Author Archives: Philip Smith

Is a Feminist Wonder Woman a Defeminized Wonder Woman?

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I have been reading a lot about Wonder Woman recently. Actually, I have been reading a lot about Darna recently, but it is very difficult to theorise Darna without turning to theories about Wonder Woman because, as readers of this blog are no doubt aware, the Wonder Woman comics can often seem to be to the study of superhero comics as gravity is to physics; they were there (almost) from the beginning of the genre, they have been at the center of many important debates, and, despite being the subject of work by some of our best minds, one has the sense that we have barely scratched the surface of all there is to be said about them.

I would like to center this discussion on an incarnation of Wonder Woman who exists only in a single image (discussed in two separate posts), created by one Aaron Diaz, proprietor of the webcomic Dresden Codak and blog Indistinguishable from Magic. This incarnation of Wonder Woman is noteworthy, I believe, because Diaz is highly engaged in issues of gender representation in popular culture and one finds in his work a palpable feminist agenda (I should probably add, in the interest of full disclosure, that I am a long-time fan and supporter of Diaz’s work). While, in my argument below, I read Diaz’s work as a compelling intervention, I nonetheless believe that his Wonder Woman creates problems with regard to gender even as she solves others, thereby opening up interesting questions with regard to female superherodom.

Diaz’s Wonder Woman was created in direct response to DC’s New 52, but also provided an opportunity for him to address some long-standing characters who he finds to have historically suffered from poor design. He chose Wonder Woman on the grounds that ‘[a]lthough a feminist pop icon, her origins are too tied up with creator William Marston’s obsession with bondage. Because of this (and an all-too-frequent parade of poor or sexist writing), she’s never had a solid, progressive design.’ As other contributors to this blog have shown, the (to put it mildly) recurring bondage theme Marston’s Wonder Woman comics need not be read as anti-feminist. Diaz is not entirely incorrect, however; as many have argued, Wonder Woman’s apparent status as em(super)powered woman and feminist icon has historically been undercut by images of her as erotic spectacle (these links are work safe this one is not). One may not agree with his dismissal of the Marston/Peter run, but can at least understand his desire to reinvent Wonder Woman in light of the New 52 and other incarnations.

Diaz does not dispose of Wonder Woman’s swimsuit, but covers it with a ‘more conservative’ mid-thigh Greek-style dress, thereby moving away from the overtly sexualised Wonder Women. Diaz’s Wonder Woman is, in accordance with her origin story, made from clay. Where, in other incarnations of the character, this statue then became flesh, Diaz’s Wonder Woman remains a ‘statue come to life.’ Diaz thus draws a link between sculpture and superhero comics as two mediums which have historically fixated on bodily perfection. Because she is made from hardened clay, Diaz’s Wonder Woman resonates with the ‘metalisation’ of the male body one encounters in films during the 1980s when, in light of the AIDS crisis, cinema sought to enforce masculine bodily boundaries. This tradition certainly continues in superhero comics today, where characters such as Colossus play out the fantasy of impenetrable metallic bodies.

Diaz also replaces Wonder Woman’s lasso with a sword ‘that contains the lightning of Zeus.’ Given that Wonder Woman’s lasso is, as Berlatsky contends, ‘a vagina as surely as James Bond’s gun is a phallus’, Diaz thus symbolically makes Wonder Woman a man or, at least, equips her with the idealised hyper-male attributes of an impenetrable body and impressive phallus. The powers of her lasso are transferred to a shield ‘containing the wisdom of Athena (which, when using its reflection, can reveal a person’s inner self and compel them to tell the truth)’. Where the lasso contains her enemies, the shield repels them, further enforcing the impenetrability of Wonder Woman’s metallised body.

Clearly, Diaz’s work is motivated by a strong feminist agenda. His Wonder Woman is deliberately drawn against the eroticisation of the female superbody. She also continues the appropriation of (super)male attributes begun in her inception; she not only possesses the strength and invulnerability of Superman, but has been given the hardened body and phallus traditionally reserved for other male superheroes. One might ask, however, if the accruing of (super)male signifiers is truly a step-forward, or if it requires the evacuation of that which makes Wonder Woman such a powerful feminist icon? One might argue that the appropriation of the phallus serves, ultimately, only to reiterate its primacy. The loss of the lasso (which ends violence) in favour of a sword (which is a tool of violence) removes her capacity for pacifism. Has Diaz’s Wonder Woman been denied the opportunity to create alternative, feminised forms of power? If Wonder Woman is, effectively, transformed into a man, what becomes of her pacifism, her feminism, and her queerness? Is the equipping of female characters with a phallus an effective answer to the male gaze?

To reiterate, in the battle over the representation of gender in comics, Diaz is inarguably one of the good guys, and his Wonder Woman addresses many of the problems which typically plague female characters in superhero comics. His answers, however, present certain problems which, I believe, highlight many of the flaws which surround the place for gender in the superhero genre – that, in order to avoid eroticisation or negative signifiers of femininity, Diaz’s Wonder Woman must cast aside the very things which make her a woman.

Is Fury Road Really All That Feminist?

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I read a few reviews of Fury Road, then, with my expectations set suitably high, I went to watch it. The main point that struck me as I sought to reconcile what I had read with what I was seeing, was how readily some seem to be to award the title ‘feminist’. Men’s rights activist Aaron Clarey called the film ‘Feminist Propaganda’ (I am not linking to his review because I don’t want to give him the hits, but go ahead and google him if you must). Kyle Pinion of The Beat described the film as a ‘feminist blockbuster’. His review went on:

[I]t’s one of the most feminist action films in recent memory. Fury Road centers on a group of women taking their own agency and pushing against patriarchal rule. While this franchise has always had an undercurrent of pacifist themes, Miller has laser-focused his message, to a point where one interaction at the midway point of the film ends up stating the obvious: this is what happens when old white men run the world unchecked. That may rankle some feathers in the audience, but this is an action movie that isn’t just empty spectacle or aiming for the lowest common denominator. This is a motion picture that’s actually about something with a strong point of view, and that’s worth standing up and applauding for. It’s basically the film equivalent of an album by The Clash dropping in the middle of a sea of bad arena rock.

Furiosa (Theron) is, indeed, a strong female character leading freed female slaves (who we see symbolically stepping out from the jagged chastity belt of male power) to what she heavily implies will be an Amazon-style eco-feminist utopia. She shoots better than Max, is as tough as he is, and makes many of the major decisions in the film. Even her apparent breakdown is brief and expressed not through uncontrollable sobbing but by falling to the knees Platoon-style. She does not become embroiled in a romance plot and, at the end of the film, appears set to lead a large group of people.

The film does, further, suggest that patriarchal dictatorships are a bad thing – Furiosa has liberated the harem of an altogether despicable warlord named Joe. The all-female group who the characters later encounter are Amazon warriors in the sense that they are competent, comparatively democratic, mutually-supportive, and (perhaps) ecologically-minded. So far, so laudable.

The feminist reading collapses there, however. The mcguffin of the film is a group of five women (what NY Daily News calls ‘the beauties’) who spend the majority of the story being beautiful, inept, and providing reaction shots for explosive spectacle. Rescuing the women (and the death of one of the women) serve as the primary motivation for the male characters and one female outlier. These women are not people in any meaningful sense – they are in equal parts prop and chorus for the main actors in the story. The first time we see them proper they are hosing one another with water. They are pictured in parts rather than as a whole, scantily-clad, nipples erect, and apparently unaware of the camera’s presence. The sequence is a depressingly textbook example of Mulvey’s male gaze theory. This is disappointing but hardly surprising. It is, if anything, par for the course for a blockbuster action film.
 

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What concerns me is that one is presented as though it excuses the other – that once the film has established its feminist credentials it feels that it has a free pass to indulge the male gaze and present certain female characters as the prize in a wholly phallic contest between male agents.

The central slogan of the women’s escape is that women should not be kept as slaves. They make sure we get this point by painting it on the walls of their cell before they depart. Female slavery is, of course, a very real problem. Even if we set aside imprisonment through economic and social systems, there are women today who are literally kept as slaves. I am not sure that Fury Road is quite the venue to address this issue, though. The majority of the audience for this film, I would hope, are not in a position where they are undecided whether or not the trafficking of women is a bad thing. As a feminist assertion, therefore, the statement that women are people and that people are not property is something of a low bar, and an argument, one would hope, that only has relevance to human traffickers and wavering sociopaths.

An argument could be made, however, that raising awareness of these issues (albeit very indirectly) is important and if this were the central message of the film, even as a relatively uncontroversial assertion, I would still read it as largely positive. The presence of a group of women, however, who lack agency and, to all intents and purposes, are treated as objects in the context of the film, undermines the message. What we are left with is a movie which alternately gestures toward a feminist message while simultaneously offering the female body as erotic spectacle. It tells us that women are people while simultaneously treating the majority of the female cast as objects.

Darna: ‘The Filipino Wonder Woman’

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Darna by Ghettobrigante

 
Darna is often described as ‘The Filipino Wonder Woman’ and there are many persuasive reasons why such a comparison might be made. In the 1951 comic Darna is described as having ‘kisig ni Apolo at lakas ni Samson’ (which I translate as ‘the elegance of Apollo and the strength of Samson’ – Tagalog speakers, please correct me – I am still learning), which almost directly quotes Wonder Woman who was described in 1944 is ‘as beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules and swifter than Mercury’ (issue 38, 1944 quoted in Berlatsky’s book on Wonder Woman, page 139). Darna was later seen as a Wonder Woman clone when, in 1991, a film version showed her blocking bullets with bracelets. This became a key aspect of the character and was repeated in the 2009 television show.

Darna paratexts have encouraged the comparison; in 2013 Marianne Riviera, the current most recent Darna, posed in Wonder Woman cosplay for a magazine shoot.  The comparison between the two is almost inevitable, and is dramatised in fan art such as that by Glee Chan.
 

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Darna/Wonder Woman fan art by Glee Chan and Marian Rivera as Wonder Woman

Darna clearly borrows tropes from other American characters. Her powers are similar to those possessed by Superman. She transforms from her non-hero incarnation Narda into Darna by saying ‘Darna’, in a manner very similar to Captain Marvel saying ‘Shazam!’ That she is derivative is hardly surprising – many superheroes in the 1940s were variations on a well-established formula and the industry at the time did not particularly reward originality.

Conversely, there are those who maintain that Mars Ravelo, Darna’s creator, was pitching the idea of a female superhero in 1939, two years before Wonder Woman’s first comic book appearance. In such a timeline Darna is not a Wonder Woman clone, but a character who emerged independently around the same time.

I am not particularly interested in answering the question of which character came first. What does interest me is the question of why it matters. I believe that this is important because it is rooted in the artistic relationship between the Philippines and the U.S. Filipino comics. Both Filipino superhero comics and Pinoy Manga have often had to fight accusations of being derivative with the implication that Filipino comic book creators simply recycle the cultural work done elsewhere. If Darna is nothing more than the Filipino Wonder Woman, then, it follows, she has little value alone and can be subsumed into Wonder Woman studies. The argument that she exists independent to Wonder Woman, then, can be read as an assertion of Filipino national identity through comics.

One of the reasons why I find this interesting is that different incarnations of Darna seem to cycle between being an icon of Filipino identity and an outward-looking international figure. We have had English-speaking Darnas whose identity and attitudes are largely indistinguishable from an American equivalent, and we have had Tagalog-speaking Catholic Darnas whose enemies draw heavily from Filipino folk-law – see, for example, Roberto Feleo’s ‘Darna’s Fortress of Solitude’ (1987). It is noteworthy in this regard that in the original comics Darna looks distinctly Western, and the first actress to play Darna, Rosa Del Rosario, was biracial, as was Nanette Medved, who played her in 1991 and Anjanette Abayari who played Darna in two films in 1994.

So, is Darna more than a Wonder Woman clone? And, more importantly, does it matter?
 
 

Saga and Trauma

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For those who have not yet encountered it, Saga is a science fiction fantasy series set against the backdrop of a long-running interplanetary war. The main characters, Alana and Marko, are deserters from opposing sides of the conflict who, with their daughter Hazel, find themselves pursued by bounty hunters and other interested parties. Saga is a comic about war, not only the actuality of war but the politics, and, perhaps most profoundly, the psychological and social reverberations of conflict. All of the main characters have, at some point before the story begins, witnessed and participated in acts of violence on the field of battle, and their lives have been shaped by the trauma they have lived through. This provides writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples with fertile ground to approach the question of life after war. What makes their approach unusual among comic creators is their attempt to make contact with readers who are either current or former members of the military. This means that in the letter pages of Saga the rubber meets the road as it were; Vaughan and Staples attempts to depict the effects of war can be measured against the experiences of their readership.

One way in which Vaughan and Staples approach the veteran is through the portrayal of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Trauma, to use Roger Luckhurst’s words, ‘issues a challenge to the capacities of narrative knowledge.’ The traumatic moment is too overwhelming to be integrated with the individual’s understanding of the world. It is thus pushed beyond the bounds of accessible knowledge and becomes, instead, a kind of ghost event which repeatedly erupts into consciousness. The U.S. Department for Veteran Affairs assert that between 11 and 20% of US soldiers to return from Iraq and Afghanistan describe symptoms consistent with PTSD. This results not only from witnessing warfare but, for 23% of women veterans, from sexual assault.

Attempts to depict trauma in literature often employ repetition, symbolism, substitution, and temporal disjunction. Comics are a particularly effective medium for describing trauma, as has been demonstrated in works such as Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Brian Bendis and Dave Finch’s Avengers: Disassembled. These comics leverage the simultaneity of the comics page, the overlapping of panels, and the capacity for the visual dimension of comics to repeat and distort images to communicate the experience of living with trauma.

One visual exploration of trauma in Saga appears in #27 where Marko, in the grips of an ‘F-spiral’ brought on by taking a bad batch of the drug Fadeaway, recalls accidentally killing a civilian. On the following page we are taken from Marko’s face as he realises what he has done backwards in time through a series of panels, first capturing first moments of violence, then his time with his former lover Gwendolyn, to more violence, being given a sword as an adolescent, learning to create fire, reading violent comics, to, in the lower right of the page a bleed of Marko the child with his face frozen in a grimace. The background for this final image is rough brush-strokes of orange which invade the panels of the images above, creating a blood-splash that runs across these multiple time periods. There is no speech assigned to the child Marko, but the last words from the splash page before, when the son of the civilian Marko killed calls ‘PAPA!’ certainly resonate. This montage of images suggests but denies temporal order, with time periods and identities symbolically informing one another.
 

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Marko is not the only character whose life has been shaped by trauma. Prince Robot IV’s head is a television screen which involuntarily flashes images as they enter his consciousness. Vaughan has described the TV screen as ‘a way to visualise post-traumatic stress disorder’ (The Comics Alternative Jan 19 2015). This is introduced in #1, in which the image of a severed horn flashes onto his screen to indicate both a pun on sexual dysfunction, and a literal image from the bloody conflict in which Prince Robot IV was involved. He has physically returned from war, it seems, but the violence through which he has lived has made a psychological return impossible. Later, in #2, as he questions a soldier about Alana and Marko, the image of a man engulfed in flames suddenly flashes on his screen. These images serve as a panel within the diegesis, allowing the past to visually invade the present as traumatic memories burst into consciousness. This trauma is explored more explicitly in #12, which opens with Prince Robot IV in a war zone. He witnesses a medic dying from exposure to gas. The scene ends with him covered in blood. Subsequent panels show that this scene has been playing out on his screen as he sleeps. One is reminded of Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story in which the story of witnessing a man being killed by a landmine opens with the sentence ‘This one wakes me up’.
 

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Vaughan also explores the social impact of war and strategies used to mitigate trauma. In #26 we learn that a would-be convenience store robber was a veteran and was carrying drugs. Marko asks why, to which he is told ‘Why would a veteran of the Wreath army be carrying Fadeaway?’ ‘Because he’s a veteran? Honestly, you’re probably one of the only vets who’s not using.’ The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence report drug dependency among soldiers is more than double that of civilians, and that this number is rising. This is Alana’s route of escape; during the comic she becomes a habitual drug user and the theory that she does so in order to manage trauma is made explicit in #26.

The depiction of trauma within the comic has been accompanied by an attempt to engage readers who have seen conflict. As early as #4 Vaughan asked in the letters column for any readers who were members of the military to get in touch. It was not necessarily straight-forward to assume that those who have been involved in a conflict would want to read about war and its aftermath, but Vaughan’s question yielded results. In response, #6 featured a partially redacted postcard from SSG David C in Guantanamo Bay which read ‘XXXX SAGA XXXX is XXXX the XXXX best.’

#7 saw a letter from SPC Allen P. who, at the time of writing, was an intelligence analyst on active duty in Afghanistan. He wrote ‘my job is to track down insurgents to capture/kill’. He reported that he bought his comics online. The fate of Allen P became a narrative within the letter pages; in #9 Vaughan reported that the comics sent to Allen P had been returned to them and urged the writer to get in touch. Allen P wrote again when he got back to San Antonio in #11 to assure Vaughan that he is well.

#7 also featured a letter from Ogden MF Curtis, a medium machine gunner who was also in Afghanistan. He received his comics by mail – a friend bought two copies of each issue and mailed him one. #9 included a letter from Airman First Class Taylor, who was deployed in Qatar and reported that he also acquired issues digitally. In #26 a survey of Saga readers showed that many listed Iraq and Afghanistan as countries they had visited, suggesting a high number of veteran and active duty readers.

Many of these readers hint at or explicitly confirm that they struggle with trauma. In #17 Dick L. from Prescott, Arizona wrote ‘I did pretty okay in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yeah, some guys got blown up, but I made it home in one piece … physically, at least.’ EMC Timothy Van Kleek, VSN aboard USS Elrod, whose letter appeared in #20 was more explicit: 

‘I have been serving now for 15 years, and the country has been at war for most of it. I’m not on the front lines every day, but there isn’t an aspect of my life, of society as a whole, that the conflict hasn’t touched. I can feel it hanging over me constantly, like the Sword of Damocles. I may not always agree with it, and I certainly realize that what I do is a direct cause of the deaths of my fellow human beings (a fact that has caused me serious psychological trauma on more than one occasion), but I continue to do it.’

What is perhaps surprising, however, is that the aspect of Saga which seems to appeal most to readers with military backgrounds is not the depiction of trauma but the exploration of parenthood. EMC Timothy Van Kleek goes on ”Why? Many reasons. Seability. Pay. Skills training. But mostly because I have a family […] The trick, and perhaps this is why Alana is so bitter, is to not let it affect you negatively. I never tell my little girl that “I’m doing this thing I sometimes hate just to take care of you.” And I never bring my frustration or anger from work home with me.’

#7 featured a letter from Major Sam DeWind, a veteran of Iraq and an officer of 16 years service, who was, at his time of writing, based in South Korea ‘within the effective range of a couple thousand pieces of North Korean artillery’. Major DeWind’s sentiment rhymed with that of EMC Van Kleek ‘I’m really connecting with your protagonists and their struggles as parents in a perilous world […] during the periods of heightened provocations and tensions here, most notably the shelling of Yeonpeong Island in 2010, you learn something about who you are as a parent’. By contextualising war within their role as a care-giver, these veterans and active duty officers engage in what Robert Kraft calls ‘seeking the resonant influence of social support, redefining the event [and] finding meaning’. Family becomes a touch-stone, in other words, which allows them to partially mitigate the impact of trauma.

What these letters suggest is that the (albeit small) sample of veterans who read Saga not only empathise with the depiction of trauma in the comic, but that they also strongly identify with the coping methods which Vaughan and Staples portray. It is perhaps noteworthy that, while Saga engages explicitly with war and its aftermath, it does so in a fantasy setting, thereby applying a filter to war which mimics the substitution and symbolic engagement which characterizes the trauma narrative. The act of writing a letter may also employ a well-established means of addressing trauma through narrative. Saga is thus immanently relevant to a place and time when conflict damages the emotional lives of many, when men and women kill and die, and come home broken from conflicts overseas, when living with trauma is a reality for many, and the question of the place for veterans in society affects us all.