Review: Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation by Carolyn Cocca

[helloladies]

Today we welcome Jenny from the delightful book blog & podcast Reading the End to Lady Business to discuss Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation by Carolyn Cocca. *\o/*

As a critical, feminist fan of (American) football and (mostly Marvel) comics, I fairly often hear the argument that people don’t come to football and comics for politics, they come to football and comics for fun. Social justice warriors and PC police are taking a thing that’s supposed to be fun, this argument goes, and making it grim and serious by getting politics all over it.

This is kind of like saying you don’t want to eat yogurt because you don’t like the idea of having bacteria in your body. The bacteria’s in there already, team. What you mean is that you don’t want these bacteria. You don’t want these politics, the ones that do not actively work to conceal systems of oppression in which you and your fun thing are complicit. Because—and perhaps you should be sitting down to receive this news—adherence to a perceived political norm is also political.



This Angry Feminism Minute™ is brought to you by Carolyn Cocca’s Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation, out this year from Bloomsbury Academic. It’s an examination of the evolution of female superhero characters from the 1940s onward, with each chapter dedicated to the heroine(s) of a particular moment: Wonder Woman, Batgirl, the women of X-Men, Princess Leia and the other Star Wars ladies, Buffy Summers, and Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan. Cocca situates each of them in the time and culture of their creation and explores how different eras of writers have portrayed their capacity for heroism. A lot of it’s about politics.

No, I’m only joking: All of it is about politics. Because even when the authors are specifically not trying to be political, they’re still swimming in their particular era’s soup of gender norms, world events, and economic pressures. (Economics are political too, pass it on.) At her creation, for example, Wonder Woman espoused the values of peace, love, and justice, and she and her friends fought against racist caricatures of Axis powers like the Italians and the Japanese. By contrast, Cocca describes her portrayal in the 1950s like this:

[Marvel writer Robert Kanigher] thought that the Amazons were lesbians and wanted to write "a real love story with real people." Steve Trevor’s marriage proposals to Diana became constant, and she left the military to work for a romance column and as a stunt woman in Hollywood. . . . The feature in the back of the comic that profiled famous women, called "Wonder Women of History," was replaced in 1950 by "Marriage a la Mode," which documented marriage customs around the world. Similar romance supplements continued for twenty years.

and in the 1990s like this:

As newsstand sales declined and direct market sales to local comic shops increased, the active fan base frequenting such shops became more homogenous: mostly male, white, heterosexual, and adult. Comic art began to display a hypergendered backlash to the gains of the feminist movement: hypermuscular men and hypersexualized women. . . . [Wonder Woman] stories were less about Greek myths, about questions of morality and power and peace, and more about simply fighting criminals in a hyperviolent and hypersexualized manner, often with a facial expression that has been described as "porn face."

The portrayal of female superheroes, in other words, often reverts to a perceived "default," which—from the vantage point of two and six decades on—is itself a clear reflection of ideological conventions prevalent at the time of any given story’s creation. And that, I think, is what gets missed by traditionalist comics bros defending their faves from charges of making problematic art: Ladies, people of color, queer folks (I could go on) didn’t politicize comics. They were political when we got here. Just, you know, in a way that stereotyped and ignored us.

Though Cocca is never polemical, her book highlights the limitations that naturally arise when the majority of superhero writers and artists fit a particular (white, male, cis, straight, able-bodied) demographic profile. Chris Claremont is among the most beloved writers of classic X-Men and the creator of many classic storylines; he wrote a broad range of female characters with different powers, hang-ups, and personalities, women who supported and loved each other. While Claremont did bring a substantially less sexist ethos to X-Men, Cocca notes ongoing shortcomings of representation. For instance, although it’s semi-revolutionary to have a black woman leading the X-team, Storm’s costume and backstory frequently rely on exoticization and racial stereotypes.

A recent dust-up over Riri, the black teenage girl who will be donning the mantle of Iron Man in forthcoming Marvel comics, criticized the artist for over-sexualizing the (underage underage underage) character, as well as the colorist for lightening her skin tone substantially from earlier images.



The artist responded:



The answer, of course, is yes. It would be yes anyway because the character’s fifteen damn years old, and it’s particularly yes because our culture sexualizes black women and values light skin over dark in just about every possible context. But this is exactly why it’s so important to have a diverse stable of writers and artists. Awareness of the history of sexual predation and colorism is just one thing in a universe of things that creators can miss on when writing outside their own culture and experience. Critiquing these mistakes isn’t injecting politics where none existed, but acknowledging the politics that are already present and asking the creators to be more deliberate about those choices.

(The variant cover was withdrawn, and J. Scott Campbell subsequently drew a more age-appropriate version of Riri Williams.)

Superwomen highlights the inevitable limitations of a world in which white cishet able-bodied male creators predominate, regardless of what may be a wealth of good intention. For instance, Joss Whedon created Buffy Summers with the explicit aim of “com[ing] down against the patriarchy.” The TV show and later the comics highlight the importance of chosen families, tolerance, and gender equality, many of which were grounded in the 1990s “girl power” movement from which Buffy originally arose. Yet Cocca is also aware of the ways in which the show and comics fail at diversity:

Buffy as a TV show was overwhelmingly white. Due either to the viewpoints of its main writers who were all white, and/or due to assuming its consumers would be generally middle class and white, the show’s portrayal of "difference" was centered more on gender and sexuality rather than race and class, highlighting the ways in which privilege can ease challenges of norms. . . . Other slayers [in the comics] are clearly nonwhite also . . . but many of these characters remain in the background.

The foregrounding of white, middle-class, thin, able-bodied girls doesn’t necessarily arise from any explicit belief on the part of the creators that girls not fitting that description shouldn’t star in stories. It’s part of the cultural oxygen we breathe: Buffy and Willow and Anya and Cordelia are what the writers imagine when they hear the word girl, and their personal connotations of girl-ness are—as Cocca shows—sharply limited.

With decades of hindsight, of course, it’s much easier to make connections between political environment and representation of marginalized groups in comics, and Cocca’s arguments feel stronger in earlier chapters (i.e., those that consider characters who have evolved through multiple decades and their attendant ideological shifts). Seen up close, it can be harder to unpick the tangled strands of ideology and art. Cocca is meticulous in doing so and generally attentive to the intersections of marginalized identities. Her chapter on DC’s Batgirl (Barbara Gordon) neither offers a free pass on the violent assault Batgirl suffers for the emotional development of the men in her life, nor elides the heartbreak of fans with disabilities upon seeing Oracle cured of her paraplegia in the "New 52" DC relaunch.

The key to all of this—though Cocca may not say so explicitly—is not just diversifying the actual superheroes, but hiring a diverse group of creators for your comics/movies/television shows. Marvel has begun to take steps in this direction, and the era of Peak Television has given opportunities to a much more diverse group of writers, but a lot of nerd creative power continues to sit with white men. Some of them are great. Some of them are serial abusers. All of them have blind spots. Choosing to snuggle up inside a status quo may protect you from thinking about politics, but it won’t protect you from participating in them.

This has been your Angry Feminism Minute™. Tip your servers.