Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics

WORLD COMICS AND GRAPHIC NONFICTION SERIES

Frederick Luis Aldama, Christopher González, and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, editors

Other Books in the Series

James Scorer, Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame

J. Andrew Deman, The Claremont Run: Subverting Gender in the X-Men

Jeffrey A. Brown, Super Bodies: Comic Book Illustration, Artistic Styles, and Narrative Impact

Peyton Brunet and Blair Davis, Comic Book Women: Characters, Creators, and Culture in the Golden Age

Mark Cotta Vaz, Empire of the Superheroes: America’s Comic Book Creators and the Making of a Billion-Dollar Industry

Anna Peppard, ed., Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero

Allan W. Austin and Patrick L. Hamilton, All New, All Different? A History of Race and the American Superhero

Jorge J. Santos Jr., Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics

Benjamin Fraser, The Art of Pere Joan: Space, Landscape, and Comics Form

Jan Baetens, The Film Photonovel: A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations

Marc Singer, Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies

Matt Yockey, ed., Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe

Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis, eds., Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics

David William Foster, El Eternauta, Daytripper, and Beyond: Graphic Narrative in Argentina and Brazil

Christopher Pizzino, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature

Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González, eds., Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future

SEARCHING FOR FEMINIST SUPERHEROES

Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics

Sam Langsdale

University of Texas Press

Austin

The Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Endowment is supported by Allison, Doug, Taylor, and Andy Bacon; Margaret, Lawrence, Will, John, and Annie Temple; Larry Temple; the Temple-Inland Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Portions of chapters 3 and 4 were previously published in Moon Girls and Mythical Beasts: Analyzing Race, Gender, and Monstrosity, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 45, no. 2: pp. 395–420. © 2019 by The University of Chicago.

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2024

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected].

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Langsdale, Samantha, author.

Title: Searching for feminist superheroes : gender, sexuality, and race in Marvel Comics / Sam Langsdale.

Other titles: World comics and graphic nonfiction series.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2024. | Series: World comics and graphic nonfiction series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023054058 ISBN 978-1-4773-2978-8 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2979-5 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-2980-1 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Feminism in comics. | Women superheroes. | Transgender superheroes. | Lesbian superheroes. | Queer comic books, strips, etc. | Social justice in comics.

Classification: LCC PN6714 .L355 2024 | DDC 741.5/3522—dc23/eng/20240314

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023054058

doi:10.7560/329788

For all the feminist heroes who fill my bookshelves and grace my everyday: you save me.

CONTENTS

Introduction. A Willful Method: Searching for Feminist Superheroes

Chapter 1. Whoa Momma! The Feminist Model of Maternity in Spider-Woman

Chapter 2. America and the New Mestiza: Punching Star-Shaped Holes through Binaries and Borders

Chapter 3. The Unstoppable Wasp: Diversifying Superhero Teams with Queer Science and Feminist Friendship

Chapter 4. Sampling Ironheart: Black Feminist Thought, Superhero Ethics, and Afrofuturism

Conclusion. Archiving Traces of Feminist Superheroes

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

INTRODUCTION

A WILLFUL METHOD

Searching for Feminist Superheroes

Throughout the last fifteen years, superheroes have again become an integral part of mainstream popular culture in the United States. A proliferation of films, TV series, videogames, comics, fan conventions, and merchandise has ushered superheroes into almost every corner of American media. For scholars of superhero comics and comics-related media, the genre has the potential to be analyzed from any number of angles, including its history and evolution into a multi-billion-dollar industry; its relationship to US nationalism and its reflection of underlying social issues; and its ability to inform cultural hopes and ideals and to influence the politics surrounding representation. Despite this polyvalence, recent popular discourse has turned towards the genre’s capacity to glorify violence and to uphold white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, imperialism, and even fascism. Recent TV shows such as HBO’s Watchmen (Lindelof 2019), Amazon’s The Boys (Kripke 2019), or Invincible (Kirkman and Racioppa 2021); films such as Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019); and myriad op-eds about, or interviews with, creators like Alan Moore and Eric Kripke all suggest a reemerging cynicism towards the genre. Relatedly, recent scholarship on superhero comics has also cultivated a focus on the genre’s problems. Texts like Sean Guynes and Martin Lund’s edited volume Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics (2020), Esther De Dauw’s Hot Pants and Spandex Suits: Gender Representation in American Superhero Comic Books (2021), and Allan Austin and Patrick Hamilton’s All New, All Different? A History of Race and the American Superhero (2019) overwhelmingly point towards the genre’s historic and ongoing tendency to generate media informed by white supremacy, racism, heteronormativity, and sexism.

Given this context, I suppose I should not have been surprised when, after a panel presentation during which I and two of my colleagues had given (what I thought were) nuanced, persuasive papers about feminist friendship in superhero comics, I was approached by an audience member who asked me why I was reading superhero comics if I was interested in feminism. Admittedly, I was a bit gobsmacked. Had we not just spent sixty minutes explaining exactly why? But I also understood. My interlocutor’s question, and the popular and scholarly discourses of which it is a part, was absolutely warranted. Even cursory histories of the representation of women and girls in superhero comics point to overwhelming trends of underrepresentation and marginalization, oversexualization and objectification, and the near ubiquity of whiteness, cisnormativity, heterosexuality, and able-bodiedness (Cocca 2016, 6–16; Peppard 2017; De Dauw 2021, 1–15). Statistics reflecting the current state of affairs are hardly better. According to scholar Carolyn Cocca, Female characters starred in about 15% of superhero comics in 2020, with about the same percentage being written or drawn by a female creator. In 2015 it was about 12%, in 2010 about 6%, and in 2000 about 5%. Women star in about 16% of superhero TV shows on air or in development, and in about 18% of films scheduled for release or in development. As Cocca notes, Given that women are 50% of the population, these proportions are quite low (2021, 7). There is no denying that superhero comics and comics-related media that do not center straight, white, heterosexual, nondisabled men and that do not employ white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, nationalist ideological frameworks are numerically marginal. But they do exist, and to continue to focus only on the problems at the center of the genre amounts to further marginalizing (even if inadvertently) more inclusive, progressive texts and the various ways they make meaning.

Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics begins with the recognition that female-led superhero comics, with diverse casts of characters that cultivate inclusive feminist storytelling and art, exist on the margins of the US mainstream superhero genre. However, the purpose of this book is not to focus primarily on why these comics are marginalized, but rather to show how the margins as a site of innovation and productivity have enabled the creation of feminist superhero texts. Moreover, by employing feminist philosophies as lenses through which to analyze the comics in question, I suggest that feminist superheroes have the potential to contribute to liberatory social imaginaries that are crucial to working towards a more just world. Such a study is warranted for a number of reasons: First, as superheroes continue to proliferate across media, there is a protracted potential to lose sight of historically excluded creators, characters, and audiences without an express effort to construct more equitable frameworks of scholarship. Second, reducing more inclusive superhero comics to their minority status is to ignore the power of the margins and the multiple and meaningful ways comics may impact audiences. As scholars like andré carrington have argued, the potential of the margins exists even in mainstream media: Marginality and popularity can coincide as names for multiple facets of the same cultural phenomenon. This is especially true for works of genre fiction, which are both deeply invested in market imperatives that buttress the existing social order and, occasionally, more imaginative or diversionary than texts that present realistic treatments of everyday life (2016, 14). And third, as US popular culture continues to manifest as a battleground between oppressive and progressive social norms, capitalist modes of cultural production, and people’s desires to envision a better elsewhere, focusing on feminist superheroes provides one way to prove that the fight goes on; nothing about the genre is inevitable.

METHOD AND TERMINOLOGY

To determine whether, and to what extent, solo comics featuring Spider-Woman, America Chavez, the Unstoppable Wasp, and Ironheart may be read as feminist, I will pair close textual reading with analyses of contemporary discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and disability using feminist philosophies as interpretive tools. This combined approach speaks to the themes that make this book a work of feminist cultural studies broadly, and of feminist comics studies more specifically. As Morag Shiach argues, cultural studies is concerned with the relationship between culture and power and is interested in the practices and texts through which individuals and groups come to understand or to imagine themselves as social beings (1999, 3). Accordingly, Searching for Feminist Superheroes is, on the one hand, aimed at analyzing the limitations and possibilities for generating feminist representations of girls and women in comics in our white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist, heteropatriarchal cultural context. On the other hand, because the nature of reading comics is an interpretive process (i.e., meaning-making happens in the gutters), this book also aims to demonstrate how feminist philosophies can enrich readings (scholarly or otherwise) of female-led superhero comics.

More specifically, comics scholar and artist Scott McCloud suggests that the gutter, the space between comics panels, "plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics! Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea" (1994, 66).¹ In other words, comics readers are never passive recipients of messages delivered by creators; instead, readers actively make meaning by incorporating their past experiences in their imaginative attempts to bridge the gaps between images so that a continuous narrative comes into view. This interpretive process, which McCloud calls closure, is not actually limited to the gutters of comics. However, I have chosen to use gutters in this discussion as shorthand for comics as a space in which worlds are constructed by creators and readers, and both bring their real experiences to bear on telling and consuming stories. In fact, Frederick Luis Aldama argues that the creation and consumption of comics is a co-creative process:

When we open a comic and begin to read and view its pages, we co-create. The authors and artists select in and out details (writing and visuals) that at once hit our perception system and guide our imagination to thrill in their filling in of gaps; our emotions and thoughts fill in and complete drawn figures, gestures, dialogue, and character interaction, for instance. When we fill in the gaps, we co-create and we make the story our own. We don’t change the story; we follow the carefully selected visual and verbal cues that make up the blueprint to co-create the story. We become chiasmic transformers, all while not changing the DNA of the story itself. (2017, 91)

This conception of comics and how they are read is constructive for my examination of feminist superheroes for several reasons. Comics should not be seen as mirror images of our reality, but Aldama’s analysis nevertheless points to techniques creators use to reconstruct reality by selecting and omitting building blocks of our reality to compose their storyworlds. Comics readers similarly integrate their real identities, experiences, and ideologies into their interpretations of the gaps, signposts, and cues creators use to make up the blueprint of the comic. Importantly, according to Aldama, The wonderfully generative capacity of this co-creating potential in comic book readers . . . ​not only allows readers and audiences to imagine movement and three dimensions in the static, two-dimensional in-print comic book storyworld spaces, but also allows them to feel and think about identities and experiences distant from their own (2017, 90).

For example, creators may choose to focus on a character with marginalized identities to incite co-creative readers to understand and relate to that character’s experiences of marginalization, whether the reader shares that identity in reality or not. Creators’ abilities to reconstruct realities that draw from, but are not limited to, our reality also enable them to compose visual and verbal cues that guide readers to imagine a world free from such marginalization. Therefore, my method of pairing close reading with discourse analysis aims to demonstrate how US norms of gender, sexuality, and race (among other aspects of identity) may inform which building blocks creators choose to include or exclude in reconstructing reality and how these same norms may impact readers’ abilities and desires to co-create that reality via their interpretations of visual and verbal cues.

Moreover, by recognizing the potential for comics to open readers’ eyes to the experiences of marginalized subjects, and to help them imagine a world free from such marginalization, this book focuses on comics that are attentive to but not entirely determined by the overlapping systems of social oppression that affect US women. Because this kind of analysis is based on my abilities and desires as a comics reader, each chapter is, on one level, an account of how I, as a feminist scholar, comics fan, woman, and social being, have filled in gaps, completed gestures, and followed the map composed by the relevant creative team. That is, these interpretations are, in many ways, my own co-creations. However, throughout each chapter I endeavor to demonstrate the specific ways I use feminist philosophies as tools for interpreting the figures, gestures, and dialogue of each comic such that any co-creative reader with the same tools might identify a similar set of blueprints.

My reason for employing feminist philosophies as comics studies tools becomes clear when one considers Mary Midgley’s definition of philosophy. She argues that it is not some grand abstract hobby but rather a very necessary skill set that has much in common with plumbing.

Plumbing and philosophy are both activities that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have, beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed, but which sometimes goes wrong. In both cases, this can have serious consequences. Each system supplies vital needs for those who live above it. Each is hard to repair when it does go wrong, because neither of them was ever consciously planned as a whole. There have been many ambitious attempts to reshape both of them, but existing complications are usually too widespread to allow a completely new start. (1992, 139)

The value of being able to look at the inner workings of a system is, as Midgley suggests, most obvious when problems arise. While the breakdowns of our ideological and ethical systems are not always as immediately obvious as a dripping faucet or a flooded drain, we are eventually faced with discomfort and social malfunction. It takes skill—and practice—to turn inwards and ask what in the structure of our thought is wrong, and it is even harder to readjust, shift, and change (1992, 140). Like Midgley, I see the value in philosophies as tools for examining how our cultural norms around identity have amalgamated through generations, how they are complex in their imbrications, how they are taken for granted as inevitable, and, as a result, have become a source of great social discomfort. Feminist philosophies in particular can help us to see the underlying systems of gender as they intersect with other structures of identity, to diagnose the failings of taken-for-granted norms, and to devise strategies for change.

Of course, feminism itself might be conceived of as a vast, complex philosophical and political system with many crisscrossing pipes intended to meet diverse and sometimes competing demands. Because of the plurality of feminisms over time and across geographies, it would be neither possible nor desirable for me to attempt to plumb the histories, movements, practices, or structures of thought that fall under the term feminism in the space of this book.² Instead, my aim in the chapters that follow is to pick up and use the various feminist philosophical tools that seem most suited to the job.

Having said that, the one tool that is required consistently throughout the book is a working definition of feminism. Historian Estelle Freedman defines feminism as a belief that women and men are inherently of equal worth. Because most societies privilege men as a group, social movements are necessary to achieve equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects with other social hierarchies (2003, 22). Recognizing how gender intersects with other social hierarchies is the basis for intersectionality. This term—coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to address the ways Black women’s experiences are affected by compounding inequalities—has been a mainstay of much social justice–oriented scholarship (Collins and Bilge 2016, 1).

In its proliferation, though, its meaning and usage have expanded such that no single definition conveys its significance. However, Patrick Grzanka’s summation is helpful: intersectionality reflects how race, class, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of identity and inequality shape the contours of social life and structures in the United States and around the world. Intersectionality, [is] the study of how these dimensions of inequality co-construct one another (2014, xiii).

Because the aim of this book is to conduct intersectional feminist analyses of superhero comics, each chapter critically examines how white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity (among other social hierarchies) co-construct each other, until representations of white, affluent, heterosexual men are disproportionately privileged and presumed to be the genre norm. The particular comics I have selected for discussion all either explicitly critique those norms, actively subvert them, or do both. True to the co-creative process, these texts can also be read as presenting visual and verbal cues that illuminate the diversity of women’s lived experiences as they are shaped by race, class, sexuality, and embodiment while also imagining alternative realities that exceed the limits of our own overlapping systems of oppression. Calling attention to these feminist imaginaries of liberation in superhero comics is an important part of philosophical plumbing. As Midgley suggests, the changes needed to shift blockages often come from the arts: They can show us a new vision (1992, 140).

To achieve true intersectional justice, we need to do far more than simply reimagine superhero comics, of course: Any powerful new idea calls for a great deal of change, and the more useful that idea is going to be, the more need there will be to work out these changes fully (Midgley 1992, 140). According to historians like Freedman, women have been politically agitating for unmitigated access to their rights as human beings for more than two centuries, and even a brief look at contemporary US issues like women’s healthcare, equal pay, political access, representation, and domestic violence makes it clear that a feminist future is far from being realized. Nonetheless, it is my hope that in searching the margins for feminist superheroes, this book demonstrates the creative ways some comics producers and readers are pushing our structures of thought in more egalitarian directions.

What quickly becomes apparent when one focuses on comics that are critical of the status quo—and that invite readers to imagine feminist futures—is that they do not align with accepted definitions of the superhero genre. For example, if a superhero is a heroic character with a universal, selfless, prosocial mission, as Peter Coogan suggests (2013, 3), a feminist character who is Black or a person of color, who is poor or working class, who is disabled, or who is queer could apparently never be a superhero in a white supremacist, capitalist, ableist, heteronormative, patriarchal society since true justice would include personal (as well as collective) liberation, and, arguably, could not be said to be selfless.

One might also struggle to characterize feminism as a universal mission since, as Freedman argues above, feminist praxis requires that specific measures be taken to address women’s inequality, in particular. Similarly, if Coogan is correct in suggesting that a superhero is generically distinct, i.e., can be distinguished from characters of related genres (fantasy, science fiction, detective, etc.) by a preponderance of generic conventions (2013, 3), then comics like America or Ironheart are off the table because their creators purposefully align their texts with other literary traditions like Latin American feminist literature or Afrofuturism.

Jeffrey Brown has argued that at its core, the superhero genre is about boundaries (2015, 137). This creates problems for understanding Spider-Woman as a superhero comic since Jessica Drew’s journey from pregnant superhero to working mom transgresses boundaries on bodily, professional, and representational levels. What is important to note here is that these definitions can be read as descriptive of the majority of the genre rather than prescriptive of what superhero comics must do or be. As descriptions of most superhero comics, Coogan’s and Brown’s analyses (among several others) are accurate in many ways. However, as I’ve suggested, identifying superhero comics based only on these criteria excludes many promising texts.

So, following feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, this book adopts a willful method to seek out what has been excluded. Ahmed writes: "Willfulness might be what we do when we are judged as being not, as not meeting the criteria for being human, for instance. Not to meet the criteria for human is often to be attached to other nots, not human as not being: not white, not being male, not being straight, not being able-bodied (2014, 15). As I show throughout the four chapters of this book, characters like Jessica Drew/Spider-Woman, America Chavez, Nadia van Dyne/The Wasp, and Riri Williams/Ironheart fail to meet the criteria for superhero" in terms similar to those Ahmed outlines. Thus, to insist on their designation as superheroes is to be willful. This decision to read sideways or across the de facto boundaries of the superhero genre also makes this book a work of "not philosophy" (Ahmed 2014, 15). That is, part of the discussion for each fictional woman or girl analyzed in the following chapters focuses on what they are not—not monstrously embodied, not stereotypically hypersexual, not hyperindividualistic, not derivative.

The search for feminist superheroes constitutes, in some ways, what Ahmed describes as "a philosophy of the not." Methodologically, Searching for Feminist Superheroes is also a not philosophy insofar as it is interdisciplinary. Certainly, I cite many philosophers in this book and have argued above for their utility in reading comics; however, like Ahmed, I reference philosophers alongside many thinkers who are not philosophers, and in no way am I aiming to suggest that feminist philosophies are the most or the only effective tools for co-creative comics studies. As I suggest in the conclusion, the process of searching for feminist superheroes is one I hope others from across comics studies will join. The four chapters that follow are not intended to be representative of the culmination of this search; rather, they are entries into what will ideally become a living archive of feminist superheroes.

By way of invitation to others who may also wish to seek out feminist superheroes, it seems useful to discuss further the criteria that led me to the four comics discussed in the chapters that follow. First, all the titles selected for analysis are female-led, insofar as they are titular comics focusing primarily on one girl or woman (although there is a tendency for the protagonists to work closely with friends, sidekicks, and teams). This does not necessarily mean that the creative teams of each book are led by women. Women and nonbinary creators have been far outnumbered by men in mainstream superhero comics publishing throughout its history. The disparity between the number of female characters discussed and the number of female or nonbinary creators behind them is indicative of this industry-wide problem. In fact, only one of the books, The Unstoppable Wasp, maintained gender parity in its creative team throughout production. It is also important to note that the gender identities of comics creators do not necessarily tell us anything about their politics. We typically assume that creators who share the same identities as their characters can speak more authentically to the kinds of experiences that character might have. But even when women comics creators write or draw female characters, there is no guarantee that the comic will have a feminist ethos.

Relatedly, while cis men may not be able to write or draw female characters based on lived experience, it is still possible for them to include and omit building blocks of our reality in their reconstructions of comics storyworlds in feminist ways. Indeed, that is precisely what I suggest writers like Dennis Hopeless and Jeremy Whitley and artists like Javier Rodriguez, Joe Quinones, and Luciano Vecchio do. Male superheroes may also be capable of feminist praxis and may also be portrayed in feminist ways.³ However, given the marginal status of women and girls in superhero comics, and, by extension, in scholarship focused on superheroes, my decision to focus on women and girls (as well as some nonbinary characters) is rooted in my own feminist politics.

Aside from each comic being female-led and eponymous, each text represents a specific run that is examined in its entirety. This approach allows for a more in-depth examination of how each text [comes] to understand or to imagine girls and women as social beings; it lends to more detailed discussion of the choices of specific comics creators; and it helps to cultivate a sharper focus on the particular feminist concerns being explored.

I have also chosen comics that, thus far, have not received much scholarly attention.⁴ While particular