Gender and the Superhero Narrative

INTRODUCTION

Michael Goodrum, Tara Prescott, and Philip Smith

This book sits at an intersection between academic and public discourse. It seeks to advance the debate around gender and representation in superhero narratives by connecting with existing scholarship and expanding the conversation to include recent and previously unstudied texts and fan movements. We seek to contribute to the growing number of voices, from both fan and academic communities, who argue not only that diversity is the future of the superhero genre, but that diversity has always been present, if sometimes hidden, in the genre’s history, readership, and concerns.

THE SUPERHERO NARRATIVE

The primary concern of this book is superheroes, whether they appear in comics, film, video games, or costumes. Readers of this book are likely familiar with both superheroes and the narrative forms they inhabit. By establishing our own definitions and key concerns, however, we seek to elucidate our approach to this book. Each new scholar who takes up the issue of superheroes also tends to offer her or his own definition, until there are more competing definitions and interpretations than there are superheroes. Even something as ubiquitous and seemingly innocuous as spellcheck reveals a broader cultural bias: MS Word only recently began accepting superheroine as a real word, although superhero was already established. This raises a point worthy of consideration, as superheroes, and all too often their readership, have been assumed to be almost entirely male. As this collection demonstrates, this is not the case. There is a long but troubled history of superheroines, and, we maintain, their presence is quietly disruptive of the superheroic status quo. Although we believe in the necessity of gender-inclusive language and place pressure on the narrowness of superhero as a term, we have chosen to use it in the title of our collection as it is the most frequently used shorthand for this genre. Our authors consider the limitations of the term in their chapters.

Rather than fixating on what defines a superhero, then, perhaps a more productive question is to ask how superheroines different from superheroes, and why.¹ To replace a male character with a female character in a narrative that remains essentially unchanged is to view the feminist project as no more than women being given access to traditionally male attributes. It suggests a kind of grand convergence where we assume that, given unlimited freedom, women will choose to be just like privileged definitions of what it is to be a man. Placing a female character in a superhero role does little to alter an essentially masculine narrative wherein threats to traditional power structures are resolved through violence. For a superhero narrative to be truly feminist, it requires the (super)empowered agent to not only identify as female, but also to open discourse around the problems of traditionally male phallocentric violence, and to offer an alternative.

Lillian S. Robinson notes that the female superhero originates in an act of criticism—a challenge to the masculinist world of superhero adventures, and that in considering them we must remember that feminism is not exclusively—not even primarily—a matter of role models and symbolic butt-kicking, but is rather a worldview directed at understanding and remaking society.² In terms of narrative, then, differences in character lead to the consideration that such deviations from established, patriarchal practice lead to differences in narrative structure—for instance, the question of whether women, who have all too often been suppressed through violence or the threat of it, must use violence to qualify as superheroes, given the propensity of their masculine counterparts to hit foes over and over again until they do as they are told. (A strategy routinely undermined by the form in which it appears, as Batman has been punching the Joker since 1940, and yet there he still is, as unruly as ever.) One clear example of how superheroines might differ from superheroes is Ryan North and Erica Henderson’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (2015– ), whose protagonist often tries to identify and rectify the cause of villainous actions, resolve differences through (always chipper and entertaining) dialogue, and help both the villain and society in the process.

Squirrel Girl, of course, is not the first pacifist female superhero. There have been moments when women have attempted to pursue alternative strategies to phallocentric violence, such as when Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) runs for the House of Representatives in 1972, stating, It’s the only way I can really fight crime—prevent it—through prison reform! Legislation—law that creates order … not disorder!³ Her electoral victory, however, meant the end of her strip in Detective Comics, and she was replaced by her friend and bodyguard Jason Bard in #425 (1972). During the 1940s Wonder Woman made prominent use of Reform Island in her Amazonian homeland; female villains were taken there and, over time, turned into productive members of Amazon society. One prominent example of the efficacy of this policy was Baroness Paula von Gunther, a Nazi foe of Wonder Woman during the Second World War, who reformed under Amazon care and became one of their leading scientists. As Tim Hanley points out, the goal of Reform Island was to teach villains to give up their own egocentric desires and learn submission, which, while infused with the bondage that characterized the Marston era, at least demonstrates a commitment to change rather than ongoing projects of suppression.⁴ The success of Reform Island and Wonder Woman more broadly was also depicted as inspirational within the comic book universe. In Wonder Woman #30 (1948), a female penologist seeks to become warden of a women’s prison, using progressive rehabilitation techniques to reintegrate the prisoners, who broke laws because they no longer felt themselves members of society!⁵ Men try to disrupt the penologist’s plan, but Wonder Woman steps in to save the day. The story concludes with the statement that treating humans with kindness, patience and love is the first great step in eliminating crime! Any woman could tell you that!⁶ Although any woman could apparently tell you that, it was, and remains, a far cry from the ways in which superheroes generally handle their opponents. In fact, at least one superhero narrative undermines this: a progressive prison governor is ridiculed in the Batman television series when his liberal approach to penology allows the Joker to transform a pitcher’s mound into a spring that he uses to escape from prison.⁷

To argue that women are nonviolent by nature would be reductive and misguided. What we can argue, however, is that when an agent in a superhero narrative resolves threats through violence, that narrative reinforces the primacy of what have traditionally been seen as masculine traits. It encodes a relegation of feminized traits that third wave feminist writers have sought to reclaim. Opening discourse around alternatives to violence, then, is only half the battle—an ideal feminist superhero narrative would also need to give men and women access to those characteristics (such as pacifism or emotional expressiveness) that have traditionally been viewed as feminine by removing the stigma attached to them as well as challenging the reductive assumption that women are inherently caring and peaceful. In other words, such narratives might challenge the implication that being caring or peaceful is a bad thing. In a feminist superhero narrative, for every woman who succeeds in a traditionally male role we need a corresponding positive portrayal of a male character engaged in a traditionally female role such as child-rearing or preparing food (in an everyday domestic setting rather than an elevated professional one).

Superheroes can also differ depending on their geopolitical context. Burka Avenger, star of an award-winning Pakistani animated television series by Aaron Haroon Rashid, is a schoolteacher who, in her superheroic identity, fights for justice, peace, and education for all, using pens and books as her weapons. With the show’s obvious message of female empowerment, it is easy to overlook the way it also positions the burka not as a symbol of repression, but as wholly in keeping with a Muslim lifestyle that champions female education and equality. The specific context in which the stories emerge influences the nature of the character and her narratives, creating a distinctly Pakistani take on the form.

To understand the question of gender in the superhero narrative, then, we must look not only to the question of violence, but to that of power. In a genre where the protagonists are often seen as intent on retaining the status quo, as Matthew Wolf-Meyer argues, changing societal structures is problematic.⁸ Superheroes might strive to retain the status quo through their activities, but in a narrative structure where closure is endlessly deferred, the order to which they dedicate themselves is necessarily imperiled by the form in which they operate. Were it not, there would be no need for superhero stories, and therefore a lot of unemployed creators. This is too simplistic, as is the argument that superheroes inevitably defend the status quo. Kamala Khan, the incumbent Ms. Marvel, undoubtedly fights crime, and in so doing promotes order, but she also foregrounds debates over the acceptance of nonwhite, non-Christian identities in American society and, to some extent, reshapes the status quo, or at least contributes to a debate about what it is and who it privileges, as was seen in the use of images of Ms. Marvel to cover anti-Islamic adverts on buses in San Francisco.⁹

One potential way in which superheroines might change the conversation is to shift the genre. Rather than understanding superhero narratives to mean superhero stories, we might, instead, read them as stories that have superheroes in them. The former are structured around what might be termed superhero events, with the main line of thought in their preparation seeming to be conversations between creative teams along the lines of wouldn’t it be great to see our hero fighting an ice dragon in space? How can we make that happen? In terms of gender, too often the story discussions have run along the lines of sexual display and objectification of the female body. In contrast, stories with superheroes in them are closer to narrative structures from other genres, and focus more on characterization, plot, and relationships between characters, offering more scope for improved representations of gender. Both clearly have a place in the genre–Captain America and the Falcon #176 (1974) was revelatory in its focus on dialogue and the extended exploration of Steve Rogers’s decision to quit his role as Captain America, but it worked so well precisely because the genre is based on action. Emphasis on discussion and difficult decisions was therefore all the more powerful. There is a spectrum between these two poles, but it is worth noting that at times editorial injunctions have explicitly forbidden the kinds of character development necessary for the creation of stories focused on relationships and growth rather than spectacular action and display.¹⁰

We have thus established a broad context for the debates to follow—the question of gender in the superhero narrative invites us to re-examine the role of violence and social change. Resolving such questions may require us to reinvent the genre itself. Rather than seeking to protect the status quo through violence, superheroines might, instead, seek to bring about a new, more equitable social order. Having established this context, we can now consider in more detail the ways in which this discourse has been formed in recent years.

THE NEW ERA OF DIVERSITY

In 2014, to great fanfare, Marvel’s comics division announced that the new Ms. Marvel would be Kamala Khan–a Pakistani American, Muslim teenager. Khan was not the first female superhero; neither was she the first teenage superhero or the first Muslim superhero (even setting aside superhero narratives from outside of the United States, Marvel’s Dust and Taliah Al Ghul both preceded the new Ms. Marvel by more than a decade). Nonetheless, Marvel sought to break ground: first, by making Kamala Khan a lead character with her own title and, second, by offering an insider’s view. Khan (unlike Dust and Talia Al Ghul) would avoid stereotypes and sexualization, and speak genuinely and frankly to the experience of an underrepresented group.¹¹ To this end, not only would Kamala Khan be a female Muslim superhero, she would also be written by a female Muslim writer, G. Willow Wilson, with cover art by a female artist, Sara Pichelli, and edited by Sana Amanat, a Pakistani American Muslim.

Marvel, by almost all accounts, delivered. The incumbent Ms. Marvel exercises her right to wear the type of costume that best suits her—modest but practical, representative of her culture but also of her individuality. The outfit that Khan digs out of her closet, adapts to her needs, and triumphantly wears to fight evil is a burkini, the same article of clothing that became headline news in 2016 when French mayors attempted to ban them and stigmatized women wearing them on public beaches. By creating this modest, empowering costume without evoking stereotypes, Wilson, Pichelli, and co-artist Adrian Alphona took a stand on burkinis (and, by extension, burkas, headscarves, veils, and other items of Muslim clothing). But it is not just the clothes she wears that make Khan stand out amongst her white, homogeneous female cartoon peers. Khan is a multidimensional character with depth and complexity. Her popularity with readers has demonstrated that a Pakistani American Muslim girl can easily hold her own title (consistently in the top 100 of comics sales), as well as successfully cross over into other Marvel titles. The increasing presence of superheroes like Kamala Khan is important not only for political but for economic reasons—for the comics industry to survive, publishers cannot afford to cater only to the needs of a single demographic. We write this even as David Gabriel, Marvel’s senior vice-president of sales, print, and marketing, attributed a decline in sales to the company straying beyond its core heroes. There is clearly still work to be done not only in increasing representations of diversity, but in convincing publishers as to its value.¹²

Female superheroes have also gained visibility off the page. In 2016 Wonder Woman was selected as an honorary ambassador for the United Nations, to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.¹³ The choice has some textual grounding; the character has a long history of pacifism dating back to her original Marston/Peters incarnation. Diana Prince actually worked for the UN in the 1970s, and writer Phil Jimenez, who wrote the character from 2000 to 2003, presented her as political activist. Nonetheless, the choice was a contentious one–not least because Wonder Woman is fictional and often sexualized–leading to a petition and silent protest by UN staff. In December 2016 Wonder Woman’s tenure came to an end, though the UN denied it was a result of protests, pointing to other short-lived honorary positions in the past.¹⁴

Protests against Wonder Woman as an ambassador take their place along several other fan movements that attest to the growing interest in stories beyond heterosexual (or asexual) white male superheroes. The Valkyries (an online community of LGBTQ and female comics fans headed by creator Kate Leth) and the Carol Corps (a Ms. Marvel fan group) both attest to the strong desire among certain comics fans to expand and support diversity both within comics and among comic book readers.¹⁵ Several fan websites such as Women Write About Comics and Has DC Comics Done Something Stupid Today? serve to both celebrate diversity and hold comic book companies accountable. The online platform has also provided freedom to those who feel constrained by traditional comics publishing models—comics such as Gyno-Star, Goodbye Perdu, and Girls with Slingshots provide a diversity of voices rarely found in the comics mainstream.

Calls for diversity in comics run alongside, and sometimes intersect with, those in film and television. As movements such as #OscarsSoWhite have shown, many audience members want more than just a token display of diversity: they want to see it on the screen and on the page, reflected in the awards, behind the cameras and pens, at the tables of the studios and publishers. Television is one site that has been responding to these movements. For example, showrunner Melissa Rosenberg made a conscious decision to ensure that women directors were represented on Jessica Jones, going so far as to offer a second season directed entirely by women.¹⁶

This new era of diversity has been accompanied by a growing historiography of women in comics that seeks to demonstrate that diversity in comics is hardly new. Trina Robbins’s books Pretty in Pink (2013) and Great Women Cartoonists (2011), as well as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s She Changed Comics (2016), have been important interventions in destroying the myth of comics (and superhero comics in particular) as a primarily male affair, recognizing the work of female editors, artists, and writers such as Gail Simone, Diana Schutz, and Dorothy Woolfolk in changing the industry, as well as providing role models for future creators.¹⁷

Such books also serve to remind us that while diversity may seem new to superhero narratives, we should acknowledge the work of readers who have been challenging the status quo in comics for several decades. Even during the Golden and Silver ages of comics, when issues of gender and sexuality were hardly at the forefront of superhero stories, comic book readers created their own narratives within the texts that were available. Non-normative readings coexisted through fan discourse, as evident from David Galloway’s ability to see Superman as my own tender, indigo-haired ravager, or, famously, Fredric Wertham remarking that any woman pursuing Bruce Wayne will have no chance against Dick.¹⁸ Throughout the 1960s and beyond, though, the narratives themselves have sought to engage with questions of diversity. This modern evolution, then, has deeper roots. Comics stand at the edge of mainstream discourse and, occasionally, lean just beyond it, contributing to debates about representation that can have wider impacts.

COMPLICATIONS AND CONTROVERSIES

It is tempting to read the recent changes in media representations of diversity as profoundly transformative. Closer examination reveals, however, that, while the periphery is changing, the core of the superhero narrative remains profoundly phallocentric. In the majority of cases, superhero narratives continue to revolve around violence, the male gaze, heteronormative relationships, and the white male as savior. Many fans felt betrayed, for example, when, in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) appeared to equate her inability to have children to her perception of herself as a monster. In comics, too, 2014 and 2015 saw numerous outcries over misogynistic and overtly sexualized covers, including Kenneth Rocafort’s cover for Teen Titans #1, which endowed teenage Wonder Girl with oversized breasts; Milo Manara’s erotic Spider-Woman #1 cover, where Spider-Woman crouches in a contorted position and presents her rear at the top of the page; Rafael Albuquerque’s variant cover to Batgirl #41, which shows the teenager crying and gagged by the Joker in an allusion to events depicted in The Killing Joke (1988); and J. Scott Campbell’s variant cover to Invincible Iron Man #1, which shows, once again, a sexualized teenage character with a bare midriff and oversized breasts (see fig. Intro. 1).¹⁹ These covers all elicited strong outcries from fan communities and may have contributed to a creative response from other artist-and-writer teams, who started using women superheroes on their covers to provide commentary on the ongoing debates about the representation of women. For example, Joelle Jones’s cover for Mockingbird #8 shows the heroine shading her eyes, looking into the distance, while wearing a T-shirt reading Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda (see fig. Intro. 2). Aside from a few exemplars like Ms. Marvel, the creators of superhero narratives often seem bewildered when they are confronted about sexism, racism, and homophobia. The fact that DC editor Eddie Berganza remained in the company, and even continued to work on Wonder Woman, despite several sexual harassment complaints is testament to the systemic sexism at work in the comics industry both in the comics and behind the scenes.²⁰

It is obvious that hidebound artists, writers, and companies need to be held accountable for their shortsighted decisions and reliance on easy stereotypes in storytelling. But it is equally important to hold accountable for their representations those writers and artists who demonstrate that they are genuinely engaged with the representation of diversity in comics, and to critique their work. One prominent example is Brian K. Vaughan, writer on Marvel’s Runaways. Early in the comic, a white lesbian super-powered alien girl, Karolina Dean, is courted by Xavin, a person/alien of color. Xavin presents as male, but when he learns that Karolina is lesbian, he instantly turns into a sexy female. Problem solved. Xavin is a Super Skrull shape-shifter, the modern-day cheaters way of including transgender characters, notes Marcy Cook.²¹ Although characters like Karolina (albeit white, blonde, thin, beautiful, and sexy) and Xavin are steps toward including experiences beyond those of cisgendered heterosexual characters, there is much more work to be done. Another promising-but-flawed example is Vaughan and Fiona Staples’s Saga, which has been praised for its pacifism as well as for its rounded female, queer, veteran, and (pseudo-)Asian characters, and yet its full-frontal nude introduction of a transgender character rightly elicited negative reactions from members of the transgender community.²²

The increasing diversity showcased by the texts described above has been met with an equally fervent backlash. The Gamergate movement, which is ostensibly concerned with ethics in game journalism, has been a rallying cry for a group of largely white, heterosexual, male gamers who feel increasingly ostracized from activities that have, since the 1980s and 1990s (thanks, in large part, to editorial policy and the appearance of comic book shops), typically been viewed as a white, heterosexual, male enclave. Similar protests occurred around the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies right-wing voting campaigns for the 2015 Hugo Awards, in which a certain group of fans sought to fight against science fiction and fantasy fiction that is niche, academic, overtly to the left in ideology and flavor.²³ These fan movements have been associated with online harassment as well as rape and death threats toward female journalists and prominent women working in the industry.

THE STATE OF THE FIELD

This book belongs to a growing body of literature that seeks to document the impact of feminism in its various guises in popular culture and public debates. Of particular relevance to the superhero narrative and the issues outlined above are Sherrie A. Inness’s edited collection Action Chicks (2004), Mike Madrid’s The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines (2009), Jennifer K. Stuller’s Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Super-women in Modern Mythology (2010), Jeffrey A. Brown’s Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture (2011) and Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture (2015), and Carolyn Cocca’s Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation (2016), as well as Maja Jones and Norma Bajac-Carter’s two-volume Heroines of Film and Television and Heroines of Comic Books and Literature (2016).²⁴ These books and others like them have moved away from solely condemning popular representations of women to exploring the potentially positive (if often still problematic) ways in which women’s issues (such as domestic violence, motherhood, and sexuality) and women’s bodies (through a code of poses and costumes) are represented in superhero narratives.

Figure Intro.1. J. Scott Campbell’s variant cover to Invincible Iron Man #1

Figure Intro.2. Joelle Jones’s cover for Mockingbird #8.

The story that emerges from these texts is that the representation of gender in superhero narratives has followed, sometimes belatedly, the development of the women’s rights movement and its later iterations. Brown, for example, argues, Because the action heroine is a direct affront to notions of gender acceptability, she requires audiences to see her as more than just a woman taking on a male role.²⁵ At the same time, however, the depiction of women in superhero narratives often reverts to problematic representations of idealized and objectified female bodies as well as phallocentric violence.²⁶ Much ink has been spilled, for example, over the frequent instances of BDSM imagery in early Wonder Woman comics, which, on the one hand, are an articulation of creator William Moulton Marston’s proto-feminist philosophy of politics and sexuality, and, on the other, provide ample material for those who fetishize images of women being bound and humiliated.²⁷ Cocca has produced a useful semiotics of modern superhero poses (most notably the broke back pose) that illustrates that the problem of sexual objectification remains very much apparent.

The problem of sexual objectification is so endemic to the female superhero narrative—in both text and metatext—that it is almost unavoidable in any discussion. While feminist bloggers, critics, and websites like The Mary Sue have a growing voice, heterosexual male readers have had more collective economic influence over the comics industry; Deodato reports that during his run on Wonder Woman from 1992 to 1995, for example, [e]very time the bikini was smaller the sales got higher (Newsarama staff 2006). Ms. Marvel, a comic that largely avoids the male gaze, generally sells 32,000 copies a month, compared to 45,000 for the more titillating Harley Quinn. At its worst, the female superhero offers little more than visual stimuli for a heterosexual male readership under a veneer of empowerment (what Goodrum calls a failed attempt to reconcile existing iniquities to new ideals).²⁸ As the webpage The Hawkeye Initiative (which substitutes male characters for female characters in the same clothing and pose) cleverly demonstrates, the positioning and clothing (or lack thereof) of a female superhero can dramatically undercut her exercise of female power. It is hard to take seriously claims of empowerment when an apparently powerful female character thrusts her barely clothed and unrealistically proportioned buttocks or breasts (or sometimes both, thanks to the broke back pose) toward the reader while looking like she is approaching sexual climax. Often such images are reinforced by the presence of male observers, legitimizing a dynamic that positions men as actors and women as objects. As Goodrum argues, superheroine narratives, to some extent, operate as a means of organizing the body of their protagonist into a series of poses that constructs the narrative.²⁹ Such works seem to gesture toward a feminist ethic while simultaneously treating the female body as an object to be viewed and enjoyed, effectively dissolving any threat she represents to patriarchal power.³⁰

NEW CRITICAL APPROACHES TO ADDRESS A NEW ERA OF COMICS

The essays in this volume are a sample of scholarship that seeks to engage with current representations of gender and sexuality in contemporary superherodom. This collection offers a representative selection of critiques and analyses, issues, characters, and titles, both mainstream and independent, recent and historical, in order to add to the existing conversations and encourage further discussion. Many of these chapters intersect and overlap in ways that cannot be fully captured in the broad breakdown that follows, but for reading purposes, and to encourage thematic connections between chapters, we have grouped these works into three sections: Politics and Intersectionality, Queer Identities, and Industry and Fandom.

POLITICS AND INTERSECTIONALITY

Our collection begins by focusing on Ms. Marvel, a title whose necessity and relevance has been tragically highlighted by the increase in attacks against Muslims in America in the wake of the 2016 election. In "‘Yeah, I Think There Is Still Hope’: Youth, Ethnicity, Faith, Feminism, and Fandom in Ms. Marvel," Mel Gibson engages with the growing body of scholarship around this groundbreaking title. The comic, Gibson argues, adopts an intersectional feminist lens in its engagement with themes of identity, gender, and the negotiation between cultural norms. Gibson demonstrates that, while the Kamala Khan incarnation of Ms. Marvel inarguably brings these themes to the fore, they have been a key aspect of the Ms. Marvel narrative since the 1970s.

Next, Maite Urcaregui engages with Kelly Sue DeConnick’s and Valentine De Landro’s Bitch Planet, a comic that represents an exaggerated (although sometimes only slightly) version of present-day racism and sexism. In "Intersectional Feminism in Bitch Planet: Moving Comics, Fandom, and Activism beyond the Page, Urcaregui examines a comic that has an explicitly intersectional feminist agenda and yet has plots that frequently suggest retributive violence as a reasonable solution, and sometimes reinforces stereotypes, such as its representation of an Asian overachiever who plays the violin. Urcaregui offers a carefully structured analysis of this landmark comic that explores many of the core arguments of intersectional feminism, both on the page and beyond. In a perceptive analysis of the comic’s backmatter, Urcaregui shows how the creative team and readers constitute a community in dialogue with itself and the sociopolitical concerns that inform the creation and reception of the series. Fans’ adoption of the Non-Compliant" logo as a symbol of resistance against oppression in its various forms shows how the discourse of the comic is able to reach beyond its pages.

The confluence of politics, history, gender, and acts of heroism has recently attained even greater attention through the success of Netflix’s television series Jessica Jones and its spinoff, Luke Cage. In "‘I Was Never the Hero That You Wanted Me to Be’: Feminism and Resistance to Militarism in Marvel’s Jessica Jones," Samira Nadkarni investigates the complex, intersecting forces in Netflix’s popular series. She thoughtfully examines the show’s response to post-9/11 sensibilities and the ways that it draws upon and reinvents elements of the noir genre in an effort to investigate and challenge masculine, nationalist, and militarist authority. Nadkarni also considers the way the series engages with the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, tracing the underlying political projects of the MCU and suggesting ways in which Jessica Jones complicates them.

But what if the superhero of the story is actually a villain? In "The Queen of Burlesque: The Subtle (as a Hammer) Satire of Bomb Queen," Christina Knopf examines the role of gender in this often abrasive independent comic that challenges norms of superhero narratives. Knopf maintains that Bomb Queen is a commentary on the politics of superhero comics in that it at once critiques and embodies prevailing themes in the superhero genre. As an embodiment of normative superhero practice, it is potentially able to attract readers inured to superhero conventions and the political projects that underpin them and then destabilize such practices through its extreme representations.

QUEER IDENTITIES

Our second section opens with "‘Curiouser and Curiouser’: Revisiting ‘The Woman Question’ in Batwoman: Elegy," in which Lisa Perdigao examines the comic that revives a character with a particularly checkered history at DC. Greg Rucka and JH Williams III’s Elegy, Perdigao demonstrates, goes some way to addressing the decidedly antifeminist message of previous iterations of the character. As a gay character reacting to real-world controversies such as the US military’s Don’t ask, don’t tell policy, this iteration of Batwoman represents the leading edge of DC’s new heroes.

Comics writers and artists are not the only ones to grapple with the question of gender and identity in superhero narratives—in the world of cosplay, fans take this debate beyond the page. Christopher McGunnigle delves into these intersections between fans and texts by examining how fans design and display costumes that alter the traditional genders of iconic superheroes. Utilizing original ethnographic research, Rule 63: Genderswapping in Female Superhero Cosplay shows that cosplay offers a means by which fans can rewrite and reinvent certain characters, thereby combating the subordinate position often assigned to female superheroes.

Whether queering the costumes or the discourse, people and characters in the trans community have also played a vital role in the representation of gender in superhero narratives. In Faces of Abjectivity: The Uncanny Mystique and Transsexuality, Dorian L. Alexander examines Mystique from the X-Men comics and film franchise, a character often presented as blurring the boundaries of gender. Mystique can change her form at will and thus occupies a fluid gender identity where she is able to present as both male and female, but also as somewhere in between. Therefore, Alexander argues, she represents an intersection of transsexuality and Gothic monstrosity.

INDUSTRY AND FANDOM

Our third section, which looks beyond the text to industry and fandom, opens with From Princess to Protagonist: Redesigning the Video Game Superhero, in which Vanessa Hemovich offers a history of gender in video games that engage in some way with tropes of superhero narratives. Not surprisingly, for much of the medium’s history, female characters have played an ancillary role to the male protagonists. Changes within the industry have led to more opportunities for women designers, gamers, and characters, but also to a significant backlash, most notably the Gamergate movement. Certain titles, however, have continued to present female characters who move beyond the role of victim/source of titillation, chief among them being Overwatch (2016). Hemovich’s thoughtful analysis of Overwatch and its place within developing gaming narratives helps readers parse the underpinnings of misogynist movements and look ahead to exciting possibilities in the future of gaming.

Whether discussing gamers or comic geeks, understandings of what a fandom should be necessitate understandings of what it is and has been. This has been in many ways the most frequently cited but least understood aspect of comics in particular: readership demographics, both real and imagined. Whether or not comics truly are the boys’ club that many assume they are is up for debate, as are the forces behind these perceptions. Is the belief that fewer girls and women read comics a self-fulfilling prophecy? As Robbins notes, By the end of the century, neither Marvel nor DC published any comics for girls. Proposals for comics aimed at young girls (or women) are discouraged at both companies, because ‘girls (or women) don’t read comics.’ This is, of course, circular logic. Girls, indeed, do not read comics if there are no comics published for them.³¹ The question of who reads comics has always been difficult to answer. In The Evolution of Female Readership: Letter Columns in Superhero Comics, Tim Hanley makes innovative use of the fan letters printed in superhero comics to construct a quantitative method of identifying a potential female readership over several decades. He combines this with a qualitative study of the letters as indicators of editorial desire to appeal to female readers and analyzes the fan responses.

Finally, in The Gwenaissance: Gwen Stacy and the Progression of Women in Comics, Gabriel Gianola and Janine Coleman engage with a character who has historically served as a polarizing figure for readers: Gwen Stacy. They chart the various meanings that the character has embodied, starting with her first incarnation during the Silver Age of the 1960s through to the Spider-Gwen of today. They demonstrate that the character has, in her various guises, served as a lightning-rod for the gender politics of the time, including a saintly stand-in-girlfriend during the 1960s; a saint in the early 1990s; a tough, combative, quasi-feminist character in the early 2000s; and a feminist icon in recent years. Gianola and Coleman present Stacy’s death in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) as a source of fan outrage with significant outcomes—Spider-Man’s move from Sony to the MCU, and the introduction of a range of Gwen Stacy–led comic titles. These examples examine the connection between better female representation and marketing and sales goals.

A NOTE ON QUOTING AND CITATION

One of the challenges and thrills of assembling a collection of essays that analyze newly emerging multimedia texts is how to standardize the use of text from various sources, including comics, online posts, and video games. We want to preserve the spirit of the original source while also ensuring a pleasurable reading experience.

Comics, for example, have a great plasticity of text, which can be hand-lettered or digitally reproduced, and may appear in a wide variety of colors, fonts, and styles. Some conventions in comics, however, do not translate well in formal essays (for example, using all-caps for speech-bubble text). Therefore, when quoting text from comics, we have standardized capitalization to match the conventions of prose and retained bold and italics only when needed for emphasis.

Online texts, such as blogs and tweets, pose a different challenge. Although "[sic]" is traditionally placed after mistakes in quoted text to indicate that the error is original from the source, we have chosen to silently correct minor grammar errors and typographical mistakes in tweets, blogs, and other online postings that are quoted in this collection. This is partially a gesture of respect for the authors of these texts in recognition that many forms of online communication are quickly drafted and on devices that make editing difficult. It is also a way of offering a more seamless reading experience.

FURTHER READING

We hope that Gender and the Superhero Narrative will help to inform and inspire your appreciation and critique of superhero narratives and encourage you to play a role in the titles and fandoms that interest you. Good comics keep readers hungry for more, and after reading the essays in this collection, you will likely be inspired to deepen your own comics reading. We recommend engaging with the primary sources these essays analyze, along with some of the many titles that we did not have room to cover here but are important to the conversation:

Adler, Ali, Greg Berlanti, and Andrew Kreisberg. Supergirl. Warner Bros. Television, 2015–present.

Cain, Chelsea (w), Kate Niemcyzk (a), Ibrahim Moustafa (a), and Joe Caragmana (1). Mockingbird #1–8. New York: Marvel, 2016.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi (w), Brian Stelfreeze (a), Laura Martin (c), and Joe Sabino (1). Black Panther: A Nation under Our Feet. New York: Marvel, 2016.

Cohen, Rebecca (w, a). The Adventures of Gyno-Star. http://www.gynostar.com/, 2010–present.

DeConnick, Kelly Sue (w), Christopher W. Sebela (w), Emma Rios (a), Filipe Andrade (a), and Dexter Soy (a). Captain Marvel: Earth’s Mightiest Hero Vol.