Your Otherness Offends Me

Posted on May 18, 2014 by Hiba Ganta

I am very emotionally and intellectually affected by the idea of ‘otherness’. I find myself unable to champion either a purely South Asian standpoint or a generalized ‘Western’ stance on social issues, especially feminism and it’s relationship with culture. This means that I am perceived as the ‘other’ to people from both worlds – and truthfully, I don’t know if this admittance helps or hurts any arguments I make.

In short, I am an Indian expatriate, inexperienced with my maternal and paternal languages. Despite this, I grew up eating ‘rice and dal’ everyday for lunch (a South Indian staple) and I’m comfortable eating with my hands. I speak an “accentless” English but when I am angry or speaking to my family, I inevitably find myself being sharper on my consonants, with a trace Indian lilt. I’m somewhat forgiven for my lack of “Indian-ness” by relatives and other expatriate friends but beyond these superficial things, certain combinations of conservatism, unequal gender roles and cultural identity have made an impression on me.

As pointed out by my sister in a casual conversation, there are many faces of Indian feminism, just as in the West – the conversation has been had and re-had with marginal real-life improvements and there is little that is new to say about it. Therein lies a glimpse of the true problem-gap between cultural identity and feminism in India, and I daresay to an extent in the West. We’ve come up with different variations of feminism for various cultural contexts but there is limited discussion about the ways in which to move beyond the intellectual bubble. This bubble has been formed around the intellectual nature of feminism but has not been adequately conveyed in context of the nuances and challenges of everyday life in Indian society for both men and women. The purpose of how feminism or equality of the genders has widely been acknowledged in terms of economic benefits but not in terms of social ones because such progress is hard to gauge when it comes to India’s religious diversity and hierarchal society.

In this sense, a valid defense is that someone who is representative of the ‘one’ or the ‘other’ cannot speak for the many different contexts at hand. In this way, my cultural “otherness” is shared with the large feminist-oriented culture in India and seen as not really belonging. Identity has always been a transient concept, but somewhere along the way South Asian cultures decided that it shouldn’t be and this became reflected in social issues too.

I recently came across this TED talk by Malala Yousafzi’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzi, which surprised me in a good way. He was speaking about patriarchal societies in a way that acknowledged the possibilities for a different kind of approach to the ‘girl-child’. He is evidently a well-educated individual but he is also very clearly not from an urbanized context. Western influence was literally the most improbable factor in the way he chose to raise his daughter. This serves to say that just like how Ziauddin Yousafzi chose to bring up his daughter in a home that allowed her to develop her own sense of independence, free of cultural hangups, so has my life as an Indian been more-or-less free of such restraints without completely altering my cultural roots (I can’t say the same for my identity). I can only speak for myself and other women who can relate to my experiences but I feel that in order to push out of the intellectual bubble-wrap that shields feminism from the difficult question of social progress, it must start as a personally generated phenomenon. Phenomenon implies that we don’t need to rely on a correct or singular version of feminism. It is contextual to each person, resulting in a generation of men and women that are willing to widen their cultural values without compromising them.

Once again, we come back to what authority I have to say this – especially since I have been more or less spared from the often-suffocating expectations of Indian conservatism and one could say my cultural boundaries are hardly existent. The truth is, I speak from first-hand experience. My father was brought up in rural Gunadala in Andhra Pradesh and my mother, in colonial Bangalore, Karnataka. To say they had different childhood values growing up and a subsequently different viewpoint on child rearing is an understatement. They grew up in India with many social restrictions but there was decisive shifts in choosing to let most of these values go by adopting a more liberalized approach to raising us. (Mind you, moving away from India played a huge role in being able to do this.) As a result, I was not constrained to the belief system of my parents. Freedom to study in my field of choice, freedom to marry the person of my choice, freedom to disagree (even if it was met with a sometimes confusing and strict moral code): this was all a result of a personal choice made by my parents for which I am grateful.

Therefore, I know for a fact that growing out of the cultural mould into which you’re born is alienating. There is nothing worse than being rejected by your birth culture and labeled as ‘other’ (which is often a synonym for a generic wannabe for the West). The fact is that there is nothing pegging feminist values to Western culture: on this point, I will not back down. South Asia has a history and far more advanced track record of female leadership. In the Indian home, the mother is the backbone, if not a breadwinner as well. The issue at hand is that despite all this – the cultural mould for women remains narrow. It’s perpetuated in wedding rituals, marriage, child-rearing versus career building, the same as in the West. So often, the platitudes that mothers pass onto daughters about the nature of men and their “irrationality” and patriarchy are nurtured and not actually deconstructed. This is why raising your daughter in the way that Malala and myself were raised is so important in allowing a person to really understand themselves and where they’ve come from but also in terms of seeing these cultural expectations for what they are: changeable.

To not speak loudly, to not back-talk, to be neat- all these things are seen as positive and encouraged in the Indian home. When people say that Indian women are “taught” to be a certain way – this isn’t some broad reflection on the education system or Indians as generally bigoted people. It comes from this fixed gender role that’s part of culture. My Indian parents were/are no different in this respect, except, that they have grown to accept my “non-traditional characteristics” because they consciously encouraged it in my formative years. Even in my context, I had to exercise my freedom of thought and independence – it was not assumed of me. The bottom line is, I am an Indian but I am also a feminist. I am a person without a home country but I have a root culture. Feminism cannot fit squarely into the current expectations of South Asian women. This culture should not be reduced to narrow social norms, resistant to “otherness”, when it’s been shown that there is so much room for a brighter future when those boundaries are widened.

Mallala Yousafzai

“Like a Damn White Knight”: Feminism and Chivalry, Love and War and Sin City

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Kristian Williams

In 1986, Frank Miller made headlines with The Dark Knight Returns, introducing a tougher, meaner, more Eastwood-like Batman, and kicking off the “grim and gritty” trend in adventure comics. The Dark Knight Returns is not only a good superhero story; it is also a comment on and critique of superhero stories, showing us the underlying mechanics and the foundational assumptions of the genre.

Another title, released that same year, did something similar. I don’t mean Watchmen (though it obviously did); I mean the largely overlooked Daredevil: Love and War. Also written by Frank Miller, and graciously illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, the novel offers an articulate critique of the kind of heroism implied by the ideals of chivalry. Years later, this critique became a recurring motif in Miller’s over-the-top noir series, Sin City. In both cases, Miller deploys sexist conventions in order to undermine them.

The Stories Men Tell Themselves

Love and War is explicitly about men, women, and power.

The book’s premise is that Vanessa Fisk, wife of Kingpin Wilson Fisk, has suffered some sort of psychological break and ceased to speak. Desperate, the Kingpin kidnaps Cheryl Mondat, the wife of a prominent psychologist. He then forces Dr. Mondat to treat Vanessa: “I could not simply hire you,” the Kingpin explains. “I want your passion, doctor. . . . You must know that you hold in your hands the life of the woman you cherish.”

Matt Murdock, the Daredevil, rescues the kidnapped woman — if “rescue” is the right word. “I make all the right promises,” he narrates; “She doesn’t cry. . . . Her voice is strong when she asks me who I am.”

“I’m a friend, Mrs. Mondat,” he says.

“And I’m your prisoner,” she replies.

Daredevil then sets off to attack Fisk Tower in a foolhardy effort to rescue the doctor. While he is away, Victor — the animalistic, pill-addled, psycho hired to kidnap Cheryl in the first place — manages by a combination of good luck and pure evil craziness to track her to Matt Murdock’s apartment, where he tries, not only to kidnap her again, but also to sexually assault her, and (given his previous performance) likely murder her in the bargain.

Surprisingly much of the story is given over to Victor’s point of view, and the narration — fragmentary though it is — recounts a delusional fantasy in which Victor is a knight and Cheryl a damsel in distress:

“I see us together, a queen and her most loyal knight. . . . Bandits attack. They pull you off your horse and tear your dress and throw you to the ground. . . . The bandits escape with my queen. . . . But I will find them. Save her honor.”

Elsewhere, he compares Cheryl to “Sleeping Beauty” and “Helen of Troy.”

The story Victor tells to himself is an inversion of reality: He is not her kidnapper, but her rescuer; not her attacker, but her protector. His intentions are not corrupt, but pure; his character noble rather than base; his actions chivalrous rather than criminal.

What stands out, as a result, is the way this hero story justifies Victor’s actions to himself, and how similar his justifications are to those of Daredevil. “She’s safe with me,” Matt thinks as he carries the drugged-unconscious woman to his apartment — though, like Victor, he has to remind himself repeatedly that “She’s a married woman.”

One could be forgiven for wondering if Murdock’s heroics, rather than providing the solution, might be part of the problem.

Failed Quests

It is not the Daredevil who saves Cheryl from Victor. She does that herself, cracking him across the face with a hot fireplace poker and then running him through. The image accompanying the coup de grace is, strikingly, that of a knight and queen riding into the sunset.

At the same moment Murdock, dressed as Daredevil, is assailing Fisk’s office tower. It’s a wasted effort. The task is impossible, and Matt is exhausted and injured before he even finds the hostages. By the time he reaches them, Vanessa, like Cheryl, has already found her own way to freedom.

With some gentle coaching from Dr. Mondat, Vanessa has managed to spell out a word using a child’s blocks. The word she spells is “XKAYP” — escape.

Her husband watches as the letters come together. “She stabs me,” Fisk thinks to himself. “She shatters me.”

It’s hard to know what we expect to happen next, but it’s pretty surely not going to be good. As Kingpin, Fisk has “built an empire on human sin,” and he maintains it through fear and cold, calculating violence. As Dr. Mondat was working with Vanessa, Wilson Fisk — “on a hunch” — ordered an arsonist “beaten with a lead pipe,” and then casually has one of his lieutenants, whom he suspects of treachery, assassinated. The scene is background, not even a subplot, just a moment of the day — but it reminds us who the Kingpin is, what he is capable of. How will such a man respond to his wife’s abandonment? What will he do to the doctor? to Vanessa?

The answer shows Fisk at his most human. He rages. He grieves. And then he relents. He flies Vanessa to Europe, gives her a fortune and a new identity. “The Kingpin will never see his wife again.”

As Fisk makes clear — not by saying so, but through his actions — his wife was never really his prisoner. Vanessa’s escape comes simply because she articulated her desire for it. Against all the conventions of the genre, in this telling it is the villain who behaves most decently.

By upending our expectations — about gender, about morality, and together, about heroism — Love and War also exposes them, and so exposes them to scrutiny. It turns out that a lot of what this story is about is, in fact, uncovering what these kinds of stories are about.

From Hell’s Kitchen to Sin City

On the surface, Sin City represents a vicious, vulgar blend of gendered stereotypes, sadistic ultraviolence, and paranoid conspiracy. For Frank Miller, however, “Every Sin City story is a romance of some sort.” As he told Publisher’s Weekly, “[E]ach story has a hero. There might be flaws. They might be disturbed, but if you look at it, ultimately their motives are pure. . . . they’re what I’d like to call ‘knights in dirty armor.'” The Sin City stories valorize these “knights,” but also complicate and undercut the chivalric ideal. Miller admits, of his knights’ quests, “They’re very dark, and the consequences are bad and they’re usually futile. . . .”

Men in the world of Sin City are all broad shoulders, hard fists, and gruff voices. The women are, with few exceptions, prostitutes or strippers; even those who aren’t rarely appear wearing more than lingerie. But, like Love and War, the Sin City stories push against the genre’s sexist assumptions.

Nearly every novel in the series features a tough guy trying to protect, defend, or avenge a woman, and making a mess of it: Dwight McCarthy’s efforts to defend his girlfriend from her abusive ex set the stage for the mob to take control of prostitution in Old Town. John Hartigan, a rare honest cop, manages to save an eleven-year-old girl from a murderous pedophile, only to lead the killer straight to her again later. Marv — whom Miller has described as “Conan in a trench coat” — can’t protect his “angel,” the prostitute Goldie. He blacks out drunk, and when he wakes up she is dead. What’s more, these failures are described in mock-heroic terms. The dominatrix Gail teasingly calls Dwight “Lancelot.” Hartigan chastises himself for “charging in like Galahad.” Marv reflects, in his fashion:

“You were scared, weren’t you, Goldie? Somebody wanted you dead and you knew it. So you hit the saloons, the bad places, looking for the biggest, meanest lug around and finding me. Looking for protection and paying for it with your body and more — with love, with wild fire, making me feel like a king, like a damn white knight. Like a hero. What a laugh.”

I won’t try to find a “moral” to the Sin City stories, but if there’s a lesson to be learned, it may be that male heroics are not what keep women safe. What does? Apparently, their own collective activity. Dwight considers the relative security of Old Town, outside the control of the cops, the mob, or the pimps: “The ladies are the law here, beautiful and merciless. . . . If you cross them, you’re a corpse.”

Miller’s protagonists may be big men with trench coats and weather-beaten faces. But ultimately, it is the girls of Old Town who take care of the girls of Old Town.

Miller vs. Miller

Frank Miller — who likes drawing tits and ass almost as much as he likes drawing swastikas — does not enjoy a reputation as a feminist. And it is hard to know how well the politics of Love and War or Sin City honesty reflect his values or beliefs.

That uncertainty is largely a feature of Miller’s erratic and likely incoherent array of opinion over the course of time: He somehow went from writing about a Batman who “thinks he’s a damned Robin Hood” in Year One and organizes a revolution in the Dark Knight Strikes Again to railing against the Occupy movement as “nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness.” His immediate reaction to the September 11 attacks was explicitly anti-religious and anti-nationalist: “I’m sick of flags. I’m sick of God.” Yet a decade later, his Hitchens-like enthusiasm for war produced the execrable propaganda of Holy Terror. The Martha Washington series begins with a black girl literally imprisoned by poverty, but becomes an Ayn Rand-inspired fable celebrating the triumph of individual will.

Still, I think that the radical elements of his work, however muted, are more intriguing, more powerful, and more important than the reactionary aspects. Once one grasps that our entire culture is sexist, the fact that some comic book is also sexist may not seem all that interesting; but for the same reason, if that comic also resists sexist conventions, the fact that it does may be remarkable. Whether the author intended it to do so or endorses that reading likely says something about him, but doesn’t necessarily tell us very much about the work in question. It is, I think, worth considering — worth appreciating — those moments where some radical implication, deliberate or not, emerges from the text. In a way, it is almost better if the radical subtext is not intentional, if the subversive moment occurs simply because the story needs it — or further, because the stories that shape our culture cannot help but to suggest possibilities that they cannot themselves contain.

Bibliography

9-11: Artists Respond (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2002).

Karl Kelly, “CCI: Frank Miller Reigns ‘Holy Terror’ on San Diego,” Comic Book Resources, http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=33550, July 21, 2011.

Heidi MacDonald, “Crime, Comics and the Movies: PW Talks with Frank Miller,” Publishers Weekly, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/27434-crime-comics-and-the-movies.html, March 7, 2005.

Frank Miller, “Anarchy,” http://www.frankmillerink.com/2011/11/anarchy, November 11, 2011.

Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986).

Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002).

Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse, 2009).

Frank Miller, Holy Terror (Burbank, California: Legendary Comics, 2011).

Frank Miller and Dave Mazzucchelli, Batman: Year One (New York: DC Comics, 2005).

Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz, Daredevil: Love and War (New York: Marvel, 1986).

Frank Miller, Sin City: The Big Fat Kill (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2005).

Frank Miller, Sin City: Booze, Broads, and Bullets (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2010).

Frank Miller, Sin City: The Hard Goodbye (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2010).

Frank Miller, Sin City: That Yellow Bastard (Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 2005).

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (New York: DC Comics, 1987).

Lone Woolf and Cubs: Alan Moore, Postmodern Fiction, and Third-Wave Feminist Utopianism

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Eric Berlatsky

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007 . A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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Alan Moore’s most recent glossy graphic novel is, despite its title, more akin to Lost Girls than to the two previous volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (LOEG). LOEG: The Black Dossier, like Lost Girls, is preoccupied with other creators’ fictional characters having copious amounts of sex with one another in a variety of positions. This is particularly the case in the first third of the book where Allan Quatermain (King Solomon’s Mines, etc.) and Wilhemina Murray (Jonathan Harker’s Dracula companion) have bathed in a fountain of life/immortality, which serves to make them both young, blonde, and perpetually randy. The pool may as well have been filled with liquefied Viagra, given the dramatic shift away from the subtly represented sexual dynamics between the two in both previous volumes, set some fifty years earlier. Their intermittent congresses are punctuated by excerpts from the “Black Dossier,” a government file stolen by Quatermain and Murray, which collects documents on the “extraordinary” members of the League in its various incarnations. Among these are Fanny Hill, star of a pornographic 18th century novel by John Cleland, and Virginia Woolf’s androgynous Orlando, eponymous hero/ine of the 1928 novel. Introducing Hill and Orlando as part of Leagues that both preceded and followed the turn of the Victorian century version detailed in the previous two volumes gives Moore an excuse to indulge again in somewhat graphic sexuality, particularly with Orlando, whose propensity to change gender every few centuries allows for the exploration of heterosexual couplings from either gender’s perspective, as well as frequent gay and lesbian sexual encounters, with a heavier emphasis on the latter.

Graphic gratuitousness, from LOEG: The Black Dossier

To suggest that Moore’s increasing interest in sexuality is merely an excuse to get artist Kevin O’Neill to draw some dirty pictures for him is unfair, however, since the fascination with sexuality is clearly linked to an almost Romantic obsession with the liberating powers of the imagination. The “Blazing World” section that closes the book presents readers with a utopian “magical kingdom” of fantastic fictional creations, symbolically representing the scope and power of the human imagination, frequently repressed or ignored in the “real world.” That is, while Moore’s LOEGverse is already only populated by fictional creations (James Bond, Hugo Drummond, Emma Peel, Wodehouse’s Jeeves, etc. all make memorable appearances in The Black Dossier), there is a constant implication that in this “real world” the most imaginative of imaginative creations are slowly being pushed out, due to oppressive social policies and a general incapacity (or unwillingness) to access the most powerfully imaginative parts of our brains. England, in the 1958 LOEGverse is ruled by the dystopian Party from Orwell’s 1984, while fairies, sprites, and magical beings (apparently common in the LOEG Renaissance Britain) have either been exterminated or have fled to the “Blazing World” (from Margaret Cavendish’s novel of the same name). So, while Moore retains the trappings of the previous LOEG in giving us a world wherein all of the characters are other authors’ fictional creations, he also creates yet another world in which things are even more “fictional,” fantastic, and imaginative…turning the original LOEGverse into a dystopian lack of imagination and the “Blazing World” into its utopian flipside. Not coincidentally, the “Blazing World” also presents its readers with tantalizing sexual possibilities, including the union of Fanny Hill and Venus, the goddess of love, and a ménage in the offing between Quatermain, Murray, and Orlando. All of which brings us, at long last, to my erstwhile brother’s project on this website of “the gay utopia” and it’s problematic application in Moore’s graphic novel.

What does Moore’s pornographic fascination with and valorization of polymorphous and androgynous sexuality have to do with his equal fascination with the potential utopia of the human imagination? Presumably, the former is what my brother is labeling the “gay utopia,” a label I do not completely understand or endorse, since it is neither “gay” nor a “utopia” from what I can discern. Rather, it seems to be a version of “third wave” feminism, or “post-feminism,” or (perhaps) postmodern feminism as theorized by Judith Butler and Michel Foucault (and many others) and practiced by contemporary writers like Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Caryl Churchill (and many others), all of whom are transparently influenced by Woolf’s exploration of androgyny in both Orlando and A Room of One’s Own. Moore’s affinity with this group of writers is not only indicated by the central place of Orlando in Black Dossier, but also by the conspicuous placement of a poster advertising the performance of Fevvers, Carter’s androgynous winged circus aerialist in Nights at the Circus, on a poster in Quatermain and Murray’s seedy hotel room.

Woolf’s discussion of androgyny in the final chapter of A Room suggests the possibility that all people are both male and female, and that it is, in some sense, “unnatural” for us to think of ourselves as linked to one gender or the other. Rather, Woolf suggests, many of the problems with contemporary writing is in its “unnatural” sex consciousness, most likely caused by the women’s suffrage movement and the proprietary masculine response to it. While much of A Room, then, is spent detailing various oppressions of women (particularly economic and educational deprivations) that have presented the flowering of female genius in the field of writing, she ends by advocating the dissolution of the gender categories which make such oppression possible. If we do not think of ourselves as male or female, it would, no doubt, be impossible to deprive certain members of society certain privileges on the basis of gender. Logically, it would also dissolve the notion of default “norms” of sexual orientation, since sexual attraction would be based on a much looser sense of both our own gender and that of our partner(s). Again, it would be impossible to oppress people on the basis of the gender of the person we choose to sleep with if gender itself were not an operable category. Woolf herself doesn’t explore the sexual ramifications of this notion of androgyny in A Room (she tended to be fairly reticent in portrayals of and discussion of sex), although there is a bit more of this kind of thinking in Orlando, wherein the hero/ine falls in love with women, men, and other metaphorically androgynous characters (who likewise fall in love with her/him). None of this seems to shatter Woolf’s fundamental belief in gender, however, since she insistently suggests that there is something “special” and “suggestive” about women’s writing that is simply absent from the majority of male output. That is, while it is essential for women to forget that they are women while writing, that writing will still be characteristically feminine. All of which is to say that Woolf herself never quite asserted that gender did not exist in some kind of fundamental/natural way, just that gender consciousness had taken a far-too-prominent role in human society.

Not to fear, however, because these fairly limited suggestions about a possible “androgyny of the mind” become a full-fledged denial of the existence of the male/female gender division in post-structuralist (and post-post-structuralist) thinkers like Foucault and Butler. To boil down the highly influential thought of both theorists into two words, gender and sexual orientation become matters of “discourse” and “performativity.” For Foucault, of course, there are no natural or “essential” truths. Rather, “truth” is a matter of social agreement, or what people “say” in a variety of discourses. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault details how certain sexual practices are described through discourse (and therefore authorized) as “normal,” while others are labeled as “abnormal.” Implicit (and occasionally explicit) in this argument is that there is no “real” normal, just what people have labeled as “normal” through discourse, all of which provides the impetus and the practice of the “specification” of and oppression of the “perverse”: the gay, the pedophiliac, the practitioner of bestiality, etc. The attribution of these behaviors as “abnormal” is primarily a practice by which societies label and specify an abnormal “other” which serves to justify and valorize the “normal” self of any community. The normal/abnormal binary then authorizes and excuses various forms of oppression.

While Foucault is more interested in “sexuality” than in gender, his general argument works just as well for these categories. There is no such thing as “natural” sex or gender divisions, the argument goes. Rather, the binary is created in discourse as a means of defining the masculine (normal, complete, phallically endowed) self against the other (abnormal, lacking) that is the feminine. Those in power generate the most influential discourse, and these discourses perpetuate power relations by presenting social constructions (like gender) as biological fact. For feminist thinkers following poststructuralist thought (third wave feminists in Julia Kristeva’s formulation), then, resistance to masculine dominance becomes less a matter of advocating for economic, political, or educational equality, and more a matter of exposing the fact that gender is a false category that merely perpetuates certain power relations. Presumably, exposure of this “false consciousness” will lead to a revolution of the mind that would put an end to oppression on the basis of these categories (gender, perversion) and lead to some kind of gender-free utopia. Foucault’s own position on this is never this optimistic, however, since he argues that any discourse is by its nature “disciplinary” or oppressive, and so a change in discourse about sexuality would not free us from oppression, but merely deliver us into a new form of it.

Butler’s claim in Gender Trouble (1990) is somewhat more positive, however, since it hinges on the liberating potential of “performativity” and not on the inherently oppressive power of discourse. For Butler, as with Foucault, gender categories are inherently false. In fact, Butler denies the typical division of “sex” and “gender” with the former referring to biological/natural differences between men and women (chromosomes, genitalia, etc.) and the latter referring to socially defined “roles.” For Butler, while chromosomal and genital differences may exist, it is a social (discursive) decision to use these categories that divide a society. We might just as easily call all blondes “male,” and all brunettes “female” and ignore the differences we now use to distinguish male from female just as we now ignore other kinds of differences between people (finger length, for instance). So, while differences between people may be “real” in some sense, the meaning of particular differences is never natural, essential, biological, or ontological. Butler argues the “gendered body…has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (2497) and that this “fact” is the essential definition of performativity. Our sex/gender, she argues, is only a collection of acts within a social discourse. Drag queens and transvestites, then, become her primary examples, since their “internal” essence is so easily confused with their “external” act. Quoting Esther Newton, Butler notes how drag queens may be read as female on the outside (clothing), but really male (since they have genitals, Y chromosomes, etc.), or they may be read as male on the outside (in their bodies), but female on the inside (in their “soul,” their “self,” their primary self-identification). Butler notes then that drag, while an imitation of gender, also reveals how all gender is imitative: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself- as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of the radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary.” (2498). Again, as with Foucault, gender/sex is revealed not as “natural” and “biological” but as a social construction of discourse. If we only see these constructions, then, we can perhaps act outside of them, performing the gender we wish to perform (including, perhaps, androgyny, or some other gender outside the male/female binary) and not be constricted by discourse. As with much thought I think of as postmodern, the primary claim here is for the “lack of reality of reality” (Lyotard 146), or the revelation that things we think of as “real” (sexual orientation, gender/sex) are in fact not real at all, but are instead mere social agreement that would change if we (as a society) were merely able to “imagine otherwise.” If, as a culture, we could shift our attention away from binary divisions like normal/abnormal, hetero/homo, woman/man, etc. the oppressions that arise from these divisions might be avoided, subverted, or destroyed. As Butler argues “gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences” (2500) and presumably if “gender” were eliminated, those consequences would be alleviated.

While Foucault’s discussion of unavoidable discourses from innumerable intersecting power structures may be unnecessarily draconian (you’re oppressed by discourse, but there is no way out!), Butler’s discussion of drag and performance may be unrealistically utopian (despite the fact that Butler always keeps an eye on the oppressive discourses that construct gender). By suggesting that “performance” is the most operative word in discussions of gender and sexuality, she implies that if we all start “performing” in opposition to dominant power structures, such structures would dissolve. Moore’s Black Dossier and Lost Girls seem to operate within that logic. By presenting us with a cornucopia of sex acts, sexual attractions, and shifting genders, Moore works to undermine typical oppressive divisions like male/female and homosexual/ heterosexual, particularly in his clever division of the “real” LOEGverse and the “Blazing World,” the latter of which is only clearly viewable with a pair of included 3-D glasses. Again, the message seems to be that a shift in perspective (from the two dimensions of the league to the 3 dimensions of our world, through the 4th dimension of time, and finally to the supposed 5th dimension of the “Blazing World” wherein the characters experience all times simultaneously). The possible simultaneity of time is a standard element of Moore’s work (from Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen to Jack the Ripper’s multi-temporal experiences in From Hell), as is kinky and non-conformist sex (perhaps the most vivid example being Abby Cable’s intense and sweaty sex with a vegetable in Swamp Thing). The two are brought together most clearly in the final section of The Black Dossier, however, wherein it becomes clear that a shift in dimension, an escape from viewing time as linear, gives a fresh perspective, allowing us to see gender itself as not “real” and therefore available to re-vision.

This is particularly the case because although the “Blazing World” represents vivid and imaginative fiction, the restrictive oppressive world of the “real” LOEGverse is clearly just as fictional as its Blazing counterpart. Both are populated by fictions. It is merely the case that one of these fictions reinforces typical gender binaries and oppressions, while the other frees us from them, that separates the two. Ian Fleming’s James Bond (called merely “Jimmy,” no doubt for copyright reasons) is the key character in this regard in the “present” section of the real LOEGverse. His brutal violence and misogynist attitude towards both Mina and Emma Peel (of the Avengers) suggests the standard gender divisions and gender oppressions that exist in our own “real” world. At the same time, his obvious fictionality reminds us that these attitudes are also “fictions” in their own way, constructions of social discourse without recourse to “essential” reality. Of course, any character in a “novel” is a fiction, but Moore’s characters are made more obviously so by the fact that he is appropriating them from other people’s fictions. This self-referential indication that one’s creations are “texts” not “truths,” is a staple of “postmodern” fiction, of course, but it not mere textual game-playing here (although it appears to be in parts of the other League volumes). Rather, it serves the post-feminist agenda of suggesting that sex/gender and sexual orientation are themselves fictions. The polymorphic sexuality of Orlando is then set against the misogynist heterosexuality of Bond, both as fictions from which we can choose, but only one of which has a proven track record of oppression and abuse. It is in this way that The Black Dossier’s utopian dimension functions: as a “real” choice between two discursive fictions, not as a choice between quotidian reality and liberating imagination. As Prospero/Moore heavyhandedly notes in his final speech, our reality is at least as much a fiction as our imaginative creations. Nevertheless, in The Black Dossier, Moore makes the choice between these two fictions too easy and too reductive.

In any accounting of gender in a postmodern context, it is important not to too easily adopt a utopian perspective about the liberating potential of gender performance without also acknowledging the pervasively restrictive power of discourse and the possibility of additional restrictions of biology/nature, which may be too easily disregarded by radical social constructivists like Butler and Foucault. Grant Morrison, another comics “star,” provides a similarly utopian outlook in The Invisibles, which also combines explorations of the simultaneity of time, extra-dimensional perception, existential freedom of consciousness, and trans-gender androgyny. (Really, he and Moore may as well be the same person for all their personal squabbling). In the Apocalipstick story arc, the transvestive Lord Fanny can only gain her eldritch powers if she can “fool” a Mexican goddess-figure into believing that s/he is a girl. S/he stabs herself near the groin, fooling the extra-dimensional creature into believing that s/he is menstruating and thus gains his/her superheroic powers. As in Black Dossier, Morrison seems to suggest that gender is a matter of performance and self-identification, available for vision and re-vision, given the proper perspective (again from a 4th or 5th dimensional angle in the majority of the story). Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: A Game of You, while less giddy and inventive, may provide a reparative to this perspective, however. In this story, a witch gathers together the various women in an apartment complex to rescue one of their sisters from the “evil” Cuckoo. Wanda, a pre-operative transsexual formerly named Alvin, prepares to go with them, but is denied access to the dream realm because, well, he still has a penis. While Gaiman’s story (like Moore’s, like Morrison’s) is largely about the freedom to choose one’s identity, to perform the self, and to resist social discourse and definitions, here this possibility is ultimately defeated by the intractable reality of Wanda’s gender. In this case, the goddesses cannot be “fooled” or convinced by performance. Indeed, Wanda’s inability to accompany his friends leads inexorably to her/his death. Gaiman’s cautious pessimism indicates a less “postmodern,” and perhaps more realistic approach to gender oppression. Imagining gender differently, while possible and potentially liberating, doesn’t necessarily make certain “realities” disappear. Indeed, even if sex/gender are merely products of social discourse, there is no “Blazing World” that we can access in which such discourses disappear. Rather, discourse may be just as intractable as biology.

Morrison in Moore drag.
The Invisibles ©Grant Morrison and Jill Thompson

Most works of postmodern feminist fiction acknowledge these substantial barriers to gender liberation more clearly and more comprehensively than Moore’s does, and this is one of the primary failings of Black Dossier. Indeed, Woolf’s Orlando, written almost eighty years (and thousands of pages of feminist theory) before Black Dossier, is already more sophisticated on these issues than the later book. When Orlando emerges from her male to female sex change, she initially has no sense of her own gender while living among a group of gypsies. As soon as she returns to English society, however, her new gender has a significant impact upon her life. The juxtaposition of the “civilized” English with the “natural” gypsy culture gives Orlando (and Woolf) the opportunity to configure gender as something that rises out of social discourse, while Orlando’s experiences as both man and woman allows him/her to act as both despite the fact that s/he “remained exactly as he had been” (138). Orlando then is able to experience the freedoms of dressing as a man at night, while remaining a woman in the day during periods of the 18th century. At the same time, however, her activities and opportunities, particularly social and economic, are drastically curtailed as a woman, and her marriage (to a more ambiguously androgynous man) is described not merely in terms of love, but also in terms of social compulsion and as the “jaws of death” (262). That is, despite being Woolf’s most “utopian” novel, exploring as it does freedom from gender, the possibility of androgynous and lesbian love, and emergence into a new “present” that may evade the constrictions of the past, much of the novel is devoted to the depiction of these restrictions and the monumental power they have to control our sense of self and our daily actions. Woolf is more concerned in her work with the disciplinary nature of discourse about gender than with a performative utopian escape from those discourses.

Likewise, followers of Woolf, like Winterson and Carter, are less inclined to display a utopian dimension without counterbalancing it with a more “realistic” reparative. Carter’s Nights at the Circus (cited in Black Dossier) contains an androgynous heroine (Fevvers) and an increasingly androgynous man (Walser) who get married (like Orlando and Shel) and declare the possibility of a utopian future led by Fevvers as “New Woman”. Still, the book focuses at length on a variety of patriarchal abuses, including the merciless beating of one character, Mignon, by a series of men. These abuses are accompanied by sardonic critiques of a utopian mindset by Fevvers’ lifelong companion, Lizzie. Similarly, Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, which, like Black Dossier, contains meditations on the simultaneity of time as part of its feminism, provides us with a more ambiguously heroic androgynous heroine. The Dog Woman’s excessive enjoyment of and reveling in violence makes the reader begin to think that her feminist resistance to masculine discourse results not in “freedom” from gender binaries and oppression, but in a new era of oppression, violence, and abuse that merely reverses the male/female terms rather than erasing them. In depicting matters in this way, there is some suggestion that such an erasure of the gender binary may be impossible. Winterson’s The Passion also contains an androgynous heroine, Villanelle, whose webbed feet are signifiers of masculinity, while her genitalia/chromosomes suggest otherwise. Her liberation from an abusive marriage doesn’t result in freedom/happiness, however, at least not for all, as Henry (her friend and murderer of the husband) ends up on an island insane asylum, much like his previous “love,” Napolean.

Similar ambivalences are available in Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud 9, whose very title suggests a utopia, but whose contents are more conflicted. While the first act focuses on repressive Victorian gender and racial discourse, the sexual fantasmagoria of the second act is surprisingly less liberated than one might expect. While the first act is dominated by simple oppressive binaries of race and gender (complicated by transgender casting), the second act is dominated by homosexual affairs, followed by various ménage a trois, and finally by incestuous and inter-generational orgies. None of these physical acts seem to free their participants from the discourses of patriarchy available in Act I, however, as two gay men quickly adopt typically “masculine” or “feminine” roles, while the matriarch of the family, Betty, continues to want to serve men even after she leaves her husband and discovers the liberating pleasures of masturbation. That is, while Churchill’s play clearly views gender and sexual orientation as both discursive and performative, she is not so quick to suggest that a sudden shift in perspective, or trip to a “Blazing World” will make liberation from circumscribed gender conceptions possible.

None of this is to suggest that Moore is completely devoid of irony or self-critique. One humorous aside notes that when Orlando is male, he has a tendency to become increasingly violent, while a brief Tijuana Bible from the 1984 years depicts a man declaring, in the middle of a sexual act, “Ahh! Yes! In this moment of timeless animal love, we cast off our shackles!” That this sex act is immediately followed by betrayal by his partner and submission once more to the totalitarian government, seems to suggest the folly in believing that a series of diverse sexual practices will somehow “free” us from the discourses that determine social “norms” like gender and sexual orientation.

Still, despite this ironic disavowal of such unalloyed utopian notions, this is precisely the idea that The Black Dossier most frequently represents. The key first movement of a new consciousness in post-feminist thought is the realization that gender (and sexuality) are social constructs that can be ignored and re-invented. The result of this, perhaps, would be an openness to polymorphous sexuality and more various gender-identity. Moore’s book, however, seems to suggest that exposure to polymorphous sexualities and gender-identities will somehow lead us to an acknowledgment of gender’s inherent falsehood. While Black Dossier thematizes the fictionality of gender, it more often shows us lots of sex (especially in the first third of the book), a practice that tends not to serve the interests of post-feminism, but instead has the reverse effect. Mostly, what readers of the book are given (and it is a given, in the world of mainstream comics, that most of those readers are male) is a plethora of beautiful women in various states of undress, performing sex acts with men and/or other women. Rare is the depiction of homosexual male intercourse, and rarer is the depiction of sex that doesn’t conform to what might be typically titillating to men. Women are quite consistently, and especially in the Orlando and Fanny Hill sections, on display for men to ogle and appreciate, with the more serious ideas about the value of gender re-evaluation likely missed by many if not most readers. Nowhere is this problem more clear than in the Fanny Hill section in which one page (and its only picture) are devoted to a society in which all women walk around naked, while the men are fully clothed. While it is possible to view this as a commentary on the socially-derived convention of wearing clothes (and its ridiculousness in warmer climates), it is more likely to be read as an opportunity for mostly male readers to look at pictures of naked women. It is hard to construe this as a step for feminism. While, again, it is possible to argue that Moore seeks to be true to the style of his source material, reproducing such source material in an effort to advocate overcoming it is a problem typical of postmodern pastiche.

The exact same problem emerges in Moore¹s treatment of race. The “rescue” of Murray and Quatermain performed by the blackface sambo-style doll, the Golliwog (a character in children’s books by Florence Upton and Enid Blyton, the latter a favorite of Moore’s), may be read as an effort to promote the possibility of “reimagining” racial stereotypes in positive ways. Given the lack of critical distance, or self-conscious discussion, in the book itself, however, the portrayal of the Golliwog seems more consistent with racist caricatures than in opposition to them. Given Moore’s sketchy history of representing race (the zombie issues of Swamp Thing, the firedrake in Miracleman), there is little in Black Dossier to suggest that racist representations are under critique. Instead, the Golliwog is presented as an imaginative “hero,” instead of as a typically white failure of the imagination. The problems of racial politics inherent in the use of the Golliwog should, at the very least, be explored, just as the contradictions inherent in a man presenting naked women for the viewing/reading of other men should be considered, before claims for the inherent “liberating” power of Moore’s (or anyone else’s) imagination can be taken seriously. None of this is to suggest Moore is a “racist” or a “sexist” in any kind of easily attributable way. His left-wing credentials are, indeed, well-established. Instead, the Black Dossier seems to assert a bit too easily that intractable social problems (like racial and gender discrimination) can be overcome with a little fifth dimensional imagination, a notion that is offensive in itself.

White people are so imaginative!

Overall, The Black Dossier is a disappointment in almost every way. The playful integration of Victorian fictional characters in the previous volumes is replaced by an exhaustive encyclopedic attempt to integrate nearly all fiction into one world. The sex doesn’t reach the erotic excesses of Lost Girls, but retains many of the philosophical problems associated with pornography. The meditations on the freedom of the mind are less compelling and less complex than Moore’s early ruminations on anarchy in V for Vendetta or his vision of an unavoidably repressive utopia in the closing issues of Miracleman. Moore’s engagement with feminism and sexual freedom has been evident over the course of his illustrious career, but his most recent efforts to depict and promote a kind of utopian alternative to our vexed reality in Promethea, Lost Girls, and Black Dossier is both less entertaining and less insightful than his previous work, all of which contained fewer sex scenes.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. From Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 2488-2501.

Carter, Angela. Nights At The Circus. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Churchill, Caryl. Cloud 9. New York: Routledge, 1979, 1984

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978.

Gaiman, Neil. Sandman: A Game Of You. New York: D. C. Comics, 1991-1992.

Morrison, Grant. The Invisibles, Vol. 1, #¹s 13-16. New York: D.C. Comics,
1995

Moore, Alan and Kevin O¹Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. Wildstorm/America’s Best Comics, 2007.

Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. New York: Vintage, 1987.

___. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 1928.

___. A Room of One’s Own. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 1929.

Between Feminism and the Underground

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Samantha Meier

From “Breaking Out,” the central story of It Ain’t Me Babe Comix.
Image courtesy of lambiek.net.

In explaining the rise of Wimmen’s Comix, Terre Richards, one of the founding mothers of the anthology, reasoned in a 1979 interview with Cultural Correspondence, “As a result of the Women’s Movement, there was a growing awareness of women in all areas of the arts as well as a newly developing market for women’s work in publishing, so the time was right for an all-woman’s comic.” But when the number of women in mainstream comics would shrink to just two in 1974, what was it about 1972 that made the time right for an all-women’s comic anthology?

Financially at least, the answer is fairly obvious: Wimmen’s Comix owes its existence to It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, the first American all-women comics anthology, published in 1970 by the underground comix press Last Gasp. It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, in turn, owes its existence to Trina Robbins, and to It Ain’t Me Babe, a short-lived but influential feminist newspaper where Robbins worked.

When it comes to Wimmen’s Comix relationship with the “Women’s Movement,” though, the answer is less straightforward. To extricate any creative work from its sociopolitical context is laborious; the belief that it can be done at all is often laboring under a delusion. Scholars like Paul Lopes have argued that early women’s comix represent a “feminist intervention” into the misogynist world of underground comix, a framing which suggests that women were “outsiders” to the counterculture from which comix emerged, in addition to misunderstanding the varied motivations of women underground cartoonists. In fact, though there were only a handful of women actively creating comix before Wimmen’s Comix, many more were involved in “the underground” as a whole. The delayed acknowledgement of women’s existence in the underground comix movement in the early ‘70s mirrors the experience of women in the counterculture more broadly. In each case, women were involved in some way for a number of years before their presence and participation was fully recognized. In each case, women’s cultural separatism contributed to this process of recognition, though it was and remains a hotly contested feminist strategy.

The story of early women’s comix, like the story of underground comix, begins with newspapers. In the 1960s, as the underground press became a space for political radicals to air their grievances and rally support in a way that was purportedly open and democratic, certain voices were still being excluded from the discussion. As John McMillian notes in Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, experiences with sexism in the underground press were key turning points for many early feminists. Feminist organizations began starting their own papers in the late ‘60s, a few years after the “birth” of the underground press in 1965. The founding of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966 and the subsequent establishment of feminist groups in at least 40 cities between 1968 and 1969 led to the creation of at least five feminist publications by 1968. These included a national newsletter, The Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and NOW’s own first regular periodical, as Lauren Kessler details in The Dissident Press: Alternative Journalism in American History. Feminist newspapers and newsletters blossomed throughout the 1970s; just in 1970, 73 new feminist publications appeared, about a quarter of them affiliated with NOW chapters. It Ain’t Me Babe, first published by the Berkeley Women’s Liberation group in 1970, is considered to be the first real feminist newspaper.

Feminist papers showcased an array of political attitudes and beliefs, reflecting the diversity of thought of the nascent movement. Like New Left papers, about two-thirds of feminist papers were collective endeavors. According to Kessler, “none was headed by a male editor.” The woman’s-only or separatist quality of these papers was seen as a way to lend women the voice they had been denied in the New Left papers. Feminist papers retained the lack of editorial hierarchy and communal production of papers in the New Left, as well as their emphasis on equal access for all viewpoints, again with the same bent towards open, democratic circulation of ideas.Further, feminist newspapers often contained highly personal journalism or anecdotes as part of its project of “the personal is political” articulated by feminist writer Carol Hanisch. The feminist press helped the nascent movement communicate within itself, and to the outside world, and provided a knowledge-basis for the budding Women’s Movement. Women’s-only or feminist papers were often the only place for radical feminist thoughts to be expressed, as they were largely ignored or mocked in the broader press.

Through papers like It Ain’t Me Babe, women’s separatism emerged as a strong political stance for radical feminists, although it was not advocated by all, as feminist scholar Alice Echols notes. Separatism was generally seen as a “strategy for achieving social change, rather than as an end in itself.” When women’s voices were seen to be suppressed or silenced in the counterculture, radical feminists posited that one way to be heard as women was to create women’s-only spaces for free expression, until feminist ideologies became more pervasive. The fifth issue of It Ain’t Me Babe tackles this question head on in an editorial titled “Women … Towards a New Culture.”

We see the development of women’s culture as an essential part of the liberation struggle. The creation of a cultural ideology is a form of work; we have accepted male products in this area for too long … The cultures which surround us today in America, whose tenets we have internalized, have all been created by men. It is extremely oppressive for us to function in a culture where ideals are male oriented and definitions are male controlled. Our alternative is clear; we must develop a new culture, new images of ourselves and of the forces surrounding us. Yet the creation of a women’s culture must in no way be separated from the political struggles of women for liberation… Our culture cannot be the carving of an enclave in which we can bear the status quo more easily – rather it must crystallize the dreams that will strengthen our rebellion.

Thanks to Trina Robbins, the previous issue of It Ain’t Me Babe contains an attempt to create one such cultural project, in the form of a small note from the paper’s staff: a call for women cartoonists to work on a special comic book issue.

Image courtesy of Schlesinger Library.

In 1970, Trina Robbins moved to San Francisco to join in the comix revolution. Once there, she quickly learned that the mecca of underground comix was a boy’s mecca, one which she perceived as hostile to her and other female underground cartoonists. Early comix artists Lee Marrs, Trina Robbins, and Barbara ‘Willy’ Mendes have noted that it was initially quite difficult for the very first women to break into the ‘old boy’s club’ of underground comix, and that men initially would not accept women’s work into their anthologies, as Robbins notes in Pretty in Ink.

Discouraged, and without work, Trina joined the staff of It Ain’t Me Babe, drawing what she called “extremely unsubtle propaganda” for its covers, as well as a regular strip about the liberation of her character Belinda Berkeley.

Image courtesy of Schlesinger Library.

Inspired to stand up to male gate-keepers of underground comix, Robbins soon set out to create a comic book drawn and written entirely by women. Women underground cartoonists were scarce at the time, but she knew a few from other work in the underground. Nancy Kalish, for example, drew the strip Gentle’s Tripout (under the name ‘Panzika’) for EVO as early as 1965. Robbins, Nancy Kalish, and Barbara ‘Willy’ Mendes were featured in the first issue of Gothic Blimp Works in 1969, towards the very beginning of the underground comix movement. With the support of the It Ain’t Me Babe staff, Robbins put together a comic book entirely written, drawn, inked, and colored by women, the first comic book in the nation made that way. Because so few women were involved in the underground scene, experienced contributors were hard to come by. Trina and her fellow cartoonist Willy Mendes (short for Barbara) did most of the inking for the book, as they were the only ones who knew how. The other contributors were an eclectic bunch: Lisa Lyon drew cartoons for a socialist newspaper, Meredith Kurtzman was the daughter of Harvey Kurtzman of Mad Magazine fame, and Michele Brand simply knew how to draw, according to Robbins.

Once Robbins had collected the artwork, she called up Ron Turner, whom she had heard was interested in a “women’s liberation comic.” It Ain’t Me Babe Comix was quickly picked up and put into print by Last Gasp Eco Funnies, which paid Robbins $1,000, a huge chunk of money for a struggling would-be artist in 1970. The stories within the comics make several explicit references to ‘women’s liberation,’ the subtitle of the comic. Robbins described the central story in the book, called “Breaking Out” as a “comic strip, again written collectively, in which Juliet Jones, Daisy Duck, Supergirl, and other characters rebel against their sexist boyfriends. Just as women all over America were doing at the time, they form a consciousness-raising group.”

By 1972, It Ain’t Me Babe Comix had sold well enough to go into a second printing, prompting Turner to ask his employees Patricia ‘Patty’ Moodian and Terre Richards to advertise the fact that he wanted to print another women’s liberation comic. Moodian then called the first meeting of the group of artists who would produce the first issue of Wimmen’s Comix. Unmoored from It Ain’t Me Babe Comix’s ties to the feminist press, Wimmen’s Comix maintained its non-hierarchical collective production structure — the anthology employed a rotating editorship, which later became a rotating double editorship — but was no longer as closely associated with the feminist movement. As Richards correctly notes, the Women’s Movement helped birth Wimmen’s, as more and more women (and men) clamored to see women’s artistic work in all fields, including comix. But In fact, as founding mother Lee Marrs told Cultural Correspondence, the relationship between the feminist movement and Wimmen’s Comix was contentious at best.

One reason the women’s comic collective did not hold together in a commercial sense, to be able to do more books than just the Wimmen’s Comix that some of us could hack together, and that we didn’t get better distribution, was that the women’s movement in the beginning didn’t have any sense of humor in itself, which is sad but typical… We got totally rejected by the women’s movement for the most part.

Over the next 20 years, the relationship between Wimmen’s Comix and the feminist movement would only get more fraught, as women’s cultural separatism slowly fell out of favor, and a new generation of artists eager to play on the same field as men began to grace the anthology’s pages. The feminist roots of Wimmen‘s referenced by Paul Lopes and others cannot and should not be ignored, but they should be examined in their full complexity rather than posited as an ideologically uniform intervention. As feminist art critic Lucy Lippard writes about feminist art in the 1970s more generally, “It is useless to try to pin down a specific formal contribution made by feminism because feminist and/or women’s art is neither a style nor a movement, much as this may distress those who would like to see it safely ensconced in the categories and chronology of the past.”

How Ariel Became Disney’s Bad Woman: A Look at Disney’s Frozen and The Little Mermaid

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Sarah Shoker

Tongue in cheek, a few of my friends will wonder aloud how I can be so very obsessed with Disney if I’m a feminist. Wink, nudge.

Though these jokes are, well, jokes, they hint at common cultural understandings of Disney’s relationship to women and feminism. Comments that I’ve heard imply that being a feminist can, somehow, be quantitatively determined by one’s hobbies and likes and, once graphed on some X-Y axis or other, that feminism is negatively correlated with an appreciation for Disney movies. Similarly, some Disney princesses are seen as more or less feminist by virtue of their hobbies. Merida from Brave is a feminist because she doesn’t care for marriage and likes archery, but Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, isn’t a feminist icon because, well, she obsesses/lusts/romances over a prince and surrenders her voice in an attempt to win him over. However, this reading of Ariel is too easy, too clear, an analysis that lacks the messiness that comes hand-in-hand with desire and obsession.

Strangely, however, instead of rigorous feminists accusing Disney of this mish-mash of oppression, the protests against Disney show up on my Facebook feed from casual allies, non-feminist men, brogressives, and teenagers engaged in various sub-cultures. Protesting Disney is no longer the foray of feminists who, in any case, have been long-time fans of complicating narratives, a tradition in which I am happily cemented. Just as male comic book nerds protest the antiquated gender roles in Twilight, so too have these groups accused Disney of not following some make-believe feminist handbook. I’m left hearing sarcastic comments or well-meaning comments, both annoying, that caricaturize the meaning of strength and reconstitute feminism as a rigid set of rules instead of an analytical category with emancipatory possibilities. What of Virigina Woolf, who declared that “a feminist is any woman who is honest about her life?”

I’m not interested in rescuing Disney from its errors—of which there are many—but I am interested in complicating dominant narratives surrounding Disney heroines and how our very rejection of romance, a rejection based on a belief that Strong Women just don’t do this and that and they especially don’t obsess over boys, is a form of reifying traditional gender norms. Not only does rejecting infatuation create social problems (goodbye, teenage girls, your problems matter no more), but the existence of uncontroversial female characters who don’t make mistakes, experiment with love, and aren’t obnoxiously demanding risks veering into Mary Sue territory. In Frozen, Disney avoids controversy by constructing a plot where good people react to situations beyond their control. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is an active participant in her own plot; she makes mistakes that she then tries to fix, or makes decisions that the audience finds disagreeable but that she defiantly claims for herself. In fact, Ariel’s entire character is marked by defiance and resistance, making her a more compelling but polarizing character.

I enjoyed Frozen, as I was instructed to enjoy the film—I couldn’t help but feel like the film was green-lit with the approval of a focus group consisting entirely of my clones. But as I watched the film, I shifted uneasily in my seat because, though Disney had created a story focusing on sisterly love instead of the usual male-female romance, the plot was underdeveloped because the main character, Anna, was written as a parent-approved role model. The desire to avoid the criticisms that have usually stalked Disney princesses suffocated Frozen like a pageant parent who scrubs her child clean and only allows her to perform in ways approved by the judge. The result is a delightful movie, a movie that we expect. But is creating a clean-cut and uncontroversial character a sign of progress?

Disney’s Frozen was a film that was self-aware of its legacy, as illustrated by the song “Love is an Open Door,” where Anna falls in love and becomes engaged to Prince Hans in the course of a 3 minute song-montage on the night of her sister’s coronation. Like many contemporary young adult films and books, an inevitable love triangle occurs once Anna leaves the castle in search for her sister and befriends Kristoff. He asks her, in absolute disbelief, how she could become engaged after knowing someone for one day. (And he also insists that all men pick their noses and eat their boogers, a statement which I refuse to empirically verify.) Anna retorts that it’s true love, duh. Disney engages in some fun inter-textual analysis where it pokes at its own films. Historically, their films have featured heroines that have hopscotched into a life of happily-ever-after once the obligatory two-second kiss has been bestowed by a prince whose name the audience doesn’t even know.

Instead of focusing on the love triangle, however, Frozen is a story about sisterly love, though still featuring the theme of sacrifice commonly found within Disney. Its strength lies in its characters grappling with notions of responsibility and learning what love truly means. However, despite its excellent passing of the Bechdel test, Frozen has a number of problems with plot. Here I grated my teeth. Because I was supposed to fall in love with Frozen and I kind of did—finally, a Disney film that could meet my feminist credentials. Except, as a wannabe storyteller, I could see the problems caused by trying to keep Anna controversy-free and within the box of “appropriate role model.”

Frozen’s plot seems to advance through convenience instead of character agency. Ariel must choose between her obsession and her family, a decision which infuriates casual Disney watchers—how could she choose a boy over her family? How could she give up her voice for a man? But Anna isn’t required to make this decision. Instead of Anna rejecting Hans, admitting that she may have made a mistake, Hans is conveniently revealed to be a Bad Guy who used Anna as a way of becoming king. This plot-twist is also familiar, though Disney seems to have gender-bent the trope. Margaret Atwood once remarked that Victorian love-triangles often featured ailing wives dying conveniently so that the path would be made clear for the heroine and the dark, brooding hero to get married without facing the prospect of actually divorcing, a decision which would remove sympathy from the male lead. Anna’s good-heartedness is solidified when she is omitted from having to make this difficult decision; if Hans had been good and she had broken off the engagement then she becomes too complex, too authoritative, too unsympathetic.

In a sense, Frozen features characters that are the victim of circumstance rather than their own choices, a writing mechanism which shields them from the controversies that have plagued other princesses who have made questionable decisions. Anna discovers the true nature of love by saving her sister, a type of selfless love that is above criticism but a role that girls and women have traditionally been expected to fulfill anyway. Anna’s life is never seriously in danger, of course, (and not because Disney is the creator—the studio has made a number of darker films) and so the question of her sacrifice, plot-wise, is compromised. Discovering the meaning of selfless love is an important part of human development, but a theme that would have been sharply criticized had Anna sacrificed herself for Kristoff instead of Elsa—a claim that I cannot prove empirically, but which I feel confident in asserting upon observing how we treat teenage girls trying to understand their sexuality –poorly. Despite Anna being distinctively cute, Frozen is relatively free of sexual desire minus short bursts of puppy love and infatuation with Hans, which are shown to be a Big Mistake when Hans reveals his duplicitous nature. In the end, Anna faces a choice; be rescued by true love’s kiss (from Kristoff) or sacrifice herself to save Elsa. She chooses the latter.

Disney’s The Little Mermaid is an undeniably darker story, though the original story by Hans Christian Anderson is even more bleak. Whereas Anna and Kristoff share a bumbling and endearing kiss at the end of the film, Ariel spends much of The Little Mermaid lusting after Prince Eric’s body. She wants to be human, wants their legs, to know what it feels like to walk. Eric is a prince, but he’s also a body that is imbued with symbolism—he’s not only Eric, but a representation of everything she wants. She gushes over him, and once she saves Eric from the peril of the sea and returns him to land, pauses to admire him, leaving no question that her crush is based on sexual desire. It’s this sexual desire that makes Ariel a controversial character.

Though Ariel is often condemned for leaving her family for “a boy,” she is, to me, a more interesting character because she made a difficult decision with moral consequences that cannot be waved away with a magic wand. It is precisely Ariel’s aggression, stubbornness, and ability to carve out her own plot by making questionable decisions that leaves a lasting impact. The permanence of her decision makes Ariel’s sacrifice more impactful than Anna’s sacrifice, the latter whose decision we know will have no lasting consequence because love will act as a magical healer and “save the day.” Ariel’s decision to marry Eric, however, isn’t heroic—heroism is selfless, and her desire to marry Eric is tainted by the fact that she’s doing something for herself. In the real world, she might be called selfish or a bitch.

She crushes hard on a human prince, has a hoardish obsession with collecting human artifacts, and eventually exchanges her voice for a pair of human legs so she can pursue Prince Eric and, if he falls in love with her in the requisite time period, will remain human forever. These human legs come at the cost of engaging with Urusula the Sea-Witch—but only after her father, King Triton, discovers her cave of human objects and destroys all that she loves, objects which are the source of her knowledge and curiosity. This tough-love disciplinary approach is for her own good—an argument as novel as the Old Testament when Adam and Eve were tossed out of the Garden because Eve just had to taste the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Ariel becomes Eve, obsessing over artifacts that promise to unfold secrets but with the potential to unbridle her sexuality. Eventually, her decision to give up her voice for a pair of legs is shown to be a mistake, because post-1990 Disney films always comes with the “be yourself” moral message. However, the film is perfectly clear that her father was also mistaken to control her. Some audiences remember the former message, but not the latter.

I am still surprised when people condemn Ariel, especially when her father is the one who believes that her desire for human knowledge is a source of harm and whose destruction of her possessions drives her into the arms of Ursula the Sea Witch, a character who functions as some kind of fat woman quasi-capitalist obsessed with creating unfair contracts in hopes of usurping the monarchy and the “rightful” king—she’s worthy of admiration, really. Ariel is the prototypical Bad Woman, removed from the roster of Acceptable Feminist Heroines (by those who parody feminism?) because she has sacrificed her family for self-fulfillment. We’re condemning Ariel for her disobedience.

In the end, her father realizes that it’s unfair to prevent Ariel from being happy and, with his magical trident, grants her legs. The reconciliation between Ariel and her family mirrors the ending of Bend it Like Beckham, but the latter is situated as a British “girl power” movie because the main character wants to play soccer, a goal that is valued more than romance in the hierarchy of fictitious Approved Feminist Activities. (And because the main character of Bend it Like Beckham is brown, and we’re more comfortable seeing brown daughters rebel against their fathers because our own orientalist inclinations lead us to view their family structures as innately oppressive—but girls rebelling against white men? Well, that just won’t do.)

My conclusion is fairly trite and I don’t mind admitting it; imperfect characters make for compelling stories. Restraining ourselves and making characters that shy away from controversy can actually reaffirm the gendered expectations that we’re trying to avoid. Often, what we do not question, such as selfless love for family, is steeped in normativity. Allow teenage girls the agency and the opportunity to make mistakes, to lust. Stories can do many things, and at the very least we should, on occasion, be challenged. Stories also deserve our criticism, of course, but they deserve levelled, thoughtful, and nuanced criticism that does not unintentionally reproduce a hierarchy of values that only congratulates selflessness and condemns self-fulfillment.

Bureaucrats and Grunts: B.P.R.D. Women

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Craig Fischer

How common are three-dimensional female characters in American superhero comics? I’m spectacularly unqualified to answer that question, since I read very few contemporary superhero comics, but I’m worried that the continued viability of sites like Gingerhaze’s Hawkeye Initiative and Heidi MacDonald’s Brokeback Tumblr means that most comics continue to be sexist junk. One series that I’ve kept up with, however, that doesn’t get enough credit for its cast of active, intelligent females, is B.P.R.D., written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, and currently drawn by a rotating group of artists, including Tyler Crook, James Harren and Laurence Campbell.

B.P.R.D. is a spinoff of Mignola’s Hellboy title, and chronicles the adventures of agents who work for a U.S. government organization that battles occult menaces. (“B.P.R.D.” stands for “Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.”) The agents are a mix of characters with special abilities, like the aquatic Abe Sapien and the ghostly Johann Kraus, and non-superhero grunts just doing their jobs. B.P.R.D.’s premise isn’t innovative, but there’s a lot right about the follow-thru: Arcudi writes terse, realistic dialogue, Mignola and Arcudi’s soap-opera plots deliberately and suspensefully reveal information about their characters and their increasingly bizarre world, and the art, always competent and legible, is sometimes magnificent, as in the three pages by Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon that open B.P.R.D.: Vampire #1 (2013).

Script by Mike Mignola, Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon.
Art by Bá and Moon.

Out of context, these images echo Dario Argento’s approach to horror violence, where tortured and murdered women become an aestheticized misogynist spectacle. But B.P.R.D. is more complicated than that. The bodies drifting downstream have been killed by two ferocious female vampires, who torment a male agent, Simon Anders, throughout three mini-series, 1947 (2009), 1948 (2012) and Vampire. (The female vampires operate like film noir femme fatales: they’re evil and defined by their sexuality, but they’re also powerful and vibrant.) Further, in B.P.R.D. violence against men is just as common as violence against women: the first issue of B.P.R.D.: Monsters (2011), for instance, ends with a money shot of a gutted male torso missing its arms and legs. Most importantly, however, is the fact that Mignola and Arcudi write some of the most compelling female characters in all of comics, and for me that offsets the series’ gender-indiscriminate violence.

Before I discuss these characters, though, I want to be clear that my praise for some of B.P.R.D.’s female characters isn’t an unqualified rave for the series as a whole. I agree with the critical consensus that B.P.R.D. has dipped in quality since the departure of artist Guy Davis in 2011. One example of this critical consensus is the Comic Books Are Burning in Hell podcast on “The Long Death” storyline, where Chris Mautner, Joe McCullough, Matt Seneca and Tucker Stone point out that after two decades as the best superhero-comics line, the Mignolaverse has begun a decline precipitated by the replacement of Davis with less accomplished artists (especially Crook) and overproduction of both the main B.P.R.D. book (now monthly) and various spinoffs (Abe Sapien, Lobster Johnson). At its height, B.P.R.D. was sensational. The run from 2004 to 2010 (essentially the material collected in volumes two through four of the Plague of Frogs hardcovers) is my second-favorite genre comic ever, edged out by my favorite Lee/Kirby Fantastic Fours, but it’s currently not at its best.

Even when it was the best comic book at the shop, however, B.P.R.D. included plots that were occasionally problematic in their treatment of gender issues. You’d expect Liz Sherman, a firestarter who was part of Mignola’s original B.P.R.D. team with Hellboy and Abe Sapien, to be the title’s strongest, most independent female character, but not so: through much of the Plague of Frogs issues, her consciousness is invaded by a Fu-Manchuesque mystic named Memnan Saa, in a grindingly prolonged mind-rape that was handled with more energy and comparatively merciful brevity by Chris Claremont and John Byrne in their X-Men issues. (There’s the queasiness of “mind-rape” itself, and then the fact that it happens mostly to comic-book females: the only example of a male character being mind-raped by an invasive female consciousness is in the aforementioned B.P.R.D.: Vampire series, where Simon Anders is possessed by the spirits of the two vampire sisters.) My ability to identify with Liz, then, and admire her strength and power, was problematized by the way Mignola and Arcudi defined her, over a period of years, as Memnan Saa’s victim.

Further, the recent B.P.R.D. comics have been subtitled Hell on Earth, to show how Mignola, Arcudi and company have moved their fictional universe close to Armageddon. Chicago is infested by monsters, Houston is destroyed by a massive volcano, and the mantra for the Hell on Earth publicity is Mignola’s pitch that he and his collaborators are “breaking stuff we can’t ever fix.” Another troubled locale is California’s Salton Sea, where a giant creature stood immobile for a year, exhaling gases that changed humans into monsters, before she started laying eggs:

From B.P.R.D. #105 (HELL ON EARTH: A COLD DAY IN HELL, 2013).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Peter Snejbjerg.

In recent issues of B.P.R.D., both Abe Sapien and the precog teenager Fenix have traveled, separately, to the Salton Sea, where they encountered religious cults sprung up around the eggs. This monster/egg plot remains unresolved, though I’m worried that it will become an expression of what Barbara Creed calls the monstrous-feminine. Writing in the psychoanalytic theoretical tradition, Creed argues that numerous movie monsters—Samantha Eggar and her throbbing external wombs in David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), the egg-laying homicidal extraterrestrial in Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)—express a deep-seated patriarchal horror of female biology: giving birth is disgusting, women are disgusting because they give birth, and the Salton Sea monster might be another oblique metaphor for male revulsion towards female bodies and reproduction. I actually like body horror, and The Brood, and Aliens, but I hope Mignola and Arcudi take their egg-laying plot in a less predictable and sexist direction.

One more caveat: virtually no female creators have worked on Mignolaverse titles. The covers for the two-issue Pickens County Horror arc (2012) were drawn by Becky Cloonan, and one variant cover for The Dead Remembered (2011) was by Jo Chen, and that’s it. Three covers. (If I’m wrong about this, please correct me in the comments.) This isn’t an unusual situation in superhero / “mainstream” comics, but it is a shame, and I’d love to see Mignola and editor Scott Allie recruit talents like Colleen Doran and Pia Guerra (or maybe Renée French?) to contribute to the Mignolaverse.

Despite my misgivings about some of the gender politics in B.P.R.D., I still want to compliment Mignola, Arcudi and Davis for their portrayal of Dr. Kate Corrigan, the leader of the B.P.R.D. since Hellboy quit the organization. Based in appearance on Mignola’s wife, Corrigan isn’t a firestarter like Liz Sherman, though her achievements (before joining the B.P.R.D., she was a tenured professor at New York University and an author of over a dozen books on the occult) seem superhuman. Despite her credentials, Dr. Corrigan’s introduction into the Hellboy world was inauspicious. In The Wolves of St. August (1994), she travels with Hellboy to a small Balkan village whose inhabitants have been murdered by werewolves; defined as a bookworm (“I know about this stuff, but…it’s different when you read about it”), she doesn’t do much except dump exposition, fall through an old castle floor, and watch as Hellboy beats up a badass werewolf. She reprises her spectator role in 1997’s Almost Colossus, as she’s taken captive by a homunculus (brother to Roger, another golem who later joins the B.P.R.D.) and saved once again by Hellboy.

From HELLBOY: ALMOST COLOSSUS #2 (1997), Story and art by Mike Mignola

Corrigan is also a bit player in 2001’s Conqueror Worm, though she is enough of Hellboy’s confidant to support his decision to quit the B.P.R.D. In 2002, B.P.R.D. became its own title, and Hellboy’s absence allowed Corrigan and other supporting members to step into starring roles, as Corrigan did in my all-time favorite B.P.R.D. story, The Universal Machine (2006). Corrigan is kidnapped again, this time by the Marquis Adoet de Fabre, an ageless collector of occult memorabilia and owner of a rare book Kate and the B.P.R.D. need.

The cover for the final issue of THE UNIVERSAL MACHINE mini-series (2006). Cover by Mike Mignola.

In Universal Machine, Corrigan’s intelligence is treated as more than just ineffectual window-dressing, and she saves herself through her knowledge of history and through decisive action. (I’m being oblique because I don’t want to spoil the story.)

In the Mignolaverse, time passes at the same rate as in our own world. Many first-generation characters, like Hellboy, Liz Sherman, Abe Sapien and Kate Corrigan, are now in their 50s. Concurrently, Mignola and Arcudi juggle plots over extended periods of time, playing a “long game” that Chris Mautner (in the Comic Books are Burning podcast) compares to the deliberate pacing of Jaime Hernandez’s decades-long Locas serial. This is true of Corrigan’s gradual ascent into the B.P.R.D. hierarchy; she entered the series as a freelance consultant to the B.P.R.D., and over years of both story time and real time became the director of field operations. With the advent of Hell on Earth, Corrigan is now the leader and premiere strategist for the organization, as well as the liaison between the B.P.R.D. and more conventionally bureaucratic organizations like the United Nations. Sometimes Corrigan’s new job is played for laughs, as in this Guy Davis-drawn scene where Kate tries to dodge a U.N. functionary:

From B.P.R.D.: HELL ON EARTH: NEW WORLD #2 (2010).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Guy Davis.

More commonly, though, Corrigan suffers under the enormity of her responsibilities. Her dedication to the B.P.R.D. nixes any chance of a romantic relationship with German police officer Bruno Karhu, and she weeps over the decisions she makes that sacrifice the lives of field agents. Because I’ve been reading about Kate Corrigan for almost two decades now, I feel like I know her, and I sympathize with her.

Other readers might not find Kate Corrigan as interesting a figure, but part of her appeal to me is in how she revises the hero’s journey. My wife Kathy Parham is a fan of the Battlestar Galactica TV show (the 2004-2009 reboot), and when I told Kathy that I was writing about a Hellboy cast member who was a middle-aged woman and a leader without superpowers, she immediately compared Corrigan to Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), the Galactica character drafted as the President of Earth’s survivors. Kathy also directed me to an insightful LiveJournal posting about Roslin, where Galactica fan “larsfarm77” explains one element of Roslin’s attraction for female viewers:

I’ve watched a lot of science fiction. I can honestly say that I’ve never, ever, seen the classic hero arc played out for a woman, much less a mature one. How many times have we heard “it’s a coming of age story,” wherein [Luke, Harry, Frodo, Neo, Jake…] realize that they are so much more, that they have a destiny. Aided by his mentor [Obi-wan, Dumbledore, Gandalf, Morpheus, Grace…], he learns and grows, only to truly accept his role with the mentor’s death. And the woman’s role in all this: most often girlfriend, loving supporter of “the one.”

“Larsfarm77” then mentions that this aspiring hero/mentor pattern plays out in Galactica between two women (Roslin and religious visionary Elosha), a narrative trajectory that was “a long time coming.” Reading these words, I realized that I admire Corrigan for the same reasons–she’s an intelligent, mature woman who’s grown from being Hellboy’s helpless sidekick to the person most responsible for saving the human race–and I’m grateful to Mignola and Arcudi for writing her as a strong hero.

I suppose identification is easier where similarities exist between characters and readers. I like Kate Corrigan because she’s a middle-aged academic, just like me, but it’s possible to overstate the importance of these similarities. Storytellers can make me empathize with all kinds of different humans and creatures, and shift my identificatory attention between and among characters with frightening ease. (As a teenager, two works prompted me to identify across gender and other ideological boundaries: Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics [1965], which put me in the mind-sets of dinosaurs, mollusks, and colors, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960], which effortlessly steered me to connect with both Janet Leigh’s petty larcenist and her murderer.) It’s identificatory fluidity and increased empathy that we want to encourage in readers of formulaic, sexist culture (e.g. superhero comics and Hollywood blockbusters, which are increasingly the same thing), and I like how B.P.R.D. sticks to the narrative/cultural formula of the mentored hero’s journey while abandoning much of the sexism. Any comic that encourages superhero fans, most of whom are male, to identify with an adult, normal-looking, smart, woman like Kate Corrigan is a comic I’m glad to read.

Recently, Mignola and Arcudi have introduced other, non-superpowered females into B.P.R.D., and snapped them into trajectories designed to grow them into central characters, just as Corrigan evolved from a victim to a leader. One such character is Carla Giarocco, introduced into the comic in 2011 through both a normal walk-on and an ominous premonition. We first see Giarocco in Hell on Earth: New World, as a field agent who phones Corrigan and inadvertently reveals to Kate that Abe Sapien has gone AWOL into the Canadian woods. Among the non-superheroes now prominent in B.P.R.D., including agents Gervesh, Tian and Vaughn (all of whose histories are nicely summarized in an essay by Mark Tweedale), Giarocco has been given the most backstory. In a black-and-white freebee distributed at the 2010 Emerald City Comicon, she reveals to a Seattle cop that she grew up in Rochester, New York, and is married with a three-year-old son.

From B.P.R.D.: HELL ON EARTH: SEATTLE (2011).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Guy Davis.

Giarocco also seems the toughest of the new crop of agents: she survives a fight against a blood-crazed were-jaguar (!) that eviscerates almost an entire BPRD battalion (see The Long Death arc, 2012), and she teams up with Russian director of occult operations Iosif Nichayko on a dangerous mission (see A Cold Day in Hell). In fact, the only thing poised to slow down Giarocco is a tragic, predestined fate. After Liz Sherman and the B.P.R.D. kill Memnan Saa, but before Giarocco enters the series, Saa’s spirit returns from the dead to show Liz a future world devastated by the Ogdru Hem, the Lovecraftian overlords of Mignola’s world, and their frog-like minions. Here’s Liz wandering around in Saa’s vision of catastrophe:

From B.P.R.D.: KING OF FEAR #4 (2010).
Script by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, art by Guy Davis.

Carla Giarocco’s skeleton appears in B.P.R.D. before the live Giarocco does. We might try to write off this vision as a lie fabricated by Saa to punish Liz, but how do we explain the “Giarocco” nametag if neither of them know who Carla Giarocco is? Further, the zoom-in of the last panel is clearly for our benefit rather that Liz’s: we’re supposed to notice her name, and then fret as Giarocco joins the B.P.R.D. This reads as Mignola and Arcudi’s homage to other superhero teams with stories staged in the future tense–think of the “imaginary” Adult Legion of Superhero stories, or the X-Men’s Days of Future Past–and doesn’t auger well for Giarocco’s long-game future in the series.

Although she’s less important than Giarocco, my favorite of the Mignolaverse’s new female characters is Ashley Strode, who’s appeared in three B.P.R.D. comics, War on Frogs #3 (2009) and the Hell on Earth: Exorcism arc (2012). The four-issue War on Frogs series chronicles the day-to-day dangers and horrors B.P.R.D. agents experience as they murder the ambulatory frog-monsters who serve the Ogdru Hem. (War on Frogs isn’t a simple-minded action comic: Mignola and Arcudi establish in the fourth issue that the frogs have feelings and souls, and the B.P.R.D.’s purging of frog populations is a kind of genocide rather than just a herd-thinning.) In War on Frogs #3, Ashley Strode is a young agent reminiscing about how she’s tried to be friendly with Liz Sherman, especially during a mission to a supposedly abandoned frog site. Although much of the narrative is a flashback from Strode’s memory, our emotional center is Liz: we feel Liz’s numb horror as she repeatedly ignites and decimates nests of frogs, and the issue ends with images from Liz’s point-of-view, as we see her isolation (a symptom of which is her aloofness toward Strode) when her consciousness is taken over by Memnan Saa. In this story, Strode is less a fleshed-out character than a pretext for human-frog violence and an exploration of the consequences of Liz’s mind-rape.

We learn more about Strode in Exorcism, a two-issue tale written and drawn by Cameron Stewart, best known for his Eisner Award winning webcomic/graphic novel Sin Titulo. (Mignolaverse editor Scott Allie, presumably in consultation with Mignola and long-term collaborators like Arcudi, sometimes give characters to specific artists: stories starring the B.P.R.D. vampire agent Simon Anders are now reserved for Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon, and Ashley Strode for Cameron Stewart.) Initially in Exorcism, Strode freezes when confronted with a possessed young boy, and learns how to handle occult situations only after she battles a demon on the “spiritual plane” alongside a legendary Catholic exorcist. Stewart draws Strode as young, perky and cute–not to Lolita-ize her, but to emphasize her status as a B.P.R.D. greenhorn. By the end of the story, Strode is contemplative in the face of the apocalypse, yet confident enough to return and confront the devil inside the little boy.

From B.P.R.D.: HELL ON EARTH: EXORCISM #2 (2012).
Script by Mike Mignola and Cameron Stewart, art by Stewart.

I don’t know when Cameron Stewart will do another Ashley Strode story. In a Twitter thread from October 2013, Stewart said that he would no longer draw “sketches/commissions of characters that aren’t my own” at comicons, and indicated that this would keep him from drawing Strode. Maybe Stewart is moving in a more personal, creator-owned direction, and won’t return to B.P.R.D. I’d still like to read stories where Ashley Strode advances and matures as Kate Corrigan did.

Earlier, I typed the word “were-jaguar” and then flinched as I wondered what Domingos or Suat might think of the wholesale superhero-horror-genre-wallow of B.P.R.D. My comparison of Laura Roslin with Kate Corrigan might also put some readers off; perhaps the problem isn’t the absence of women characters in the aspiring hero/mentor formula, but the endless repetition of the formula itself. I’m not particularly interested in defending my pleasure in B.P.R.D., but maybe even people who hate superheroes can share my relief that the Mignolaverse has comparatively strong female characters rather than objectified toys and damsels in distress?

Why Care About Women Comics Critics, Anyway?

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Last week, Heidi MacDonald wrote a lengthy post discussing the lack of women in The Comics Journal (especially the print version). R.Fiore, long-time Comics Journal writer, responded as follows:

The question I have is this. Suppose the Comics Journal website finds that it is getting enough content from a predominantly male pool of writers to satisfy its needs. What is the problem with that? I pose this strictly as a question. Commentators here seem to be assuming that the problem is self-evident, but it doesn’t seem quite so obvious to me.

I posted this in reply:

There are a number of reasons to try to get more women contributors, it seems like. First, and again, TCJ is still (as Heidi suggests) an important touchstone for comics criticism and for canon formation. When TCJ prints a massive article about Crumb’s lawyers rather than having anything at all about female cartoonists, it sends a message about what’s important. That message can matter (see Annie Murphy’s piece about how discouraging as a cartoonist she found tcj’s approach to female cartoonists.)

Perhaps more importantly, TCJ’s mission is to cover art comics. Failing to engage with female critics and female cartoonists is a failure of that mission. TCJ should do better in this regard (especially the print edition) because otherwise they are failing by their own standards.

Finally, the world remaining what it is, men and women are not treated equally, which means that women have experiences and perspectives which are different from men. Those perspectives are valuable in lots of ways. Paying attention to women can involve being more thoughtful about the role of gender in the work of all cartoonists; it can mean seeing women creators as more central and so having a different canon (say, focusing on the history of children’s book cartooning rather than on EC; or thinking about shoujo rather than superhero comics). Not that all women share common interests or anything, anymore than all men do (Qiana Whitted who writes for HU is very interested in EC as just one example.) But, gender and genre share a common root and have a certain amount to do with each other, and so including women will tend to have an effect on content, and help make tcj (esp. the print version) feel less like a guy’s locker room filled with aging hippies who can’t talk about anything other than Crumb.

In some ways the fact that you have to ask the question is symptomatic of the problem, maybe? This is feminism 101 stuff. Discussions of canon and inclusion are really old hat in literature and visual art. The fact that comics doesn’t get it makes comics look really backwards and staid and a more than a little ridiculous. If you care about comics being taken seriously as an art form (which is TCJ’s mission) then including women as writers and pieces about women is a no-brainer. Are comics art, or are they a nostalgic pastime for male hobbyists? If you want the answer to be the first of those, you need to include women. (And just to be clear, I take this as what Frank is saying in this piece, which is very much to his credit.)

Maybe just to expand a little bit…first, I should note that both Tim Hodler (tcj.com’s co-editor) and Frank Santoro (who writes the post where R. Fiore commented) are on the same page as me here in terms of thinking that more women contributors are important. Fiore’s arguments are Fiore’s and not (thankfully) the position of tcj.com.

Second, when I say that engaging with women as writers, cartoonists and readers is central to TCJ’s mission of seeing comics as art, what I mean is that, both academically and popularly, gender is, and has been for years, an important lens through which people judge and think about art. For an increasing number of audiences in an increasing number of venues, having something intelligent to say to half the population matters in terms of evaluating aesthetics. So when TCJ seems unable or unwilling to include women in the conversation, that suggests it, and comics, is an unserious, irrelevant backwater, rather than an art form that matters.It makes comics look more like video games than like visual art or literature.

To talk about HU, one of the things I’ve focused on consistently and deliberately is getting women to write here. I wouldn’t say this is altruistic, exactly; after all, HU doesn’t pay, and there are plenty of other places women comics critics can write if they’d like to, whether on tumblr or their own blogs or group sites like Manga Bookshelf. So when women (or men) write at HU, I’m pretty clear that they’re doing me a favor, not the other way around.

So the reason to get women to write on HU is not to promote women. Rather, the reason to get women on the site is, first of all, because there are lots of women who have interesting things to say about comics and art, and so it benefits the site to have them here. And, second of all, because I want a website and a community which includes different perspectives, including the perspectives of that half of the population which isn’t male.

For the print TCJ editor Gary Groth, this isn’t something to worry about. Gary (quoted by Heidi) says that he is “gender-blind when it comes to good writing. And to subject matter.” For Gary, there are, or should be, no consequential differences between men and women. This is a fairly popular position (and not just among men.) Equality is a worthy goal,and it’s easy (not necessary or even always logical, but easy) to go from an argument of equality to an argument of sameness. It’s tempting to say, well, we want men and women to be treated equally; therefore, the way to do that is to assume that they are in fact the same in every way that matters.

I don’t find this convincing, though. In her recent book Excluded, Julia Serano, who is a trans woman, and a biologist, argues that gender is a complex trait. What she means by this is that how people experience gender and sexuality — the things that make me a heterosexual white guy who doesn’t watch sports — are determined not by nature (the fact that I have a penis) or by nurture (the fact that my dad was our main caregiver) but by a combination of factors which aren’t easily predictable or reproducible.

Seeing gender as a complex trait is a way to avoid gender essentialism; since everyone’s experience of gender is individual, there’s no one trait that you can point to and say, women are (or should be) like that, or men are (or should be) like that. But it’s also a way to avoid what might be called an essentialism of absence; the insistence that gender makes (or should make) no difference at all. It’s true that neither biology nor culture are determinative. But it’s also true that both biology and culture matter. Individuality is a sign of complexity, not a sign that our bodies and our social milieu have no effect on us. And if, say, you’re mainstream comics, and 90% of your audience is male, or if you’re the print TCJ and Heidi has to go through with a magnifying glass to find evidence that women exist, that’s not a fluke or an accident. It’s not a result of being gender blind. On the contrary, it’s a gendered fact which has something important to do with the way you interact with people who are, for a complex of social and biological reasons, women.

Along those lines, I would say that the fact that it has been somewhat difficult to get women contributors here is an important indication that the effort to recruit them is actually important and worthwhile. As I said before, there are no lack of women critics writing all over the web. Yet, despite an active effort on my part, HU still skews quite male.

I don’t think it’s a mystery as to why that is. I’m a guy, and I got into comics criticism through writing at TCJ, so much of my initial audience and much of my social network for writing comics criticism skewed male. In addition, my interests and background are focused on male genre product. I grew up with superhero comics, and while I don’t exactly follow them anymore, coverage on this site still I think points in that direction to some degree. In addition, I have a quite confrontational and polemical writing style, and so does a fair amount of writing on the site. There are many women who are perfectly comfortable with that approach to blogging — certainly more than have any interest in superhero comics, if the demographic data are correct. But, still, I think my particular pugnacity is coded male in a lot of ways.

So the site has more male writers than female ones for a lot of reasons, and if I wanted I could just go with that and we’d have a boy’s club with, presumably, even more writing on Watchmen than we have already. And I like Watchmen (that’s why we have so much writing on it!) But over the long haul (or even over the short haul) I think that would get pretty boring. I want to have folks contribute who are interested in things I”m not, as well as in things I am. I want to have different perspectives, not people telling me all the time what I want to hear. I want, in short, to have people on the site write about race in cosplay even though — or rather especially because — I don’t know a ton about and certainly don’t participate in cosplay. I want to hear Caro talk about why Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s take on female authenticity and the body is important, even though I have little interest in Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and never thought at all about the relation of the body to authenticity. I want to have folks write about the history of yaoi and bishonen in Japan, even if I don’t read a ton of yaoi. And obviously, men could write about all those things. But the fact is that they’re all gendered topics, that they’re all presented from a specifically female perspective, and that they all appeared on the site because women wrote about them.

To put it another way, deliberately reaching out to women writers is not in opposition to, in Gary’s words, “good writing”. Rather, having women writers, in my view, is central to making the site worthwhile, challenging, and relevant — and when I fail to do that, the site is less worthwhile, challenging and relevant than it should be. I don’t want my own limited relationship to biology and culture to be the be all and end all of what the site can be about, because that’s stifling. It’s not a matter of saying, well, I’m a feminist, so HU needs to represent women. Rather, it’s a matter of believing in the feminist proposition that women have valuable things to say.

Erica Friedman had this comic inside her high school locker because the woman on the front reminded her of a fan-fic character she wrote. Erica’s essay about it is here.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: feminism