Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: B000P28SL6
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Drawing upon her long career as a formidable feminist critic yet wearing her knowledge lightly, Lillian Robinson finds the essence of wonder women in our non-animated three-dimensional world. This book will delight and provoke anyone interested in the history of feminism or the importance of comics in contemporary life.
heterosexual romance certainly looms large in the Wonder Woman narrative, but, despite Princess Diana’s reasons for choosing to emigrate, we are never allowed to forget that the real story, for both Wonder Woman and Diana Prince, is her mission, which, in the early years, means helping to win the war. Still, the superhero manages to occupy two points in a peculiar love triangle, with Diana mooning over Steve, while he is desperately in love with Wonder Woman, even though he occasionally gets
superheroes are in the (in this case literal) picture. In The Vagina Monologues, one anecdote about the onset of menstruation has a woman tell of the comic book collection she kept at her mother’s apartment. When she got her first period, her mother told her, “You mustn’t lift your box of comics” (Ensler 2000, 39). This story would have been inconceivable in my comics-reading days, not because we didn’t face inane prohibitions associated with menarche, far from it, but because, especially for
adult themes within the adventure context and (perhaps) some greater exposure to nonillustrated science fiction and fantasy literature, is a set of skills peculiarly adapted to successful negotiation of postmodern style. (In deference to the cyberroots of these formative experiences, I should perhaps call them “skill sets.”) I suspect that most readers of contemporary “adult ethos” comic books have spent time in cyberspace before they begin reading adventure comic books and that they—especially
precisely that it is both here and there). At any rate, Crisis on Infinite Earths was geared to opening the way to adult themes by erasing from each series’ history not only the inconsistencies, but also an accumulation of dead ends, as well as the characters or motifs specifically designed to appeal to children. The result, whether intended or not, was the opposite of simplification, establishing a set of parallel realities that are or may be the source of “authentic” narrative. This impelled DC
why the primary assertion that there are such phenomena as female hetero identity and female sexuality and that She-Hulk experiences them (experiences them, indeed, early and often) cannot be discounted. Since the read102 revelation ership is largely male and adolescent, blatancy may be the only way to serve the didactic purpose. The impact of her sexuality, combined with that of her fist and feet, remind us that She-Hulk may like sex, but that she will have it only on her own terms. There is,