What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Anonymous asked: "Diana is a feminist icon, therefore, she can't have anything coming from a man, because that would be sexist." This is a comment about a recent Wonder Woman comic in which a young Diana is trained by Ares, god of war. I find it deeply troubling, it implies Diana's feminism can only be achieve when there is an absence of men. And as a man, am trouble that some women may genuinely feel this way. Your thoughts?

OK, so bearing in mind that I’m not a comics expert:

This is a really tricky question. Wonder Woman is an iconic figure, and one of the key aspects of her background has always been the idea that she was raised by a sorority of women. Particularly in comics, there’s a really deep-seated tendency for female characters to be mentored or lead by men - a consequence of the fact that they were often created as female versions of existing male heroes, or were brought into the narrative originally as love interests - and so in that sense, retconning Diana into that mold when she was renowned for breaking it strikes me as being regressive and unhelpful; it also seems to be a significant change, as I don’t think she was meant to have ever seen a man before she originally left Paradise Island. 

Thus: it’s not sexist in the sense of being discriminatory against women, but it may well be sexist in the sense of representing the genderblind, patriarchal attitudes of the writers; and if, as it seems to be, it represents a significant change to her backstory - if up until to this point, her mentorship was wholly female, and that’s now being altered - I can certainly understand how feminist fans might be angry about it. Because while there’s nothing inherently sexist about the idea of men mentoring women, there is something problematic in taking such a powerful, iconic, female-mentored, feminist character - particularly one belonging to a genre that’s otherwise saturated with issues of sexism and misogyny - and retroactively declaring that oh, by the way, her awesome skills came from a guy. 

The frequently sexist representations of women in comics, SFF and other popular media tend to lean very heavily towards the idea of female exceptionalism - that is to say, to the creation of female characters who interact primarily with men, who compete with other women rather than having female friends and supporters, and whose ‘exceptionalness’ is therefore implied to come, at least in part, from the fact that they’re not like other women. So when a narrative change is made that leans unnecessarily in that direction - like, for instance, having Diana learn from Ares rather than someone like Artemis or Hecate - such that a potential story about female-female mentorship is replaced by one about male-female mentorship, it rankles, because it aligns more closely with a set of problematic archetypes that have traditionally been used to isolate female characters from each other.

I hope that helps to answer your question!

  1. fozmeadows posted this