Intersectional Feminist Readings of Comics

Interpreting Gender in Graphic Narratives

Sandra Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367704728
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000437102
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Intersectional Feminist Readings of Comics collects several theoretically informed close reading of comics and graphic literature that apply an intersectional feminist lens to the interpretation of several contemporary North American graphic narratives.

The essays examine use a range of interpretive lenses drawn from theoretical models used in contemporary aesthetics, media studies, and literary criticism to analyze mainstream figures like DC's Catwoman and Marvel's Miss America and Doctor Strange, to contextualize historical and speculative comics by Indigenous American illustrators, and to explicate autography by critically lauded Jewish, queer and female cartoonists. In the first half of the book, the chapters examine ways in which superhero comics and the cinematic and televisual adaptations thereof, reify, revise and reject gender parity, systemic misogyny and heteropatriarchy through visual and textual rhetorics of representation. In the second part of the volume, the chapters look at the ways that feminist interpretive practices illuminate the radical work undertaken by cartoonists from historically marginalized communities in the U.S. and Canada. Across both halves, readers will find applications of longstanding feminist critical traditions, like ecofeminism, as well as new intersectional extrapolations of narratology, autobiographical studies, and visual rhetoric, which have been applied to the selected comics in insightful and innovative ways.

This is a lively and varied collection suitable for students and scholars in gender studies, cultural studies, media studies and literary studies.

Part I
Racialized heroes and sexualized villains

1 Contested adaptations: legacies of orientalism, the she-hero, and Hollywood’s diversity aesthetic in Marvel’s Doctor Strange (2016)

Michael Reinhard and Monica Roxanne Sandler

DOI: 10.4324/9781003146520-1

In an episode of the podcast TigerBelly from 16 December 2016, comedian Margaret Cho discussed an email chain with actress Tilda Swinton about her casting as the Ancient One in Marvel’s Doctor Strange (2016). Swinton contacted Cho after a controversy had broken out connected to the creative decision to feature a Celtic woman in a part traditionally depicted as a Tibetan male. This role is especially significant because the character’s guidance leads the protagonist, Stephen Strange, to access magical powers through Asian “mysticism.” The outrage over Swinton’s casting crystallized when the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) made a public statement condemning the use of whitewashing in the newly released Marvel film. Their president, Rob Chan, criticized the decision: “Given the dearth of Asian roles, there was no reason a monk in Nepal could not be Asian. Had [writer/director Scott] Derrickson cast an Asian as the revered leader who guides the main character to become a better human being and to develop his sorcery powers, it would’ve given a big boost to that actor’s career” (Yee 2016). Swinton’s casting joined a larger wave of controversies over the recent use of white actresses to play characters of Asian descent, which has included Emma Stone’s casting in Aloha (2015) and Scarlett Johansson portrayal of “Major” in Ghost in the Shell (2017).

On the podcast, Cho described her interactions with Swinton as deeply troubling, explaining that being asked to untangle the white actress’s confusion over the controversy due to her Asian descent made her feel subservient. She commented: “It was weird because I felt like a house Asian, like I’m her servant. Like the ones when they have in the [British] Raj, they would have the house servant who was your confidante … I had a weird feeling about the entire exchange” (TigerBelly 2016). Soon after, however, Swinton’s agent Brian Swardstrom released the email communications to the online media outlet Jezebel (Juzwiak 2016). Amidst the exchange, Swinton makes a point that condenses many of the recent changes taking place in Marvel’s cinematic and comic book multiverses. She notes, “the biggest irony about this righteous protest targeting this particular film is the pains the makers went to avoid it.” Swinton’s framing argued that the production was concerned about stereotyping characters of Asian descent through orientalizing tropes. Marvel had resolved to sidestep these concerns by redefining or “re-storying” the character into a Celtic woman, ultimately bending the race and gender of the canonical character to avoid controversy in both the United States and China. In doing so, Doctor Strange offers a case study about how industrial considerations and cultural politics work as evolutionary pressures on the adaptation of Marvel’s comic books.

While Swinton’s comments did not clear up the controversy of whitewashing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the incident reveals two competing visions of ethical social representation: MANAA’s condemnation of whitewashing in Hollywood vs. Swinton’s claim that Marvel’s internal discussions were premised on how best to adapt a character with a problematic history from the original canon. These dueling perspectives on the ethics of representation showcase how issues of diversity are produced in the MCU. At the time of the scandal, Marvel had already faced wider problems with diversity and representation in its films. As Ariana Quinonez (2015) wrote for Hypable,

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has a diversity problem. There’s no way to really skirt around this issue politely: it’s a fact. Five out of the six Avengers that make up the largest movie franchise in the world are straight, white, conventionally-beautiful males. That’s over 83% of the Avengers franchise headlined by people born of systematic privilege.

At the time of Doctor Strange’s release in 2016, there had yet to be a woman or a person of color in the leading role of a Marvel film. Swinton’s casting, however, showcased an attempt to bring greater representation of onscreen diversity to a character associated with a problematic past. Swinton, known for her androgynous persona in films like Orlando (1992), was seen by Marvel as a progressive choice to take on the role. Her casting, paradoxically enough, was their attempt to keep up with the times, adapting the original comics to contemporary national and geopolitical contexts.

In this way, Marvel turned to the white female body as an opportunity for marketing feminism and avoiding ethnic tensions in the Chinese film market. Doctor Strange demonstrates what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2015) has termed the “economies of visibility” to refer to the ways in which political categories like gender and race have been transformed into everyday cultural and economic practices like film attendance and spectatorship. In our analysis, these textual alterations to the comic book text through contemporary logics of gender and race have aimed to cultivate what we term a “diversity aesthetic” across Marvel’s myriad film franchises, an aesthetic that illustrates the evolutionary models of textual adaptation at work in the MCU. Through this aesthetic, goals of diversity have produced not only the transformation of marginal characters like the Ancient One in the Marvel canon but also yielded large-scale productions like Black Panther (2018) and the upcoming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) that challenge and respond to numerous fan criticisms about the gender and racial exclusivity of the MCU. Marvel’s recent approach to negotiating the gender and racial divides of the 2010s have sought to pursue a cinematic universe that undercuts charges of racism and sexism in its original comic books by incorporating elements of gender and race-bending. These instances of “bending” speak to an array of fan desires and practices that change the gender or racial identities of core characters to yield new personal, romantic, and sexual possibilities for fans and the original canon. At the same time, this bending reflects how comic book texts have been adapted into global blockbusters with distinct cultural and political “evolutionary” pressures at work for each domestic box office, thus reflecting the existing field of tensions in the global film marketplace.

Our essay covers the relationship of the comic books to identity-bending by putting Doctor Strange’s issues of gender and race in its adaptation to the screen into dialogue with Marvel’s history of gender-swapping. We trace the development of this practice by looking at the history of the “she-hero” figure, a principal way that Marvel has introduced female superheroes since the 1940s. Rather than launch new and original superheroines, characters like Miss America, Namora, and She-Hulk were created as female versions of well-established male figures: Captain America, Namor, and Hulk, respectively. We focus on the invention and phenomenon of the “she-hero” as the clear precedent for not only the Ancient One but the recent Captain Marvel film as the necessary industrial contexts for understanding these changes in Marvel’s content strategies. Our essay argues that this “diversity aesthetic” can be studied for how it demonstrates the role of identity-bending to sustain multiple points of identification for a global audience by triangulating original texts, domestic audiences, and international geopolitics. Yet beyond this scope, we also assert that this diversity aesthetic—largely cultivated through recourse to publicity and marketing language—has often worked to domesticate desires for a more inclusive canon by flattening gender and race into equally considered but nonetheless aestheticized commodities. In this way, decisions like Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange appear to refer back to the legacy of the she-hero tradition. We argue that Marvel’s management of multiple national audiences presents competing visions of social change in how the comic book canon is adapted for the big screen. In making this argument, our work seeks to examine the industrial considerations and their evolutionary pressures on the process of film adaptation at work in contemporary Hollywood.

Forget everything you think you know: re-storying the Ancient One

Marvel’s film publicity reveals how the diversity aesthetic is connected to the relationship between Hollywood and the global film market. At the same time, there are important lessons for scholars of adaptation when thinking about how industrial considerations shape and impact Marvel’s original comic books for the big screen. As Robert Stam (2000) observes, the discussion of film adaptation has traditionally re-inscribed “the axiomatic superiority of literary art to film” (58) by privileging issues of fidelity to the original work. Undergirding these attempts, the novel is believed to have an “extractable essence” that is translated into other forms of adapted media. Stam questions the efficacy of fidelity as a critical tool precisely by asking “Fidelity to what?” (57). Instead, he positions us to think beyond a merely strictly textual approach, inviting us to reconsider adaptation as a form of historical translation. Stam writes: “our statements about films based on novels or other sources need to be less moralistic, less panicked, less implicated in unacknowledged hierarchies, more rooted in contextual and intertextual history. Above all, we need to be less concerned with inchoate notions of fidelity” (75–76).

Following in this direction, Bortolotti and Hutcheon (2007) combine their expertise as a biologist and literary scholar to argue biological evolution and cultural adaptation as homological to one another. In their words, “Stories, in a manner parallel to genes, replicate; the adaptations of both evolve with changing environment” (444). In evoking this homology, Bortolotti and Hutcheon, too, unsettle the fidelity discourse in adaptation studies by introducing how texts undergo types of evolutionary pressures as they are adapted across historical periods, audience constructions, and different forms of media. For this reason, Bortolotti and Hutcheon’s conception of adaptation as a homology to evolution positions us to understand the historical lineage of texts as they are adapted through new temporal and spatial contexts. The materiality of the written text as an adapted and therefore re-presented work is filtered through not only a range of decisions to increase the perceived quality of the new text but also questions of cultural ideology, as well. Doctor Strange, moving in this direction, offers a compelling case study on how global geopolitics exerts its own types of evolutionary pressures on how source material is adapted to the screen for the global marketplace. By studying Doctor Strange’s tensions around racial representation and casting, we understand how Marvel’s delineation of a socially conscious diversity aesthetic for its filmic works reflects how disparate racial geographies and imaginations shape original source material in Hollywood’s system of global production.

In Doctor Strange, as Dr. Stephen Strange nears the doorway of the Ancient One’s spiritual sanctuary in Nepal, he is told to forget everything he thinks he knows. Those words address both the diegetic and meta-reality of the comic book’s filmic adaptation. Entering the doorway, Dr. Strange offers up clumsily: “The Ancient One? What’s his real name? Right. Forget everything I think I know”—a statement that functions ironically as the audience’s introduction to the gender-bending of Tilda Swinton’s portrayal. This spirit of forgetfulness is called forth in other moments of the film, particularly in one scene where Mordo, another student of the magic arts, describes the Ancient One’s origins: “No one knows the age of the Sorcerer Supreme. Only that she is Celtic and never talks about her past.” When the Ancient One first appeared in the Marvel comic books in Strange Tales #110 (1963), Stan Lee and Steve Ditko characterized his origin within this same fictional setting of Kamar-Taj in the Himalayas. The Ancient One is developed in greater detail over Strange Tales #148 (Lee and Ditko 1966), wherein the reader learns that his magical powers are the consequence of his friend, Kaluu, discovering the secrets of the mystic arts and sharing them with him. They soon disagree over the proper use of these powers. The Ancient One suggests they use their new magic to make their small village a utopia, while Kaluu is tempted by the conquest of nearby towns. Not long after, Kaluu succeeds in placing a mind-control spell over Kamar-Taj as they crown him their king. As the Ancient One attempts to rid his home of this new corrupt monarchy, he succeeds in banishing Kaluu to an alternate dimension at the cost of his village. Within the cinematic Doctor Strange, however, Mordo refuses to deliver this backstory long associated with the character. Instead, the scene works to re-story the original comic book continuity, in which key elements like the location of the Ancient One’s sanctuary are preserved while other components, like a clear backstory, are elided.

For this reason, Swinton’s gender-bending functions as a narrative placeholder for the Tibetan Ancient One, a character with a problematic portrayal in the comics. In a video interview with Double Toasted, C. Robert Cargill, the film’s lead writer, spoke at length about the production decisions in the film. He describes the Ancient One as a cultural landmine, stating “I could tell you why every single decision that involves the Ancient One is a bad one, and just like the Kobayashi Maru, it all comes down onto which way you’re willing to lose” (Double Toasted 2016). The Ancient One’s origin story mobilizes longstanding tropes about mysticism and the Orient. In Strange Tales #148, Lee and Ditko (1966) described the inhabitants of Kamar-Taj as “a race of people who, though not outwardly advanced, had developed the arts of joyous living to a degree undreamed of by more complex civilizations!” Furthermore, the comics present the Ancient One as a vehicle for the white male protagonist, Dr. Strange, to acquire his superhero status, suggesting clear racial hierarchies from the Tibetan sorcerer’s secondary supportive role. Within the film, however, the character’s re-storying is marked by this diversity aesthetic by translating the racial underpinnings of Doctor Strange’s source material in order to avoid controversy in the film’s reception.

The need to re-story the character’s link to the Far East through ancient, mystical secrets was further echoed within the marketing of the film. In a press stop in Hong Kong, Director Scott Derrickson discussed the motivations for changing the original canon, describing the Ancient One as simply too risky for the contemporary media environment: “The Ancient One in the comics is a very old American stereotype of what Eastern characters and people are like, and I felt very strongly that we need to avoid those stereotypes at all costs” (Chu 2016). Derrickson later explains that the character’s identity-swap emerged out of an attempt to minimize orientalist depictions of Eastern identities. He continues: “The first decision that I made was to make it a woman … but when I envisioned that character being played by an Asian actress, it was a straight-up Dragon Lady” (Lawler 2016). Derrickson’s remarks show an awareness of Hollywood’s historical production of these stereotypes, directly referring to the figure of the dragon lady, a character archetype popularized by Anna May Wong in The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and Daughter of the Dragon (1931).

The “dragon lady” figure has long been associated with wider depictions of Asian representation in American film and literature often known as the “yellow peril.” The origins of this trope can be first observed in the period after the abolition of slavery in the US when immigrant labor from Asia increased in supply. In this period, suspicions and conspiracies about the threat of Chinese laborers to native-born citizens and workers surged. Gina Marchetti (1994) contends that the representation and image of the yellow peril “combines racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxieties, and the be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Drawn to and from gender: some of what it means to critique comics through intersectional feminist theory
• Part I: Racialized heroes and sexualized villains
• Part II: National histories and personal autographies
• Index