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Wonder Woman, feminist Icon? Queer icon? No, love icon
Phil Jimenez
ABSTRACT
Born at the height of World War II, Wonder Woman fought against the axis powers and misogyny! She was (and continues to be) a beacon of female empowerment and queer identities. As her creator William Moulton Marston proclaimed, Wonder Woman is inspiration “for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.” Yet while Wonder Woman has been both a feminist as well as queer icon, inspiring many, she was later--as fate would have it--marketed primarily to young boys in the comics world. A look at Wonder Woman through the ages captures the evolution of her message about gender, war, identity and the many audiences she has in one life inspired, and in another endured. In this essay, I consider the many lives of Wonder Woman both within comics and without. We will herald the new incarnation of Wonder Woman who not only reflects female power, but inspires it in female as well as male readers.
I have come to be intimately attached to Wonder Woman by a connection substantially rooted in my queerness and her own. However, my queerness and Wonder Woman’s queerness are distinct, and while I think of myself as keenly aware of gender politics that surround superhero comics, I also know that I navigate the world through a particular lens – that is of a 40-something-year-old man. And as I age, I become more and more leery of being the ‘dude’ that speaks about Wonder Woman. From my particular standpoint, I approach Wonder Woman as expansively as I can, considering sex, power, war and violence. I often say that one’s take on Wonder Woman depends highly on how you feel about sex and about war. I am very pro-sex and anti-war, particularly the militarisation of other people through entertainment. This is how I see Wonder Woman. I align myself with her anti-war stance, and I will always see her as a love leader.
Wonder Woman is typically recognised as a feminist icon. However, I consider her a queer icon as well, an idea I will explore in this essay. I must admit, though, to imagine Wonder Woman as a queer icon may horrify those who desperately need to make money off of her to the point that it may prevent them from ever letting me touch the character again. I will explain what I mean by queer. When I say queer, I mean queer in its broadest sense – anti-assimilationist, anti-tradition and defiantly ambiguous. As the ultimate challenge to the norms, the original Wonder Woman came from a world where women were powerful, and there were no men. Diana’s world is queer because it does not rely upon a binary of male and female. Wonder Woman dominates in our world of men not because she craves power but because she is endowed with superpowers. The difference here is crucial. She was from a culture where women – Amazons – were reimagined not as a tribe of fearful warrior women but as a highly evolved technologically advanced race whose mental acuity gave them fantastic powers. She dominates because she is from a culture far more advanced than the one she finds herself in when she comes to our world.
Freedom from patriarchal norms gave Diana a freedom of body and mind that we have yet to realise, and as William Moulton Marston understood, a freer vision of sex and gender are powerful tools to subordinate the hypermasculine, or what we refer to today as toxic masculinity. Rather than kill her enemies, Wonder Woman worked most often to rehabilitate them. The now infamous scenes of bondage spoke to rechanneling aggressive, violent impulses into creative, loving sexual ones. Wonder Woman advocated for rehabilitation over destruction. She fought for love instead of fighting with violence. Wonder Woman coupled with the tendency towards the bizarre and surreal in her stories, embodying the spirit of fun, hope and joy. She was an untypical character not only for her time, but even today. She is proud of her body, her sex, her gender, and her mission in man’s world. What was wonderful about Wonder Woman was to see a woman in the world defy patriarchal norms. I believe that such defiance, however, played a heavy role in making Wonder Woman a sales conundrum in modern times. While Wonder Woman is an icon for love, peace and hope, but as decades have passed, Wonder Woman has been reimagined as an often-militant warrior soldier, from a world not of cultural savants but of savage brutes.
Today Wonder Woman as warrior remains the most commercially viable iteration of the character, partly because it plays into the fantasies and culturally sanctioned fears of anything overtly feminine of the predominantly straight male audience that the comic book industry has long served. That is not to say that women do not read Wonder Woman, or identify with her, but rather that the comics industry has long – indeed, too long – been marketed to young boys. And in this incarnation, not as ambassador for peace but as a warrior with a sword in her hand, she is familiar. Wonder Woman buttresses conventional wisdom as opposed to bucking it as a warrior. Here her otherness, or her queerness, is all but erased and money is then made. She is deadly, serious, morally conflicted – real. When men – and even women – embrace an utterly patriarchal version of Wonder Woman, I have to wonder, what happened? I have to note that it seems with the Wonder Woman movie and the new readership of comics that things are changing, but the comics industry still has a long way to go.
I believe that as a feminist and as a queer character, Wonder Woman is at her strongest and most unique when she challenges her readers and asks us to wonder why we believe in what we do. She reminds us to look at the world through a different lens, and she offers an alternative to the stories we read over and over. Wonder Woman shows us how to live our lives better, and not just live them. But that can be a hard sell in a world that rewards the admittedly superlative, but desperately grim Batman franchise, or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which made millions of dollars worldwide.
So what chance does a woman celebrating queer concepts such as joy, love, peace, hope, pleasures of sex, female power, liberation from norms and otherness has against a cultural zeitgeist like that? A lot, I say. She is Wonder Woman, after all.
Wonder Woman image and myth in popular culture
Wonder Woman became an icon both inside and outside of comics. I often ask my audiences, if they are Wonder Woman fans or comics fans because while the two overlap, the two groups can be distinct. When I was first introduced to Wonder Woman, I did not know anything about her creation – that is to say I did not know anything about who created her or why. Like many, my first exposure to Wonder Woman was in cartoon form and not in comics. If memory serves, it was on the The Brady Kids cartoon – a The Brady Bunch spinoff. This was the first incarnation of Wonder Woman for me. It was the Super Friends cartoon, though, that made Wonder Woman an icon, a spirit animal, an inspiration for me. While Wonder Woman was never as powerful in the cartoon as she was in the comics, the design, and the voice of Shannon Farnon cemented the image in my mind and so many in my generation. Great Hera! She would exclaim with great zeal! The jet-black hair, the red, yellow and blue costume. This image was imprinted on me in ways I cannot describe and on so many others who watched the series.
And then of course there was Lynda Carter. The impact of Lynda Carter on the image of Wonder Woman, on the fans and myself must not understated. Lynda Carter brought Wonder Woman into the homes for a new generation. So much of who I am as an artist, as Wonder Woman fan, how I think of heroism, femininity, beauty comes from Lynda Carter. I must not underestimate the importance of figures such as Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman or Lindsay Wagner’s Bionic Woman on TV, not only for me as a young man, living with a single mother, but also on young girls. Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman promoted peace, love and was a vision of strength–without sword in hand, but with other restraining weapons of truth – her lasso – and containment-her bracelets, indeed her ‘arms.’ This is very feminist.
While Wonder Woman lived in these images outside of comics, the comics themselves were a bit shaky, particularly the years after Marston left. If her true spirit was abducted from the pages of comic creators who replaced her with alien, sexist incarnations, then that spirit took up residence and new life in the cartoons that we watched as children, and in the figure of Lynda Carter. That is until George Pérez, one of the premier artists of Wonder Woman in our time, and my greatest influence. Pérez came on board to rescue and relaunch Wonder Woman in the mid-80s for a new generation of older, more sophisticated readers after the company-wide crossover, Crisis on Infinite Earths.1 While the initial few arcs positioned her as DC Comics’ equivalent of Marvel Comics’ Thor, Pérez’s Wonder Woman embodied such specific traits and vision that it influenced everything that came after it. Super Friends, Lynda Carter and The George Pérez reboot shaped my idea – and many Wonder Woman fans idea of the character, and to this day still do. She was powerful, loving and inspirational. She chose to rehabilitate rather than fight. She showed us the power of love. I know that she gave me – a latchkey kid, half-Mexican, queer boy, growing up as the only child of a devoted single parent just south of LA in the ‘70s and ‘80s – something to strive for and something to admire.
Who is Wonder Woman?
Renowned psychologist William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman, and her adventures were first published in the Winter of 1941 in All Star Comics #8. Wonder Woman was imagined before the USA had joined World War II, and her first story was published the same month as the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is worth noting the history of when these characters were created because they are products of their time. Wonder Woman was imagined as a character that would end the fighting on man’s world during one of the worst wars humans would ever see. She is also a product of the changing image of women in US culture including the Rosie the Riveter images that would soon appear.
Marston coupled his psychological work with his belief that women – the ‘love leaders’ of society – were superior to men, and he created Wonder Woman. Although it should also be noted that it was Elizabeth Holloway Marston who encouraged Marston to create a female character and not a male character – another Superman or Green Lantern. As I understand it, Marston believed that masculine energies were destructive and violent, while feminine energies were based on submission to loving authority.2 He used comic books as a vehicle to speak about his beliefs knowing that millions of young people were reading them. He could induct both young boys and girls into the ways of loving submission to feminine authority. Along with artist, H.G. Peter, Marston created the Wonder Woman we all recognise today. He upended a Greek myth about Amazons and gave Wonder Woman an origin that I have grown to love the most, and the one I argue is still the most feminist and progressive. Wonder Woman was born of love, the love of her mother, and it was that love that sustained her powers and her own desire to make the world a better place. Unlike most heroes who have traumatic origins of loss, Diana’s impetus for fighting for the good in the world was not due to loss, but born of a love and abundance.
After being created by the Greek Goddess Aphrodite to promote peace and love, the Amazons were attacked by Hercules, and after winning against Hercules, with the help of Aphrodite’s magic girdle, the Amazons left man’s world and lived on Paradise Island for thousands of years. Freed from the turmoil and wars of men, they became great inventors, scientists and explorers. However, during World War II, an American Pilot, Steve Trevor landed on Paradise Island. The Amazon’s patron goddesses inform them that the strongest and wisest among them should return with Trevor to help America fight the Axis threat. In the comics, the Nazis and their ilk were implied to be agents of Mars, the god of War.3 The Amazons hold a great contest for the honour to fight the Axis powers, and Diana, the daughter of the Amazon Queen, Hippolyta, is the winner. Diana takes her new costume and becomes Wonder Woman. She leaves Paradise Island for man’s world where she assumes the secret identity of Diana Prince. As Wonder Woman, Diana fought, Nazis, aliens, mythic gods, and supervillains including Cheetah and Giganta.
Wonder Woman was a symbol of equality, strength and righteousness under Marston. Villains were not just incarcerated and punished, they were brought to Reform (or Transformation) Island off the coast of Paradise Island to learn new ways of thinking, to be re-educated – a powerful idea because Marston imagined that villains could not only reform but also contribute to a moral and just society. They were brought to Reform Island with the idea that they would then be re-introduced to society. Unlike Batman, whose villains return to jail only to escape again, Marston imagined a future for these villains where they would give back after submitting to a loving authority. One particular example of Marston’s belief in reform is Paula von Gunther, a Nazi spy was given a second chance by Wonder Woman. After Wonder Woman defeats her, Paula tells Diana that her daughter is being held captive by the Nazis and she only worked for them to save her daughter’s life. Gunther was brought to Reform Island and she soon became an ally of Wonder Woman, helping her on many missions. This idea of the reformation of villains has only been touched on briefly since Marston.4 The overtones of domination and submission to loving author...
