books can
accommodate content as profound, moving, and enduring as that found in any of
the more celebrated vehicles for human expression” (2). It is worth mentioning
that the last two decades have seen a substantial change in regard to the
representation of characters in the comics. Especially, the 1960s and 1970s
have seen the underrepresented women characters appearing and occupying space
in what has been assumed to be a male-dominated world. To understand the shift
in representation and the blitzkrieging of female characters, it is important to
take a detour to the civil rights movements of the Blacks and the Hispanics,
and the political movements for gay and lesbian rights. While these movements
were organised to address specific issues affecting those particular groups,
the intersection of several factors like colour, race, ethnicity and class
became a unified driving force for the movements which subsequently triggered a
massive shift with regard to the representation of women characters in comics. Duncan
and Smith claim, in their book The
Power of Comics, that
although comics can “function as catalysts for the raising of social
consciousness among their readers, the industry that produces them has a less
consistent record for taking more direct action to change existing disparities
in power relations” (265). In order to convey ideological meanings, comics
function as “imagetexts” that utilize both textual and visual communication
(Mitchell 56). The representations of race and gender are some of the most
apparent ideological descriptors on the comic book page because of their visual
cues. These representations maybe wayward, bearing no semblance with reality. As
Royal explained:
To put it bluntly, comics - by necessity -
employs stereotypes as a kind of shorthand to communicate quickly and
succinctly. This being the case, it is up to the comics artist to tell her or
his story as effectively as possible without slipping into the trap, even
inadvertently, of inaccurate and even harmful representations. (68)
Comics and their creators may purposefully or
unintentionally misrepresent characters or reality in order to fulfil presumed
stereotypes, perpetuate ideologies in the prevalent culture, or otherwise
appeal to readers. In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyse and
explore these ideological undercurrents pertaining to the postfeminist
world-view, with specific references to the discourses of gender which both
compliment and challenge it. The representations that have been considered for analysis in this paper include
DC Comics’s female superhero team ‘Birds of Prey’ (particularly Oracle and
Vixen), the anti-hero(ine)/villain Harley Quinn, and Marvel Comics’ Spider-Girl
(Araña),
Dust, and the new Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan).
One of the main reasons for the recent
intervention in superhero comics is precisely that third-wave
feminism/postfeminism is part of a broader engagement with the intersectional
axes of class, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, and complex gender
politics which have come together in really innovative ways around the wider
issue of representation. While third-wave feminism is replete with
contradictory stances, positions and diverse movements, this diversity has actually
been a major enabler in bringing together writers to herald a significant
impact on the genre superhero comics. In their article titled “Contradiction
as Agency: Self-Determination, Transcendence, and Counter-Imagination in Third
Wave Feminism”, Valerie
R. Renegar and Stacey K. Sowards point out that contradiction is precisely what
leads to innovation. "Contradictions found in third-wave feminism" they
write, "are often designed to challenge traditional notions of identity
and to create ambiguities, divergences, incompatibilities, and different ways
of thinking" (6). They argue that contradictions enable women "to
discover and experiment with the various dimensions of themselves" (8),
which can consequently enable "new possibilities and options for everyday
experiences and activism" (2). As Shelley Budgeon has noted, another key
feature of third-wave feminism is seeing "popular culture simultaneously
as a site of pleasure and an object of critique" (280). This is also in
keeping with Christine Gledhill's idea of "pleasurable negotiations",
which is basically a call for "rethinking relations between media
products, ideologies and audiences" and a way to understand femininity and
womanhood not as abstract "textual" positions, but as
"lived" socio-cultural categories (169) from which women make varied
use and interpretation of media products. Postfeminism, much like
postmodernism, caters to the late capitalist culture that thrives on work,
leisure and a consumerist culture. It has been largely able to intergrate itself
with economic discourses, signifying that the self must conform to the existing
demands of market culture.
The writing in Birds of Prey supports female agency while the artwork denies it,
and, through this balance of agency and denial, it creates a postfeminist
imagetext. Other features such as consumerism, self-surveillance attribute a
postfeminist colour to it. The text is postfeminist because it projects
powerful characters but again limits their capacities besides indulging in
racial discrimination. There are a few moments in the work that show a
postfeminist world-view at work, even in a writing trajectory that is meant to
emphasize the strengths of women and their relationships with one another. One
of the important incidents in the work is when Barbara is in hospital, crying
after her seizure, but Black Canary, another female character, shows Barbara
how there is mascara all over her face. This incident suggests that even in times
of pain Black Canary cares about Barbara’s appearance or, at least, believes that
Barbara would want her to help maintain her appearance. Black Canary surveys
Barbara to keep her exterior in check and up to the standard beauty codes.
Barbara, after all, must conform to the codes of sex appeal and exquisite
appearance. The industry thrives in making women appear desirable, conforming
to the traditional heterosexual notions, and thus the postfeminist culture
expects women to appear how the free market desires them to so that they become
viable consumables across the media. Another instance of how maintaining a
particular kind of ‘acceptable’ appearance occurs during the second fight
between Huntress and Vixen. As Huntress kicks Vixen in the face, a caption box
reads, “Come on... you’re a model, Mari. You can’t like getting your nose
broken” (Dixon 3). Even during a fight, Huntress aims to snap Vixen back into
reality by attacking her superficial features. A broken nose, to Huntress, may
have a greater effect on a model (who cares about her appearance) than some
other sort of brute force. In a fight scene, one would expect the characters to
focus on surviving rather than on how they appear, and yet Huntress targets
Vixen’s superficial beauty. Through Huntress’s aiming at Vixen’s nose what is
intended to be shown perhaps is that the way to make a woman truly feel pain is
by attacking her physical appearance, specifically her face. Birds of Prey seems to reinforce stereotypes
and also emphasizes impractical clothing and things that do not serve much
purpose. There is, of course, an espousal of the belief in emancipation of
women but the artwork seems to be besmeared with conventional sexist/racist
practices. The costumes that the characters wear point towards this: while
Vixen’s costume covers her entire ‘black’ body thereby hiding the racial
signifiers, Huntress’s costume is interesting because she wears only a
one-piece swimsuit with a cut to show her midriff and thigh-length boots.The
artwork does not give her pants or anything similarly practical. Black Canary’s
costume in Birds of Prey comprises a
black, leather swimsuit with fishnet stockings. The characters, therefore, are
kept racialized and sexualized possibly in order to cater to the requirements
of the (white) male gaze, and this runs counter to the female power argument that
the comic book supposedly espouses.
The inclusion of ‘hot’ superheroines has been
in vogue within the realm of comic books for decades. The designers have more
often than not crafted the superheroines, irrespective of the medium, in a way
which has enabled them to wield their sexual power. Whether good or evil, the
drawings of these women has constituted what has been called “bad girl art”, a
term that originated in the 1990s, and which referred most specifically to comic
book women who were “anti-heroine characters, often portrayed as cruel,
mercenary, or demonic . . .” (“Bad Girl Art” Online). In her work titled Busting Out All Over: The Portrayal of
Superheroines in American Superhero Comics from the 1940s to the 2000s,
Brandi Florence analyses such a kind of “bad girl art” in which
(anti)superheroines (having “super-sized” breasts, strong thighs, and thin
waists) are often depicted in uncomfortable, erotic positions (97). In Birds of Prey, the one Black female
character, Vixen, is portrayed as feral and savage. Her representation is
inherently flawed and troublesome because she is mostly portrayed as erratic.
Of course, her mind is being controlled by one of the villains for a significant
portion of the story but the comic still paints her as animalistic. Vixen is
tied to the primal, animal-like representation; her name itself is a sexualized
reference to foxes, and she can tap into the natural world to draw upon the
powers and traits of animals. Vixen’s portrayal is primarily negative because
it relies upon racist attitudes towards Black women as primal and animalistic;
she is shown to have the potential for transgressing the divide between humans
and animals. This particular type of representation resonates with Patricia
Hill Collins’s notion of ‘matrix of domination’, which she elucidates in her
book Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender,
and the New Racism. Collins utilises this concept to underscore that one's position in
society is made up of multiple contiguous standpoints rather than just one
essentialist standpoint. It assumes that power operates in a top-down manner by
forcing and controlling unwilling victims to bend to the will of more powerful
superiors. Collins opines that "depending on the context, an individual
may be an oppressor, a member of an oppressed group, or simultaneously
oppressor and oppressed…. Each individual derives varying amounts of penalty
and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression which frame everyone's
lives" (226). In addition, Collins emphasizes "that people
simultaneously experience and resist oppression on three levels: the level of
personal biography; the group or community level of the cultural context
created by race, class, and gender; and the systemic level of social
institutions" (227). Vixen’s animal power is explicitly a sign of this
because she is Black and can switch between different species of animals in
order to exhibit her superpower. This representation is troubling because the
text apparently tries hard to celebrate the power of women. What it ends up
doing, however, is relying upon racist stereotypes.
Birds of Prey puts forward the argument that differently-abled people should be
treated equally, and that they possess many unique and liberating traits. So the
representation of the ‘bad girl’ in case of the character named Barbara Gordon (the
Batgirl) gets transformed into one of a quintessentially ‘good girl’ owing to
her physical disability because it forces her to give up the mantle of Batgirl.
The transformed Barbara Gordon is represented as the computer-hacker, Oracle,
whose aptness with technology is unmatched. Despite being physically disabled,
she is a genius in the world of computers, a hacker with unmatched agility and
agency. The various representations of disability in popular culture are
necessary to develop positive attitudes towards the differently-abled people and
celebrate them as equals. Garland-Thomson claims that “disability – like gender
– is a concept that pervades all aspects of culture: its structuring
institutions, social identities, cultural practices, political positions,
historical communities, and the shared human experience of embodiment”
(“Integrating Disability” 4). In American culture, the differently-abled people
have generally been ignored in favour of the able-bodied ideal, and if a
differently-abled person happens to be a woman, her misery gets multiplied
manifold. In this context, Barbara Jordan can be said to have negotiated her
double jeopardy (of being a woman and a differently-abled person) skilfully by
utilizing her photographic memory and technological prowess to carve a niche for
herself in the comic book universe. Barbara Gordon’s case seems to be akin to
what Ellis and Kent point out in Disability
and New Media:
Digital media and online technology hold the promise that people with
disability will be included in social life, diminishing the impact their impairment
has on their social life. (59)
Both a sex-positive approach and the adoption of “rhetorical strategies”
(Valerie R. Renegar and Stacey K. Sowards 8) of patriarchy – such as the claim
that "our desires aren't simply booby traps set by the patriarchy" (Jennifer
Baumgardner and Amy Richards 136) – have meant that women writers have been
able to use images of scantily-clad heroines and do a ‘Good Girl/Bad Girl’ makeover
of characters that previously were not drawn that way, such as the
transformation that Harley Quinn went through at the hands of Amanda Conner.
Harley Quinn appeared in the DC animated Universe as the Joker’s psychiatrist
and later his girlfriend, thereby situating herself on the side of the evil as
a member of gang Criminal Gallery/Rogue’s Gallery. Initially, Harley appeared
in full clothes, covered from tip to toe, but soon changed into a ‘hot’ sleazy
figure in shorts. Initially, the less sexualised representation meant that she
was under the control of the Joker. After being out of the relationship with
the Joker, Harley Quinn dons an attractive outfit to charm others through her
sexualised portrayal but then again she stays in complete control of it. The
most important figure in her life now is Poison Ivy, another female character
undergoing a transformation from villain to anti-hero, and with whom Harley
starts a relationship. In bed together, they chat, almost like teenagers, with
Harley wearing a pair of pink fluffy bunny slippers, a sign of childishness or
innocence in stark contrast to her actual life. She is also regularly shown
making herself up and choosing different costumes, because she could not stand
to be as boring as Superman and wear the same outfit every day. This appropriation
of the supposed tools of patriarchy (makeup, high heels, etc.) fits very well
with some of the aspects of third-wave feminism, such as renegotiations of
ideas of femininity and fluid sexuality.
In DC’s New 52 series (where
Harley Quinn has a stand-alone comic book title), Harley Quinn is shown to
inherit a property and rents a part of it tenants. She uses the roof to shelter
animals in the first volume. She exhibits the role of a psychiatrist, a
vigilante, an animal rights activist and a landlord. She is also a bisexual
woman who has had her skin bleached bone-white and needs to put on makeup to
pass as ‘white’ (and hence ‘normal’) when she returns to her professional
engagements as a therapist. She arrives in Coney Island riding a motorbike
laden with all her belongings. The bike itself is a customized chopper and can
be read as an appropriation of a traditionally male symbol of virility. In her
book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler analyses this kind of representation
as an instance of the ‘performative’ criteria favoured by heteronormative (and its
related) ideologies. Specifically,
Butler conceptualizes gendered subjectivity as a fluid identity and contends
that the individual subject is never exclusively ‘male’ or ‘female,’ but rather
is always in a state of contextually-dependent flux. That is, gendered
subjectivity is not something "fixed" or "essential" but a
sustained set of acts, "a repetition and a ritual" (xv). The comic book
offers an avenue to challenge patriarchy and postfeminist constructions if
Harley rejects the Joker (or any other male partner) and relies upon her female
community. However, the comic book’s continuous projection of Harley’s desire
for the Joker (from whom she has separated) disputes and dismantles whatever
positive infrastructure was put in place. The comic book contends that women need
and desire men no matter whether their attention is reciprocated in any
meaningful way.
Fiona Avery’s Amazing Fantasy released by Marvel Comics in 2004
introduced a Latina Heroine, Araña Corazon
(Anya), and it marked a watershed in comic book history. Her real name is Aña Sofia
Corazon, but she uses ‘Anya’ for the case of pronunciation of others. The first
six issues of Amazing Fantasy focus on the context of the story where
the readers are informed about WebCorps, Anya’s role as Hunter, her ties with
Miguel, the importance of the death of her mother in this series, her
investigative reporter father and his background, her ties with Spiderman, and
more about the enemy organization Sisterhood of the Wasp. Comic book artists
rely on certain techniques to enhance the superhero fantasy world for the
audience. However, in doing so, characters’ bodies are objectified to reveal
their superhero strengths. This objectification is especially problematic with
regard to the depictions of women characters because it leads to an overt sexualisation
of their characters. Although the techniques involve knowledge of muscle groups
and comic book traditions, the reader also notices that women’s bodies are
meant to be on display or objectified in ways different from those for male
characters. The tight buttocks, ample breasts, long yet muscular legs, narrow
torso, muscular arms, and fuller hips are meant to capture the tough, rugged,
beautiful, and ‘sexy’ women, as Hart discusses in his work How to
Draw Great-Looking Comic Book Women. Hence,
although many of these women (Anya included) have superpowers and skills beyond
those of the layperson, their bodies are idealized and objectified in negative
ways in the same manner in which women’s bodies are presented in magazine
advertisements where these are on display and women are “ready for sex” (Hart 7).
So the reader has to fight the urge to sexualize the characters and remember
that these bodies have been drawn and created for the comic book’s fantasy world
and that part of the fantasy is the comic book heroine’s body. Durham stated
that heroines often have their bodies as focal points with a focus on
“slenderness and voluptuousness that epitomize current dominant definitions of
beauty” (26), and Anya is no exception to this. In fact, Anya has the woman’s
body type which is often depicted in the media: a narrow waist, fuller hips,
ample breasts, lighter skin, and long hair.
The stereotypical representation of sex and race has always been an
indispensable aspect of the media. Anya, too, has been represented in similar
lines with the projection of her Latina identity. The projection goes further
as she differentiates herself from other non-whites and affiliates herself with
the other Latinas. Anya prioritises her family over everything but apparently
it is the ‘workplace’ which foregrounds itself as a ‘real’ family to her.
Although she is concerned about her father’s well-being, the workplace takes
prominence in her life and becomes her ‘family,’ especially in scenes (where
she has spiritual contact with her dead mother) where she creates and sustains
connections to her mother through ‘conversations’ about her mother’s death and
her own role in avenging that death. It is also at work where she truly
connects with other Latinos and begins to build ethnic relationships and
expresses her Latina identity. When she finally realises the significance of
her heritage, and the roles of her mother and father, she truly emerges as a
superheroine; she does not adopt the moniker of ‘Spidergirl’ (as her peers
suggest based on the example of Spiderman) but embraces her mother’s maiden
name ‘Araña’ as her heroic alias.
The multiplicity of ethnic, religious and gendered (mis)representations
is most evident in a character called Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel, who was
created in 2013 and who started featuring as Ms. Marvel (written by G. Willow
Wilson) since February 2014. A Muslim and a Pakistani-American Superheroine,
her religious orientation and ethnicity, crafted carefully by Wilson, an American
Muslim herself, immediately brings to mind another Sunni Muslim Marvel
superheroine, the Afghani-American Sooraya Qadir, known as ‘Dust’ after her
abilities to transform her body into dust particles. A comparison between
Kamala Khan and Dust is important here since the representation of Dust, who
debuted in 2002, in a post-9/11America, “is
fraught with Orientalist sentiments and a Western male gaze” (Kent 523). With
regard to representation of Dust, especially the utilization of the image of
the oppressed Muslim girl waiting to be rescued from the clutches of the
‘brutish’ Afghan men, who do not seem to be able to live in peace, Dar has the
following to say:
She is an "oppressed"
Muslim girl who was rescued from Afghanistan by Wolverine, a Western male
mutant. Wolverine is told that the Taliban were trying to remove Dusťs clothes,
obviously to molest her, and since there weren't any "good Muslim
men" around to take a stand against the Taliban's perverted behavior, who
better to rescue her than Wolverine, or rather, "Western democracy? (107)
What is
further interesting in the representation of Dust is her costume, which has
received considerable critical attention. Although, as Julie
Davis and Robert Westerfelhaus has pointed out, in comics “superheroes
do not typically dress in ways that signal religious affiliations” (802), Dust
chooses to wear an ‘abaya’ (a long outer garment) and a ‘niqab’ (a kind of
veil), which mark her off as a Muslim woman, adding an exotic dimension to her
character. While Dust’s agency in choosing her costume is appreciable, the
primary reason that she gives for doing so (‘protecting herself from men’)
plays into the Islamophobic stereotype of (Muslim) men being lustful and Islam
being a religion which puts harsh restrictions on women in particular. This is
nothing but a misrepresentation of the notion of modesty in Islam.
In stark contrast to Dust, Kamala
Khan does not wear any ‘abaya’ (although her Turkish friend, Nakia, does wear a
headscarf), and, interestingly, she is differentiated from her conservative,
orthodox brother, gesturing towards the fact that Islam is not merely a
monolith. Kamala Khan is shown to leave New Jersey in trying to find and gather
her lost self and the place she originally belongs to. In a particular story
arc, she leaves Jersey feeling unsure about who she is and where she belongs,
only to discover that "the missing pieces" in her life "aren't
part of a place," but things that she, as a young, super-powered,
Pakistani-American woman, has to work out for herself (Ms. Marvel 4-5). She discovers that there is no holiday for her and
no place of refuge. In Karachi, Kamala Khan is confronted with a situation
where she needs to showcase her superheroine stuff to save the situation.
Bereft of her superheroine costume, she moves around in red leggings, blue
dress and red scarf, part of which is worn as ‘hijab’ and ‘niqab’. Wilson uses her to give expression to
traditional feminist tropes about equality and empowerment, as she negotiates
relations with people and institutions on the path to working out who she is
and what she wants. Age and the particular forms of discrimination faced by her
generation are other central themes in Wilson's writing and Kamala's story. The
sensitive case here is Ms. Marvel’s gender, as her creator Wilson knows very
well. Coming from New Jersey and living in a socio-economic group ordinarily
referred to as the working class, Wilson's Ms. Marvel also fights
gentrification by property speculators. Ms. Marvel is, then, a young, Muslim
woman, a Pakistani-American, and a working-class millennial. In the words of
Fixmer and Wood, this represents the "kind of solidarity that incorporates
difference while transcending identity politics" (240), or what R. Claire
Snyder calls "a dynamic and welcoming politics of coalition" (176).
Kamala Khan is portrayed as a successor to Carol Danvers (the original Ms.
Marvel). In this context, Kamala has not only to suffer from the imposed roles
of gender, race and ethnicity but also from what Harold Bloom calls the
‘anxiety of influence’, where the identity of her ‘self’ is put into an
unstable state because she has to act keeping the legacy of her precursor,
Carol Danvers, in mind. In conclusion, it may be said thatalthough
superheroines have often been accused of perpetuating and bolstering certain
stereotypes, which a postfeminist world-view may be said to entail, the
incorporation of a diverse range of superheroines belonging to different
religious, ethnic and sexual orientations (from Wonder Woman, who started her
journey in the 1940s, to the postmillennial Dust, America Chavez and Kamala
Khan) has also enabled their creators to find a space to challenge many “aesthetic
and narrative conventions in superohero comics” (Curtis and Cardo 382).
Works Cited
“Bad Girl
Art.” Hey Kids Comics Wiki, heykidscomics.fandom.com/wiki/Bad_girl_art.
Accessed 18 October 2020.
Baumgardner,
Jennifer, and Amy Richards. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future.
Picador, 2010.
Berlatsky, Noah. Wonder
Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948. Rutgers
UP, 2015.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of
Poetry. Oxford UP, 1997.
Budgeon,
Shelley. “The Contradictions of Successful Femininity: Third-Wave Feminism,
Postfeminism and ‘New’ Femininities.” New Femininities: Postfeminism,
Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, edited by Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 279-292.
Butler,
Judith. Gender Trouble:Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity.Routledge, 1999.
Collins,
Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New
Racism.
Routledge, 2006.
Curtis, Neal, and Valentina Cardo.“Superheroes
and third-wave feminism.” Feminist Media
Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 2018, pp. 381-396, Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1351387.
Accessed 10 October 2020.
Dar,
Jehanzeb. “Holy Islamophobia, Batman! Demonization of Muslims and Arabs in
Mainstream American Comic Books in Teaching Against Islamophobia.” Teaching Against Islamophobia, edited by
Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg and Christopher Darius Stonebanks. Peter
Lang, 2010, pp. 99-110.
Davis,
Julie, and Robert Westerfelhaus.“Finding a Place for a Muslimah Heroine in the
Post 9/11 Marvel Universe: New X-Men's Dust.” Feminist
Media Studies,
vol. 13, no. 5, 2013, pp. 800-809, Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2013.838370.
Accessed 10 October 2020.
Dixon,
Chuck, et al. Birds of Prey. DC Comics, 2015.
Duncan, Randy, and M. J. Smith. The
Power of Comics. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
Durham,
Meenakshi Gigi. “The Girling of America: Critical Reflections on Gender and
Popular Communication.” Popular Communication, vol. 1, no. 1, 2003, pp. 23-31,
Taylor & Francis Online,https://doi.org/10.1207/S15405710PC0101_4. Accessed 10 October 2020.
Ellis,
K., and M. Kent. Disability and New Media.Routledge, 2011.
Faludi,
Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. Vintage, 1992.
Finn,
Michelle R. “William Marston’s Feminist Agenda.” The Ages of Wonder Woman:
Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joseph J. Darowski,
McFarland, 2014, pp. 7-21.
Fixmer,
Natalie, and Julia T. Wood. “The Personal Is Still Political: Embodied Politics
in Third Wave Feminism.” Women's Studies in Communication, vol. 28, no. 2, 2005, pp. 235-257, Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2005.10162493.
Accessed 10 October 2020.
Florence,
Brandi. Busting Out All Over: The Portrayal of Superheroines in American
Superhero Comics from the 1940s to the 2000s. 2002. University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, Masters Paper, doi.org/10.17615/xz4k-h361. Accessed 18 October 2020.
Gamble, Sarah. “Postfeminism.” The Routledge Companion to Feminism and
Postfeminism, edited by Sarah Gamble, Routledge, 2006, pp. 36-45.
Garland-Thomson,
Rosemarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA
Journal,
vol. 14, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1-32., JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316922.
Accessed 10 October 2020.
Gill, Rosalind, and
Christina Scharff. New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and
Subjectivity, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Gillis,
Stacy, and Rebecca Munford. “Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis
of Third Wave Feminism.” Women’s History Review, vol. 13, no. 2, 2004, pp. 165-82. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020400200388.
Accessed 10 October 2020.
Gledhill,
Christine. “Pleasurable Negotiations.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, edited by Sue
Thornham,
Edinburgh UP, 1999, pp. 166–179.
Groensteen,
Thierry. The System of Comics.UP of Mississippi, 2007.
Hanley, Tim. Wonder Woman
Unbound: The Curious History of the World's MostFamous Heroine. Chicago
Review Press, 2014.
Hart,
Christopher. How to Draw Great-Looking Comic Book Women. Watson-Guptill,
2000.
Kavka, Misha. “Feminism, Ethics, and
History, or What Is the ‘Post’ in Postfeminism?” Tulsa Studies in Women's
Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 2002, pp. 29–44, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4149214. Accessed 20 October 2020.
Kent,
Miriam. “Unveiling Marvels: Ms. Marvel and the Reception of the New
Muslim Superheroine.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, 2015, pp. 522-527, Taylor
and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1031964. Accessed 20 October 2020.
Lane,
Laura, Vera Woloshyn, and Nancy Taber. 2018. “Tangles, Tears, and Messy
Conversations: Using A Media Discussion Group to Explore Notions of Strong
Women.” Journal of Gender Studies,
vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 497-508, Taylor and Francis
Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2016.1243044. Accessed 20 October 2020.
Lepore, Jill. The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Knopf, 2014.
McRobbie,
Angela. “Postfeminism
and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime.”Interrogating
Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra,
Duke UP, 2007, pp. 27-39.
Mitchell,
W. J. Thomas.Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. U of Chicago P, 1994.
Modleski, Tania. Feminism
Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age. Routledge, 1991.
Renegar,
Valerie R, and Stacy K Sowards. “Contradiction as Agency: Self-Determination,
Transcendence, and Counter-Imagination in Third Wave Feminism.” Hypatia,
vol. 24, no. 2, 2009, pp. 1–20.
Richardson,
Diane, and Victoria Robinson.“Introduction.”Introducing Gender and Women's
Studies,
edited by Diane Richardson and Victoria Robinson, 4th ed., Macmillan
International Higher Education, 2015, pp. xxi-xxvii.
Roiphe,
Katie. The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism. Hamish Hamilton, 1994.
Royal, D.
P. “Drawing Attention: Comics as a Means of Approaching U.S. Cultural
Diversity.” Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives: Essays on Theory,
Strategy and Practice, edited by Lan Dong, McFarland, 2012, pp.
67–79.
Snyder,
R. Claire. “What Is Third‐Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay.” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 34, no. 1, 2008, pp. 175–196, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.1086/588436. Accessed 10 October 2020.
Tasker,
Yvonne, and Diane Negra.“Introduction.” Interrogating Postfeminism:
Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra,
Duke UP, 2007, pp. 1-25.
Wilson, G.
Willow. Ms. Marvel, no. 12, Marvel
Comics, 2015.