In her 2002 essay Comparative Sapphism (recently made available for download, my friend and colleague Sharon Marcus contrasts the place of lesbianism within 19th century French literature and 19th century English literature. In simplest terms, that difference is one of presence and absence.French writers include lesbian themes, characters, and plots; English ones, by and large don’t. As Sharon demonstrates with a fair amount of hilarity, this posed a problem for English reviewers of French books, who somehow had to talk about lesbianism without talking about lesbianism — resulting in the spectacle of intelligent cultured reviewers demonstrating at great length that they knew the thing they would not talk about, and/or didn’t know the thing they would.
What’s most interesting about this division, as Sharon says, is that it ultimately isn’t about attitudes towards lesbianism. It’s true that the English back then didn’t like lesbians…but the French back then didn’t like lesbians either. Everyone on either side of the channel was united in a happy cross-channel amity of homophobia. So, if they hated and hated alike, why did the French write about lesbians and the British didn’t? Not because the first liked gay people — but rather because the first liked realism.
Since French sapphism was fully compatible with anti-lesbian sentiment, and since Victorian England easily rivaled its neighbor across the Channel in its homophobia, we cannot explain the divergence between British and French literature solely in terms of the two nations’ different attitudes to homosexuality. Rather, any explanation of their sapphic differences must also compare the two nations’ aesthetic tendencies. Such a comparison suggests that there would have been more lesbianism in the British novel if there had been more realism and that British critics would have been more capable of commenting on French sapphism had they not been such thoroughgoing idealists.
In other words, the French saw portrayals of lesbianism as part of the seamy, ugly, realist underbelly of life — and they wanted to show that seamy underbelly because they thought realism was cool and worthwhile. The British also saw lesbianism as part of the seamy underbelly of life — but since they were idealists, they felt that literature should gloss over such underbellies in the interest of setting a higher tone and generally leading us onto virtue.
One interesting point here is that everybody — French and British — appears to agree not just on the ickiness of lesbianism, but on its realism. Which means, it seems like, that the French might discuss lesbianism not merely because they are comfortable with realism, but as a way to underline, or validate, their realism. That is, lesbianism in French literature serves the same purpose that grime and “fuck” and drug dealing and people dying serve in The Wire. It’s the traumatic, ugly sign of the traumatic, ugly real.
Nor were the French the last to use queerness in this way. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons 1980s exercise in superhero realism, does much the same thing.
This isn’t to say that Watchmen is homophobic; on the contrary, Alan Moore in particular is, and has long been, very consciously and ideologically queer positive. But it’s undeniably the case that Watchmen‘s goal is, in part, to imagine what superheroes would be like if they were grimy and seamy and nasty and real. And part of the way it imagines superheroes as being grimy and seamy and nasty and real is by imagining them as sexual — particularly as perversely sexual, which often means queer. Indeed, the first superhero, who inspired all the others, is Hooded Justice, a gay man who gets off on beating up bad guys. Thus, the founding baseline reality of superheroics is not clean manly altrusim, but queer masculine sadism.
Incipient buttcrack, bloody nose, homosexuality. You don’t get much more real than that.
The hints of homophobia in Moore/Gibbons, then, seem like they’re tied not (or not only) to unexamined stereotype, as my brother Eric suggests. Rather, they’re a function of the book’s realist genre tropes.
Which perhaps explains why Darwyn Cooke, infinitely dumber than Moore and Gibbons, ended up, in his Before Watchmen work, with such a virulent homophobia. William Leung in that linked article suggests that the homophobia is part of Cooke’s retrograde nostalgic conservatissm — which is probably true to some extent. But it’s probably more directly tied to Cooke’s effort to match or exceed Moore/Gibbons’ realism. Portraying gay characters as seamy and despicable is a means of showing ones’ unflinching grasp of truth. In this case, again, realism does not allow for the portrayal of homosexuals so much as (homophobic) portrayals of homosexuals creates realism.
In the discussion of superhero comics, generally allegations of retrograde political content go hand in hand with allegations of escapism. Superhero comics are “adolescent power fantasies,” which is to say that they’re both unrealistic and mired in violence and hierarchy. The link between realism and homophobia, both past and present, though, suggests that when you take the opposite of adolescent power fantasies, you get adult disempowerment realities. And the groups disempowered often turn out (in keeping with realism) to be those which have traditionally been marginalized and disempowered in the first place.
In that context, I thought it might be interesting to look briefly at this image that was following me around on Pepsi billboards in San Francisco when I was there last week.
Obviously that’s Beyonce. Less obviously it’s basically a comic — the character images are repeated in a single space to suggest time passing or movement. And, perhaps, least obviously, it’s fairly deliberately referencing queerness. Beyonce often looks like a female impersonator, but the aggressively blond hair and the exaggerated flirty facial expressions here turn this image into a quintessence of camp. Also, note the position of her hands; one hovering around crotch level on her double, the others behind the butt. Gender, sexuality, and identity are all labile, and the lability is the source of the picture’s excitement and energy, as well as of its deliberate and related un-realism. Rather than queerness being the revealed and seamy underbelly of truth, in this image it’s a winking fantasy of multiplying, sexy masquerade and empowerment.
The entanglement of homophobia and realism may help to explain in part why gay culture — faced with tropes defining homosexuality as a sordid ugly truth — has often gravitated to artificiality, camp, and the empowerment of self-created surfaces. None of which is to say, of course, that realism must be always and everywhere homophobic. As an example, I give you…Andrea Dworkin in overalls.
Hooded Justice and Beyonce just wish they were that ugly, solid, real, and awesome.
Sometimes a character feels at odds with the fictional world that houses her. I wish I liked Wonder Woman as much as I like Wonder Woman. I’d like to enjoy the super-heroine’s pluck and good cheer as much as I do her robust curves and lustrous black hair. Does this make me a bad feminist? Maybe. But it’s not that Wonder Woman’s athletic feats leave me cold. It’s her virtue that gets me down, just as her good deeds land her in aircrafts that plummet and boats that sink. Of course, she always pops back up, but it’s precisely that bounciness that feels so leaden.
Wonder Woman’s look promises a touch of evil glamor, but her dialogue is all perky efficiency. Judging solely by the character’s appearance, I’d expect a cross between Emma Peel and Bettie Page, but once Wonder Woman springs into action, she behaves more like Snow White’s love child with Nancy Drew. Unlike Batman, Spiderman, or Superman, Wonder Woman has no secret desires, no ulterior motives, no glint of malice or hint of weakness. Amazon Diana and Nurse Diana are equally cheerful, brisk, and sane. Wonder Woman’s superpowers don’t warp her; they don’t compensate for shameful deficiencies, nor are they shamefully hidden. They just turn her into a Girl Scout on steroids.
Despite her dark hair, Wonder Woman has no dark side. But why read comics if not to get in touch with the dark side? I, at least, have always preferred watching the bad guys and gals in comics and Disney films. Catwoman and Cruella have the best clothes. So in the panel below, though I admire Wonder Woman’s propulsive arms and extended legs, it’s her compressed, distorted shadow that draws my eye, not least because of the care Peter took in drawing it:
Notice that Wonder Woman is literally not in touch with her shadow in this image, just as throughout #28, “Villainy, Incorporated,” the evil she battles never taints her. Wonder Woman rarely gloats over her defeated antagonists, nor gets carried away subduing them. At one point, Giganta almost makes Wonder Woman lose her temper, but it’s far more typical for our heroine to dash off to get a purple ray machine that will keep villainous ringleader Eviless alive, or to express joy at having saved her from drowning.
If this were Mystery Men, Wonder Woman’s superpower would be agreeableness: by dint of being really, really nice, and kicking some ass, she’s going to make everyone else really nice too.
So it’s no wonder, ha ha, that my eyes keep straying to the less wholesome pleasures Peter has stuffed into almost every panel, such as the colors — especially vivid in the less authentic reprint of #28 in Wonder Woman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told.
The split between Wonder Woman and Wonder Woman manifests itself as a clash of palettes. Wonder Woman (the character) is red, blue and yellow, black and white; the one jarring note is her flesh, a rich coral beige, but we are encouraged to process that as neutral filler, not a color in its own right. Wonder Woman (the comic) is chartreuse and mauve, turquoise and forest green, and uses primary colors only as jarring accents. Sometimes the villains wear red and the Amazon guards don purple and green, but for the most part, to the villains go the subtler, less wholesome color schemes:
Mauve, turquoise, brown, and a muddy greenish-yellow dominate this panel, overtaking even Wonder Woman herself; her signature red and blue are relegated to the title letters. Only the Cheetah gets to be polychromatic. The color contrast provided by the yellow and brown portion of Cheetah’s arm, seen protruding above the water, gives the panel its depth of field, as do her mauve body parts, especially the sole of her foot, which invades both the print box and the reader’s space.
The battle between Wonder Woman and Villainy, Incorporated is a style war: patriotic primary colors versus a decadent, cosmopolitan spectrum; Roy Lichtenstein versus Picasso; Lego pieces versus burnt umber, melon, and periwinkle crayons. The more complex colors are often relegated to secondary characters and panel backgrounds, but precisely because of their outlandishness, they often end up coming to the fore. In this panel, for example, I find myself looking past Wonder Woman, at the bricks tinted pink and purple, at the gratuitously yellow-green strip on the window blinds, at the dab of purple on the spindle of the chair:
Wonder Woman’s costumes similarly pit the fascinations of villainy against the bland simplicity of the good guys. To be sure, Wonder Woman’s signature outfit is burlesque fetish wear — bustier, micro-mini, stiletto boots — but its eagle breastplate and white stars on blue background give an overall impression of wholesome Americana. Stripes are the only thing missing from this flag-like get-up, and are provided by the uniforms that the Amazons impose on their Saturnian prisoners, along with pacifying Venus girdles:
The prisoners on the right, who resist Eviless’s exhortation to resistance, speak as a united collective whose homogeneity echoes the striped pattern of their uniform; the whole ensemble embodies constricting, standardized repetition. Only a handful of prisoners, on the left above, resist the girdles. Once they’ve shed their prison garb, they pull sartorial focus:
Exchanging conformity for individuality, with stripes now removed from their persons and confined to the prison bars behind them, these figures, who make up Villainy, Incorporated, become a carnival of stripes and swirls, dots and spots, human and animal, butch and femme, West and East, pants and skirts, unitard and hoodie.
Why is Giganta in a wildcat pattern if she used to be a gorilla? Why is Cheetah sporting leopard spots? Why do those spots glow inexplicably green in the negative space between Eviless’s arm and breast? And look at the accessories — the bird headpiece, the sinister goggles, the orange scarf segmenting a red top and yellow pants, the elaborate cat ears, the fedora, the hood, the jewelry. At last, the circus has come to town. I could look at this panel for hours.
Losing oneself in one panel of a strip, or in the details of a single panel, especially in details of costume, is associated with fetishism, the fixation on a part detached from a whole. One way of describing my experience of “Villainy, Incorporated” is that I find it much easier to focus on individual panels and on details of individual panels than to follow the sequence of events, which feels more cyclical than progressive. If I force myself to focus, I see that we have eight villains, and that Wonder Woman first defeats four, then another two, and then the final duo. But tracking this is a chore, because in each of those mini-episodes, protagonist and antagonist keep switching roles: first the villains are bound to submit, then Wonder Woman, then the villains, then Wonder Woman. Often Wonder Woman finds herself having to obey the commands of an opponent who has snagged the heroine’s golden lasso, which allows anyone wielding it to compel obedience:
In this panel, I’m more interested in Cheetah’s feet than in what’s going to happen next. It’s hard to care about which particular character is wearing the Venus girdle or bound by the golden lasso at any given moment, because it’s clear that soon she will wriggle free and place it on someone else, who will in turn wriggle free and place it on her erstwhile captor.
Another way of putting this is that throughout “Villainy, Incorporated,” it’s hard to distinguish the tops from the bottoms, and sometimes even the good girls from the bad. Take Mala and Eviless, whose hairdos, like their names, are basically reflections of one another.
It’s as if the scene of sadism were more important to #28 than the story — as if sadism had itself become subject to the loopy visual tempo of the fetish. What matters most is not generating anxious suspense about what will happen next, but a feeling of secure suspension in a continuous series of images of women tying up women.
Wonder Woman thus seems to challenge the contrast between fetishism and sadism posited by Laura Mulvey in her classic essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey sees Hollywood cinema as appealing to two types of pleasure that are of course related but look very different and appeal to different elements of our psyches. The first type is a fetishistic pleasure in isolated moments of female display that have no relation to linear plot progression. The second is a sadistic pleasure in narratives of pursuit, punishment, forgiveness, and control, in which men usually drive the action and women receive it. Mulvey sees both forms of visual pleasure as attempts to control castration anxiety, and people have been arguing productively with her schema for decades, which attests to both its insights and to its limitations. As Noah Berlatsky has pointed out in his readings of earlier numbers, the all-female universe of Wonder Woman undoes the identification of men with action and women with passivity and turns both the superheroine and the passive male into feminist fetishes.
Mulvey assumes a specific kind of heterosexual framework that seems less than relevant to the lesbian kitsch world of “Villainy, Incorporated.” This is a universe of female prisons, Amazons swearing by “Suffering Sappho,”and boarding school crushes (“Oh what strength — Princess, you are wonderful!”). Is #28 just a variation on a girlie show, designed by men for men, an appropriation of lesbian pulp? Or does it allow both male and female readers to identify with powerful femininity and vulnerable masculinity? I’d incline to the latter, given how #28 pumps up female agency and bonds between women while downplaying male power. Steve is as apt to be tied up as any of the female characters, and in his last appearance in this episode, though he comes to Wonder Woman’s rescue, he’s rendered as a barely discernible stick figure.
Questions like the ones posed above are fun because they’re impossible to answer. I’ll end with another imponderable. Why don’t I find this egalitarian story line sexy, much as I enjoy the individual panels? Mulvey describes the “destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon,” and for me, #28 has indeed destroyed what Mulvey deems the sadistic pleasures of control and dominance associated with conventional linear narrative. To some, it may seem nonsensical of me to say that #28’s destroys sadistic narrative pleasure. The characters address one another as “slave” and “mistress” and there’s an image of a woman engaged in some kind of bondage on almost every page:
The BDSM imagery isn’t just an effect of the action-adventure plot; the Amazons speak frequently of their desire to compel “complete obedience to loving authority.”
Yet “Villainy, Incorporated” feels to me like it gently thwarts sadism, because while reading it, I find it difficult to sort out who is active and who is passive, who is subject and who is object. You’re dominant if you hold the lasso, submissive if it holds you. Even when captive, Wonder Woman performs feats of strength, like towing a submarine. The most obedient prisoners have also become so strong that by virtue of submitting to their captors they have acquired the power to rescue them:
Throughout #28, the captive guards and rebel prisoners trade places, producing the confusion of agent and object, person and thing, masculine and feminine, that Anne Cheng identifies with fetishism in her book Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface.
“Villainy, Incorporated” is obsessed with bondage scenes, but its version of BDSM is a reparative, maternalist one in which difference is dissolved, polarities blur, and rectilinear structure collapses. This relaxation of the more punitive energies that Mulvey links to classically constructed plots seems related to the shift in scene from the heterosexual one typical of Hollywood cinema to the female world of love and ritual that is Wonder Woman. It’s also related to the difference between feature films and comics; it’s as though episode #28 has internalized the seriality of the genre as a whole.
Perhaps “Villainy, Incorporated” frustrates my narrative pleasure because it often feels like it’s trying to reconcile sadism with moralism. In the name of Aphrodite, Wonder Woman practices a kind of radical Christian ethics:
The Amazons claim to be enforcing complete obedience for the good of their captives, with the aim of removing “all desire to do evil” from them. Like the nineteenth-century proponents of criminal rehabilitation analyzed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, Wonder Woman prefers conversion to physical force, disciplining her enemies’ bodies in order to reform their souls. “‘I don’t feel cruel and wicked as I used to,'” exults Irene after doing time in a Venus girdle. But isn’t moral reform the ultimate invasion? What’s left of a person if she lacks even the desire to do evil? Is the problem with Wonder Woman that she is too sadistic, rather than not sadistic enough?
Or perhaps I have a lukewarm response to Wonder Woman because she dares to expose the soft underbelly that sadistic scenarios aim to protect. Explaining this requires a long detour through feminist psychoanalytic theory. Practitioners of BDSM often describe the core of their sexuality as an ethic of radical care that undoes any strict separation of omnipotence from helplessness. But many people see BDSM scenarios as appealing precisely because they revolve around polarized roles.
Jessica Benjamin has written brilliantly about sadistic fantasies and representations in The Bonds of Love and an essay in Like Subjects, Love Objects. I can’t do justice to her subtle argument here, but here’s the comic-book version of the points I find most relevant to Wonder Woman and its variations on the theme of bondage and submission between women.
For Benjamin, fantasies of erotic domination revolve around splitting. As infants, we feel omnipotent and helpless, destructive and vulnerable. Indeed, our very feelings of omnipotence make us feel helpless, anxious that our own aggression might destroy the external world on which we depend for survival. We find it almost impossible to discern the difference between what is inside us and what is outside us. We also find it almost impossible to discern the difference between the external world in general and our parents in particular, and like most psychoanalysts, Benjamin sees mothers as the prime embodiments of both the external world and parental care.
Engaging with various thinkers, including Donald Winnicott (a key figure in Alison Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?), Benjamin sees fantasies of power and submission as resisting erotic intersubjectivity, in which each recognizes the other as “a being outside omnipotent control” (186). Sadistic fantasies manage the universal infantile experience of feeling overwhelmed by both one’s own omnipotence and one’s mothers. They appease “the conflict between recognition and destruction of the other” (183) by creating a strict demarcation between fixed poles of power and submission. Benjamin writes that these are usually “organized by gender,” with men dominating and women submitting. This suggests lack of familiarity with the diverse range of BDSM scenarios in circulation for at least the last two hundred years, but gender is not really the point of her argument.
Benjamin’s key point is that s-m scenarios and erotic intersubjectivity alike are grappling with the same psychic challenge: how to reconcile tensions between sameness and difference, merger and separation, closeness and distance, acceptance and rejection, idealization and recognition. Sadistic fantasies may seem like expressions of cruelty, but in her view they are also working out the fear that the maternal object could not survive one’s aggression (196). In sadistic and masochistic fantasies, “each can play only one side at a time.” Benjamin contrasts this to erotic experiences in which those involved are neither perfectly strong nor perfectly weak. Those experiences emerge most readily when one has been able to recognize the mother as an independent subject, which helps one develop an erotic self that can play with destruction without being extinguished by it (206). Benjamin clearly prefers Eros to sadistic fantasy, but she’s not censorious of fantasy; she sees pornography as a sign of suffering mainly insofar as many people report feeling bad about their responses to it.
Where does this leave Wonder Woman? Benjamin describes sadistic fantasies as a way to cope with the sensation of “encapsulation in omnipotence,” which is an interesting gloss on being bound by a golden lasso and a Venus girdle that compel complete obedience.
I don’t think we need Jessica Benjamin to tell us that Wonder Woman #28 is obsessed with bondage. What Benjamin’s framework helps us see is that Wonder Woman revolves around what we might call maternalist bondage. Certainly, in this comic, you’re either tied up or doing the tying, and each can only play one side at a time. But characters switch from one side to another with such frequency and rapidity that they’re almost occupying both sides at once, yielding oxymoronic beings such as “captive guards” and Amazons bound by their own lassos.
The tender solicitousness Wonder Woman so often expresses for those she’s restraining (“What’s the matter, Eviless?”) makes Amazonian domination a relatively explicit expression of the need to give and receive comfort and recognition (“I hate to pull Eviless under water”). For Benjamin, sadistic fantasies exist to neutralize, even repress, such needs at their most intense and naked. Wonder Woman dares to go where most s-m fantasies don’t — into the turbulent emotional core of neediness and reparation that most sadistic scenarios tie up into neat, well-defined packages. And the vertiginous switch-hitting that results disrupts the controlled progression of plot along with the polarized distribution of power.
Wonder Woman #28 doesn’t give us perfect reciprocity; this is a classic comic, after all, and it’s inconceivable that its blissfully one-dimensional characters would lend themselves to the intersubjective encounters with difference to which erotic reciprocity gives rise.
What Wonder Woman #28 does give us is an obsessive depiction of the reversibility and replication of power between women. That reversible reciprocity is embodied in Wonder Woman’s name. WW: these initials constitute a double mirror image, since the first letter is the same as the second, and each letter consists of twin V’s. The two V’s that make up each W recur in the peaks of Wonder Woman’s boots. We have regular V’s in the back:
and inverted ones at the front:
WW is also MM upside down — just as adoration is the flip side of rage, omnipotence is the flip side of helplessness, and Wonder Woman is the flip side of Mom. But then, what isn’t?
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This is part of a roundtable on the last Marston/Peter Wonder Woman. The roundtable index is here.
So for those who don’t remember…more than a year ago I had written a series of posts about gender in comics. The basic argument is that a character like Superman is a male power fantasy. That fits in with Freud and the Oedipal conflict. Clark Kent can be seen as the “child” who imagines himself supplanting the Father/lawgiver/god. You can also take this one step away from Freud and argue (via the theories of Eve Sedgwick) that what we’re talking about here is not, or not solely, an internal psychological desire, but rather a cultural/social formulation. Men turn away from femininity in order to identify with patriarchal power; or, to see it another way, to be patriarchal requires the denigration or hiding of weakness.
That’s the closet; Clark Kent is living a lie, pretending to be powerful in order to be powerful, when his truth is actually a weak, wimpy child. And, again, the closet is powered by male-male desires and fantasies, making it homoerotic (though, as I argue at some length, it’s actually a straight person’s homoerotic fantasy — we’re talking about how straight men bond or interact with the patriarchy in particular, and arguing that that interaction is structured by ideas about, and within, gayness.)
I then talked about how the early Marvel titles messed with this formula. Characters like Spider-Man and the Thing were much more ambivalent about power; the superdick in them often becomes a devouring ogre (see The Hulk). You also see this in some super-hero satire, like Chris Ware’s Superman character. I argued, though, that the basic binary remains; these stories don’t reject the superdick. Weakness is still sneered at; it’s just that the anxiety around the superdick is greater. You want it but when you have it you don’t want it, and then when you don’t have it you want it again. I also noted that the fascination with power and the denigration of weakness ends up making superhero stories essentially sadistic (as opposed to horror, which works in a more masochistic mode.) This also makes it very difficult for superhero comics to create anti-status quo storylines. However anxiously, the law is always worshipped.
I then went on to talk about the way this relates to Wonder Woman. In particular, I argued that the anxiety and bifurcation of male identity doesn’t really work for Wonder Woman. Female identity is not seen as doubled in the same way; women are not split between patriarchal power and weakness. That’s because female identity is simply identified with weakness. Male writers of Wonder Woman like Kanigher and Martin Pasko tended to create narratives which were about robbing Wonder Woman of her power. There was anxiety around WW’s superdickishness, but much less so around her weakness. As long as she wasn’t in control, everybody was happy. You often got the sense from the books that nobody could figure out what Wonder Woman was doing with superpowers in the first place.
Of course, Wonder Woman had superpowers in the first place because William Marston gave them to her. Which is where we left off, and where I’m going to try and pick up now.
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One of the things I’ve mentioned a number of times in various Wonder Woman posts is that her secret identity doesn’t really work right. It’s a gender problem; superhero identities, as I indicated above, are supposed to be split along the frightened child/superdick Oedipal fissure.
Typically, superhero origins work like this; little Melvin Microbits is toddling along minding his microstuff when suddenly — transformative trauma! He is castrated by a radioactive giant tubular marine mammal! Quickly, miraculously, he grows a thing bigger than his dad ever had and decides to serve the Law as — Walrus-Man!
Or that’s the general idea, anyway. Batman’s maybe the most paradigmatic example (small boy, dad shot, takes dad’s place while still also remaining traumatized child.) It works for Superman too, though (baby, father dies, takes dad’s place while still also remaining puny child). And for Spiderman (young man, father-figure dies, takes dad’s place while still also remaining traumatized child.) There are some variations, like Green Lantern (young man, father-figure dies, takes dad’s place while still remaining asshole); or the Hulk (wimpy guy, traumatized, takes dad’s place while still also remaining wimpy guy.) But the general outlines remain discernible. It’s a meme.
But Wonder Woman’s origin doesn’t work like that. She’s born (or magically fashioned, actually) with super-powers. Her secret identity, Diana Prince, isn’t the “real” trace of the traumatized child she was and remains. It’s just an act.
And it’s an act, moreoever, undertaken to pander to the needs of her man, as we see in Sensation Comics #1.
That’s a deeply odd sequence. Wonder Woman trades places with a nurse who looks exactly like her and has the same name. Moreover, the nurse has the same problem; she needs to find a way to get to the man she loves. The two switch places, but they’re able to do it only because they were already in each other’s places to begin with.
So a couple of points about this.
— In my first essay about WW and superdickery I speculated on the place that female/female relationships had in enforcing femininity. That is, male/male relationships (between, say, Spiderman and Uncle Ben) are often part of Oedipal drama; they’re a spur to becoming more manly, as well as a taunt for not being manly enough.
Female/female relationships, though, often seem much less fraught. In some circumstances — as with the Amazons — sisterhood can be an alternative to, or a challenge to patriarchy. But female bonds can also enforce femininity, and reinforce (subordinate?) relationships with men.
This is basically the argument of Sharon Marcus in her book Between Women. Marcus claims that close, even eroticized friendships between women were seen as an essential part of being a women in the Victorian period. Thus, close female friendships didn’t make women homosexual — it made them more heterosexual.
Marston was significantly more aware of lesbian possibilities than many Victorians were; he had a long-standing polyamorous relationship with two bisexual women. Still, I think Marcus’ analysis perhaps makes it clear why we need this bizarre scene of doubling before WW can have her sort-of-tryst with Steve. Just as male/male relationships for theorist Eve Sedgwick enforce the agonized Oedipal doubling, so female/female relationships for Marston create a stable, domesticated femininity. WW needs Diana to teach her how to be a woman.
— I’ve sort of made this point already, but…the scenario here is not, at first glance, an especially empowering vision. Marston seems to be going out of his way to disempower his heroine from the get-go. Moreover, he’s disempowering her in the name of servitude to men! WW casts off her superpowers so she can wait on Steve hand and foot. As I noted in the first part of the essay, male superheroes are constantly striving and failing to be powerful (men). The feminine, though, doesn’t need to strive; it can just be. And that’s what happens here. WW chucks her goddessness so she can go change her guy’s bedpans. Not much of a feminist message.
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There are maybe other, less invidious ways to look at this though. Here’s comics critic Chris Boesel, with a different take on WW’s decision to become Diana Prince.
First the Why. Why does the god (the teacher) give herself (the eternal, the truth) to be known by the creature (the learner)? It must be for love — not by any necessity, but a free self-giving for the sake of the possibility of the relation itself. And love has a twofold dimension here. It is not only the god’slove for the creature that the god… [gives herself]; it is also for the sake of love, so that the creature might love the god, that the god and the creature might be joined in a relation of “love’s understanding.”
Okay, that’s my little joke. Boesel isn’t a comics critic; he’s a theologian. And despite the serendipitous use of the female pronouns there, he’s not talking about Wonder Woman. He’s talking about Kierkegaard’s ideas about the incarnation of Christ.
The essay is called “The Apophasis of Divine Freedom,” and it appears in a volume edited by Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller called Apophatic Bodies. For those, like me, not familiar with the terminology, apophatic theology means negative theology — the practice of describing God by talking about what he (or she, or ze) is not.
I’m going to quote a little more from Boesel, since it seems apropos to WW’s decision to shuck off her goddesshood for love. Again, Boesel is paraphrasing and sometimes quoting Kierkegaard here.
Second, the How. How is the god to create the “equality,” or “unity,” necessary in order to “make himself understood” without “destroy[ing] that which is different,” that is, the creature as creature? How does the god give herself to be known by the creature in and for love without obliterating the beloved?
Climacus [that’s Kierkegaard’s pen-name] rejects both the possibility of an “ascent,” an exaltation of the beloved creature to the heights of heaven…and of a divine “appearing” in overpowering, sacred splendor,” on the grounds that they would violate the integrity of the creature’s existence, as creature.
The “unity” of “love’s understanding,” then, must be “attempted by a descent.” And a descent, by the god, to the level of “the lowliest” of all…. Therefore, “in love [the god] wants to be the equal of the most lowly of the lowly,” and so comes to the creature “in the form of the servant.” This “form,” however, “is not something put on like the king’s plebian cloak, which just by flapping open would betray the king…but is [the god’s] true form.” The god does not deceive, but in the “omnipotence of love,” remains truly god while fully embodied as a particular human creature, just like any other human, even the lowliest of the low.
The whole analysis by Boesell/Kierkegaard fits WW almost perfectly. As a goddess, WW can’t appear to (be apprehended by?) Steve. For him to love her, and for her to love him, she has to descend and become, not just human, but a servant. She even takes over the form of a “real” human being; her double, both her and not her. The moment when Steve knows her and doesn’t know her:
is emblematic; when she is Diana (which is her real name and also her alias) Steve can recognize and love her. The angel cannot be loved as an angel, but only as a servant. From this perspective, you might argue that gender is irrelevant or secondary. Marston’s not telling a story about what women should be, or how they need to be weak and servile to attract a man. Instead he’s telling a story about the encounter with the divine, and the paradoxical manner in which one, of whatever gender, can only love the transcendent through the particular.
The thing is, though, Marston is obsessed with gender…and especially, one could argue, with the relationship between gender and Godhead. The particular divinity WW is, the transcendence she represents, is female.
Moreover, the embodiment of that transcendence is female as well. Obviously, WW and Diana are both women. But the particular formal representation of that embodiment in the comic is also, I think, coded female. I’m thinking specifically of this passage from Irigary’s essay “The Sex That Is Not One.”
Woman “touches herself” all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two — but not divisible into one(s) — that caress each other.
Also this:
Whence the mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to inventory everything as individualities. She is neither one nor two. rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person or as two. She resists all adequate definition. Further, she has no ‘proper’ name.
Following Irigary’s formulation, when WW moves from transcendence to immanence, when she becomes embodied she does not merely split — she is not bifurcated within herself into two agonized and irreconcilable halves. Instead, she becomes two who remain one — neither one nor two.
The comic form itself literally embodies the indeterminacy. Comics are built around repetition of the same figure; on a given page, Peter will draw WW over and over again. The panel borders separate these images; each is each, identity in its place. But when WW needs to cast off her transcendence, the panel borders collapse, and suddenly two images of her occupy the same delimited space.
Once they are embodied together, Diana and Diana can touch — a self-caressing which opens the way for love — and not only of one another (or of one as another). Marcus noted that affection between women was seen as aiding, not hindering, love between men and women; similarly, Irigary sees women’s duality as opening into multiplicity.
So woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural….woman has sex organs more or less everywhere.
Again, the sequence here embodies the movement from two to many. The duality of Diana and Diana is multiplied on one page as they talk from panel to panel, so that we see, not just the one Diana that is two, but doubled Diana’s multiplying profligately. And then, inevitably, in the sixth panel, the one Diana replaces the other Diana while the other Diana is replaced in the frame by Steve.
A female self-caressing self opening to love for another; that’s a metaphor for motherhood. And indeed, Diana, incarnated as a nurse, treats Steve with matriarchal affection.
“Be a good boy now and keep quiet.” Diana’s love of Steve isn’t (just) romantic love, and isn’t (just) divine love — it’s the love of a mother for a child.
Paradise Island is a matriarchal heaven, and if WW is a Christ figure — and I think she is — then she remains a female Christ figure. And what’s perhaps most interesting about that is how easily it fits into Boesel/Kierkegaard’s formulation. WW does not need to overawe Steve with her transcendent power, challenging him to become a superdick like her. Instead, she lowers herself to him, showing her transcendent power through the servitude of love. The transcendent matriarch becomes human precisely to change bedpans. That’s what divine love is. That’s the point.
In this context, too, Marston’s obsession with loving submission, his conviction that women are superior to men because they know how to submit, and his determination to show WW’s power by tying her up, starts to make more sense.
Submission is godlike, especially submission to Marston’s ultimate authority, Aphrodite, the god of love. Because, as Christ and Nietzsche and lots of superheroes agree, the alternative to worshipping love is worshipping power. Marston’s WW isn’t a bifurcated, tormented child striving for an unattainable transcendent Oedipal Uberfatherness. She is bifurcated, but the way Christ is bifurcated, between human and divine, or the way a mother is split between herself and the child that comes from her. Wonder Woman’s not a superdick, but the super sex-which-is-not-one, which opens like a wound, giving birth to love. She sets aside her power to become a servant of that love, and, as they say in the comics…to save us all!
I’m a huge fan of Sharon Marcus’ book Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. I’ve already discussed the book in a couple of posts (here and here.) But I thought it would be fun to speak to Sharon herself, and she kindly agreed to an interview. We talked at the end of January about fashion, superheroes in speedos, gay and lesbian identity, Victorian pornography, Freud, and, of course, Wonder Woman.
Noah: So, just to get started and maybe let readers know something of what your book, Between Women, is about, I’m going to try to crassly summarize your main point. That main point being that in Victorian England, erotically charged relationships between women were not seen as necessarily lesbian nor as necessarily anti-heterosexual. On the contrary, such relationships were expected and even encouraged, and were considered an essential part of being a heterosexual women. Is that a reasonable two sentence description of what you were getting at, or have I butchered it?
Sharon Marcus: No, I thought that was very reasonable two sentence description. I think that what I would like to throw into the mix as really important is that, there are a lot of relationships that we now group together, including erotically charged ones, which were not necessarily grouped together by the Victorians. It seems that both feminists and people who aren’t very interested in feminism since the 70s see relationships as being on a spectrum of female intimacy. I don’t think the Victorians thought about things that way. They gave a lot more social centrality to female friendships than we now do, in the culture.
Even when I read contemporary sociology about female friendships, the literature was surprisingly scant, and not very specific about the gender of friendships. And when I found examples of people in Victorian England encountering women who were clearly in quasi-marital relationships that seemed somewhat sexual, pretty overtly because one of the partners was somewhat masculine, a lot of people reacted in a fairly blasé way to that which really surprised me. So I was surprised both that they recognized the relationship and that they weren’t that upset by it. Because what I had always heard about the Victorian attitude towards lesbianism was complete denial, ignorance, impossibility of believing it could even exist, or when confronted with incontrovertible proof, total scandalous shock.
What I ended up getting really interested in was that because there wasn’t this clear-cut category of the lesbian which came about with the rise of sexology and psychoanalysis— you know, in the 20th century the category of the homosexual was probably too well-defined. Because there wasn’t that, it meant that there was a lot more play in the relationships between women and in the relationship of women to imagery of women. So the fashion plates that I ended up looking at a lot seemed to be making it part of the community to look at women in a fairly objectifying way. Not just as part of objectifying oneself, but that this was what fashion was about.
Women checking each other out in a Victorian fashion plate.
Fashion was about fetishizing clothing, but it was also about fetishizing the women wearing the clothing. And what I ended up looking at was the similarity between pornography, which was probably written primarily for men, but which had a lot of sex between women. It’s not that different [in that sense] than pornography today, though, in some ways, Victorian pornography was really different from porography today. But there was the same kind of objectification of women, aggressivity of women towards women, intense interest in focusing on specific body parts.
Also the pornography, a lot of the Victorian pornography I found was really obsessed with clothing, which surprised me. They just weren’t obsessed with taking clothing off and nudity and exposure, but they were really obsessed with the latest style, and lace, and what sort of skirt someone was wearing, there was a whole subcategory of pornography that was about corseting. And there were incredible overlaps between pornography and fashion, both in terms of the fetishization, but also, fashion magazines. There was one fashion magazine that for almost two years published letters to the editor about corporal punishment of children, that were really graphic and in many cases overtly tittilated and titillating. And these were later reprinted separately, and the British library now categorizes them as pornography.
So that was a case of literal overlap. And I think the basic link is just an obsession with the body and its impulses. The presentation of the body to others, and how one perceives, and a real emphasis on the visual framing and control and pleasure that bodies can provide. But this was a case where it’s a publication for women to which women are contributing, and that is filled with women.
But it wasn’t what I would call lesbian.
Right, you’re saying that it was women appreciating women and that being part of their heterosexual identity.
And there was no perceived contradiction there. So you asked the question about fashion imagery today and its homoeroticism. And yes, there is a lot of homoeroticism in fashion imagery today. And there’s actually a great article by Diana Fuss which was on my mind while I was researching my book, and I think it’s called Fashion and the Female Homospectatorial Look, it came out in Critical Inquiry 20 years ago now. And she talks a lot about the fashion imagery of the 70s and 80s and early 90s, and the way that it’s playing on desire and identification, and the kind of twinning of women that takes place in a lot of contemporary fashion imagery that shows two women together.
Gwen Loos & Pauline van der Cruysse for Vogue Turkey November 2010 by Mariano Vivanco
But one of the things you ask was, well, is that really different now , now that there is a visible gay rights movement. And I would say, absolutely. And there’s where I can only speculate, I don’t feel like I know enough to say with any certainty what’s going on. But first of all fashion is a very gay world, a very gay male world. So that’s kind of an interesting wrench in the works, because what we usually say is that these kind of images of women together are a heterosexual male fantasy. And I don’t know about the fashion photographers, but certainly the fashion world, I don’t think anyone would claim that it’s dominated by heterosexual men, nor that it’s trying to appeal to heterosexual men.
Right, it’s trying to appeal to heterosexual women mostly, right?
Right, and I think playing too on the affinities there are between heterosexual women and gay men. Especially when it comes to these areas of life that a lot of straight men pretend not to care about, or genuinely don’t care about. You know everyone says that women don’t dress for their men in their lives, who don’t notice or care that much what they’re wearing. Again that’s not always true, but as a generalization it’s what circulates.
But I do think that now those images are always playing with a certain kind of transgressive charge. Like the one that you sent which wasn’t just lesbian, but was Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. So, you know, it’s a black woman and a white woman…
Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, Vogue Paris February 2008
And I think fashion since probably the 60s has become more of a site of potential rebellion or, I mean it remains incredibly conformist, by definition. It’s about being in style and doing what you’re told to be doing this year. But I think there started coming into play in the 60s a certain kind of rebellion or hipness or esotericness, being part of an avant-garde which you see shaping the imagery.
And that was interesting, too, to realize that in the Victorian period, fashion was really much more conventional. And also to see that instead of mothers and daughters fighting about whether the daughters could be in fashion…because now the sense I have is that mothers are shocked by what’s in style a lot of the time and tell their daughters, “No! You can’t dress like that.” When you read about conflict in the Victorian period, it’s about daughters who don’t want to be in style, and mothers saying you have to dress this way, this is what’s expected of us in society.
But more of the time you just got the sense that it was a real bond between the older and younger generation. There wasn’t the same sense of fashion defining a generation and creating generational conflict the way there is now. And part of the main source of generational conflict between parents and children is sex. So fashion is supposed to be sexy, it’s how you show that you’re sexy. And it seemed that non-normative sexualities can sometimes read as more sexy than mainstream ones.
I kind of wonder, it seems like there’s some of what you were talking about going on still. I mean lots and lots and lots of women, women who don’t necessarily want to be all that transgressive and women who do, just lots of women read fashion magazines, right? And they’re all about looking at images of fetishized women. So there still is this important component of being a heterosexual women which is about appreciating the fetishized bodies of other women, and which isn’t necessarily always about lesbianism at all.
I think the real question now is whether for the millions of women— I just watched the September Issue [a documentary about Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue] and it was actually really interesting, because it was a glimpse into how they put together the issue [which is the biggest of the year]…and they were clearly trying to find a story. Because there’s not a lot of suspense. You know that the September issue came out. You can’t sit there worrying about whether they’re actually going to put the issue together.
And a lot of it is about how mean and cold and harsh Anna Wintour is , trying to get some traction around that, but in fact it’s clear that although everyone around her is nervous because she’s the big boss, they also kind of worship her and think she’s amazing. But she’s the editor-in-chief, but she also has a creative director, a woman named Grace [Coddington], who is about the same age she is, and is a former model, and she is the vision behind a lot of the images.
So that was interesting to me, to see that although most of the photographers are men, there’s this women in her 50s, practically 60s, who is really kind of masterminding what the shoots are going to look like, and she loves looking at these models. At one point she refers to a husband, so presumably she identifies as straight.
I think the question now is what’s on women’s minds when they sit, millions of women, who presumably many of them think of themselves as mainstream, not just heterosexual, but mainstream, what’s on their mind as they turn page after page after page of these incredibly erotic images of women. Are they disavowing and denying that there’s any kind of lesbian thing going on? Are they actually enjoying it and perfectly aware that they’re enjoying it? I don’t know how they think about it.
I mean for writing about the Victorian period, I kind of have the convenient problem that there’s no way I can go back and ask the subjects what they’re thinking. I could read what people wrote about fashion and it just…even when there were these sexual scenarios erupting in their fashion magazines, they didn’t seem to take that and extend it to the rest of the imagery that was in the magazine. They just seemed blissfully unaware that there could be a specifically lesbian sexual subtext to any of this. And that in a way licensed the images in becoming that much more erotic.
I don’t know what is on women’s minds now. I mean, I’m a lesbian, so I look at these images as a lesbian. And I do wonder, how are other people experiencing these. And some of them are so overtly sexual, and I think in some other contexts might disturb the readers of the magazine.
from Vogue Paris
But in this context, the fashion context makes it safe, possibly because what the fashion context says is that this is about identification, not desire. But part of the whole creation of a visible lesbian identity is that it gives people a way to cordon off identification and desire. Though in my opinion they’re always blended together and it’s really really hard to say where one stops and the other starts. But they tell themselves they’re different, because identification is what you do if you just like dressing up and looking at pretty pictures of half-naked ladies, but desire is just if you’re a lesbian.
So I found your book because I googled Between Women, because I was trying to find a book that addresses what Eve Sedgwick addresses in her book Between Men, but in terms of women. When I was reading your book, it seems like you are using Eve Sedgwick’s theories, but that you’re kind of moving away from Freud. Because you’re sort of arguing that it isn’t repressed homoerotic….
I think it depends. I’ll free associate in honor of Freud, and say the various things Freud meant to me in writing this book.
The biggest concept would be the concept of repression, and the idea that sexuality is always repressed. And that can be a kind of effective circular definiion. You can argue that if it wasn’t repressed then it wasn’t sexuality. But that seems to be assuming what you need to prove, and I think becomes too restrictive a definition. Some aspects of sexuality at a given moment in time and for a given person may be repressed, but that doesn’t mean that every erotic impulse and interest is necessarily repressed. And I think that in Victorian England, women’s interest in other women was not a huge site of repression. I think that what caused more problem was if a woman didn’t want to marry a man. But a woman who married a man but had children and also wanted to go to the skating rink and exclaim over the beauties of the young women skating around…
There’s the one anecdote in your book where a woman writes about how, if it was in line with propriety and the other women’s comfort she wished that the breast of the women she was looking at would pop out of her clothes.
Yes. Yes. And that woman was married as far as I can tell. I mean I read a lot of her diaries and letters, and it seemed like a pretty genuine marriage. There was no contradiction to her. I don’t think that she actually pursued sex with women. She just felt very comfortable having this erotic appreciation of other women. It didn’t cause an existential crisis for her.
So step one where I took a different tack from Feud was not equating sexuality and repression.
Step two would be that I don’t think — I think he contradicts himself a lot and says a lot of different things in a lot of different places about masculine and feminine and whether everyone has a mixture of both, or whether everyone has a mixture of both in childhood but then as part of maturity has to become defined much more strictly as one gender rather than the other. He is really interested in castration as the way that gender gets understood, again, kind of contradictory, is that more important for men or really important for both sexes? He really I think sees there being two sexes and that that is very defining for people. And, of course along with castration he’s really interested in Oedipal dynamics, nad in the family as a source of prohibition, and that the family generates sexual desires which it then prohibits. That brings us back to repression, that being really really central. And I was interested in thinking outside of the family as the primary unit for defining, shaping, and containing sexuality. So that’s one place where I was not taking a Freudian perspective.
I think…there’s a book that came out a little bit before mine by Martha Vicinus, called Intimate Friendships, and she’s really interested at looking at how these relationships between women take on different kinds of family models. Like a maternal model, or a sororal model, or a husband-like model. And she definitely finds individual case studies that fit those rubrics. But she wasn’t’ really generalizing about a whole bunch of people. She was looking at a few specific cases, that I think she herself would say were kind of idiosyncratic. Which I don’t see her cases as necessarily as idiosyncratic as she did. I don’t see women who were in intimate relationship with other women as being so cut off from their society.
I think that I ended up getting very interested in things that did not seem to be particularly unconscious. And I guess we would say the main Freudian contribution is that a lot of what we feel and think is unconscious. I wouldn’t necessarily deny that, but it leads to this sort of assumption that for things to be really interesting they have to be hidden. And I found all kinds of interesting, wacky stuff that didn’t seem to be at all hidden. And that people had ignored because it didn’t have that charge of repression, so the critic and the analyst can come along and expose it. I was finding stuff that people were saying in diaries and letters that were meant for other people to read, that people were publishing in magazines, that they were writing in novels — one didn’t have to dig to find erotic desire between women.
And I think that in for Eve Sedgwick, it’s one of her early books, and I think she ended up moving away from this model, but she’s really looking at how Victorian society repressed erotic and sexual desire between men, and forced it to take the forms of either heterosexual exchange of women between men, or violence between men. Repressed desire can only surface as violence. Now I did find a lot of examples of aggression between women or between girls and these female objects of dolls, but again it didn’t seem like it was the manifestation of something that had been repressed, it just seemed like aggression. It seems like aggression is a fundamntal drive between people, and maybe even a fundamental part of eroticism, and it doesn’t seem to me like it’s a sign that something has been repressed.
It didn’t seem like the girls were fantasizing about whipping or being whipped by their dolls because they had no way to express their erotic desires for women. Because the whipping stories were already erotic — if they were supposed to be covering something up or serving as something that masked eroticism, they weren’t doing a very good job of it! And there were always these moments in these stories too where a girl would talk about an older woman in a very admiring or adoring way, or even talk about wanting to marry some woman. So it didn’t seem like any of this stuff was hidden, and perhaps because these were girls who were being discussed and they were so young, there wasn’t as much concern.
From Clara Bradford’s, Ethel’s Adventures in Doll Country, 1880, with sentient sticks for better chastisement. Reprinted in Between Women.
Though that was of course very surprising, because what I would have expected knowing what I know about the Victorian period from a select group of novels…I mean, I’ve read many Victorian novels, but it has to be said that one thing I found was that Victorian novels are not necessarily representative of anything except Victorian novels. There’s a whole other world of Victorian discourse that shows things and says things that don’t show up in novels. The Victorian novels would have led me to expect that girls were supposed to be sweet and not aggressive and not have any kind of sexual desire whatsoever or any kind of erotic expression, and that just turned out not to be the case. And of course these are books written by adults, not by girls themselves, but usually by women, so it was interesting to see that these women are perceiving all these things in little girls that are very very different than primarily male novelists or Victorian painters —who would paint these very saccharine sweet angelic looking little girls — were willing to think of as being part of girlhood.
So yeah, the violence between girls and their dolls doesn’t seem like it’s there because there’s no other way for girls to express affection for feminine objects. It seemed like just part of what it meant to be a girl.
So in arguing that this particular thing isn’t repression, that seems to call into question at least to some degree how much repression works in other areas as well, right? In terms of the repression of homosexual desire and whether that’s really a problem.
I don’t think it necessarily proves that Eve Sedgwick was wrong, because I do think that male sexuality and female sexuality were treated fairly differently. I think it comes as a little bit of a surprise, to me even, after haivng spent all this time with this material, to realize that in some ways male sexuality in the 19th century might have been more severely policed than female sexuality. At least same-sex eroticism. Because we’re used to thinking that men, especially middle-class and wealthy men, you know, there was a double sexual standard, they could have sexual experience before marriage, they could have extra-marital affairs, they could go to prostitutes. None of these things were really allowable for women. They would have caused women to be completely ostracized, whereas this kind of behavior in men was tolerated, even encouraged.
But it turns out that when it came to same-sex eroticism, I do think that men were more policed than women. And I don’t think Eve Sedgwick was…I think that was the intuition she was working with in a way, and some historical research has appeared since her work that suggests that it was actually true. And you know there is no female equivalent to the Oscar Wilde trials. Even though there were women, some of them fairly prominent activists, journalists and artists, who were in relationships with other women. But there wasn’t the same sense that your reputation could be utterly ruined by haivng your same-sex affairs exposed.
from The Queen, 1851, reprinted in Between Women
And partly there was a legal difference, in England anyway. Because it was criminal for men to have sex with each other. Sodomy was a capital crime and, while in the early modern period there were cases of sodomy between women, by the 19th century sodomy was understood as something that existed only between men.
One of the results of this is that your book is a lot cheerier, than Eve Sedgwick’s book. Because for you the erotic relationship between women, it’s all good. It’s good for everybody, right?
Yes. (laughs)
It’s good for women, because they get emotional benefits, but it doesn’t hurt men either, because it makes women more conventional, in some ways.
Yes, that was true of women’s erotic interest in one another, and …the only thing I would want to throw into the mix is that one of the things I ended up wanting to insist upon fairly strenuously was that female friendship, while it offered a lot of the physical intimacy and interest that we associate with eroticism, that female friendship was not the same as what was going on in the fashion magazines. In that female friendship was this very idealized category where women were kissing and hugging and writing each other these rapturous letters that now read like love letters — these relationships really were, many of them, were friendships.
And one of the things I was trying to point out too is that it’s complicated. You can’t read one letter that a woman sends to another and say, “oh here we see, just friendship,” or here we definitely see erotic interest. You have to look at the history and context of the relationship in the person’s life.
So I would say in terms of the cheery view, one of the things that I expected, that had been said a lot in the scholarship, was, oh, women’s friendships were marginalized and suppressed and demeaned. And there are a couple of people [in the Victorian period] who would say from time to time, women shouldn’t put too much energy into their friendships, or women’s friendships aren’t to be trusted. But in general I found this incredible idealization and glorification of female friendship and respect given to it, and that women actually made a lot of time for their friendships. Whether they were friendships with people they saw on a regular basis or friendships that were epistolary. I mean, one thing you come away with from this material was awe at the amount of time people had to write letters. I guess with our age of blogging and emails we probably are giving the Victorians a run for their money.
So female friendship wasn’t seen as competing with marriage. And women’s erotic interest wasn’t seen as competing with marriage. And there weren’t — because there wasn’t a movement of women who were interested in exclusive sexual relationships with women and avoiding relationships with men, those relationships weren’t seen as a threat either because they werne’t linked to a whole political challenge to the system of heterosexuality, even if the individual women in them did see them as challenging heterosexuality.
I just didn’t find a lot of evidence of anxiety.
You also say that there isn’t this anxiety among men, there isn’t this anxiety among women, but at the same time you were arguing that the existence of this sort of normalized erotiized bonds between women meant that women who were lesbian could form marriages. Essentially female marriages then were less controversial then than they are now.
Yes, female marriages didn’t seem as odd because in many ways they overlapped with relationships that the majority of married women had.
So one of the things I was going to ask Is — did the Victorians do better than we do in some sense in terms of their treatment of gay relationships?
I thought that question was very interesting. If I were asked if I would rather live then or now, no question I would pick now. Not only do we have contact lenses, running hot water, refrigeration…but I think that there’s…
Okay, sexual identity really fixed sexual identities are really constraining in a lot of ways, and also often very inaccurate. I know very few straight women who haven’t at some point has some sort of sexual experiment, affair, contact with at least one other women, often several, but they never really stop thinking of themselves as straight.
You may have some sample bias.
I don’t really care, but of course people tell me this stuff, because of who I am.
(laughs)
This is also, like when people were in their twenties, before they got married. I just think things are very fluid still for women, but it all has to be thought of in very different ways.
The way the Victorians had it better off I think is that they didn’t have to sit around torturing themselves with frankly rather inane questions like, am I a lesbian? Am I straight? Am I bisexual? On the other hand, I think it can be difficult not to have ways to organize your experience.
from Revue de la mode, 1885, reprinted in Between Women
I mean the women in female marriages seemed to find each other very easily, so there were these subcultures or networks of women who lived in Italy or lived in England, and a lot of time they were expatriates, and then if they went to Paris they knew who to look up. So they didn’t seem to be isolated — I mean that’s one of the things identities brought people in the twentieth century was a sense of community. But of course communities always end up foundering when they’re based on identity because people start policing the identity and if you step outside the defined boundaries of the identity it can be really problematic.
I think you see the same thing now with gay marriage; the way that the gay community is in some ways fissuring about the question of whether marriage is a permissible part of the gay identity or not. So that people who are really invested in queerness are kind of…I would almost say repulsed by the embrace of gay marriage among a lot of gay people, because they feel that was not what being gay was about. Being gay was about saying I’m going to defy institutions like marriage.
So I see all the negative baggage that comes with identity. I also see how being part of a group that form the start was defined by the mainstream in terms of stigma and deviance, has been kind of a mixed blessing.
But I don’t know, I think it’s in some ways I can’t even answer the question, because it’s hard for me to really imagine what it would like to be me living in this very very different time. I mean I could sort of establish a conceptual and sympathetic scholarly relationship with these people, but I don’t know who I would be if I were in Victorian times.
Well I think one of the things that’s interesting about it is — you could argue about whether the Victorians were better or whether it’s better now, but there was a period in the middle where it was clearly worse than either, right?
Yes.
I was reading John Boswell writing on gay Catholicism in the Middle Ages, and he was basically arguing that the worst time in history to be gay was like 1950 in the west.
Well, yeah, sure, being identified with Communists, perverts, pedophiles, probably serial killers — it’s interesting, because there’ve been periods in time when sodomites were identified with kind of the unthinkable, Satanic, bestial, the thing that’s so bad we can’t imagine. But no one actually thought of an actual person as being a sodomite. This was a point that Alan Bray made in his book on sodomy in early modern England. There’s all this discourse about sodomy as being the worst thing imaginable, so you can’t even imagine it. And then there are all these people writing about how John had sex in a closet with Tom. And they’re not connecting the dots. Why aren’t they connecting the dots? Because a sodomite couldn’t even be a person that you knew. You couldn’t put the two together.
Unfortunately, I think what happened around 1950 was — well I guess everyone had become so closeted that no one actually knew any gay people anymore, they didn’t know that they knew any gay people unless they themselves were gay. And then when you found out someone was gay, it was much easier to connect them to all this propaganda about how evil gay people were. So I think it was the combination of this association of gay people with a set of fears that were really panicking people and the intense closeting that was a response to all the witch hunts that were going on. And I do think that one of the real big things that changed all of that was people coming out more. It’s very, very difficult to really demonize people that you know. I mean, people have proved that they are quite capable of doing that under the right circumstances, but there really have to be circumstances.
And there we go back to the comparison between the Victorians and now. People couldn’t come out unless they come out as something, so there you need the identities. They’re limiting, they allow a group to be singled out, and generalized about in a way that the Victorians just didn’t do. But [identities] also limit what people…I don’t think most people feel comfortable acting on the range of their erotic impulses. Well sometimes that’s good….
(laughs)Well Freud would say that’s really good, right?
Because sometimes those impulses are destructive, but I think that in some ways, yes the Victorians were a little, unexpectedly, counterintuitively, were more sexually free than people are now. Maybe not sexually free, but erotically free. Because there wasn’t the same close connection we make now between erotic impulses and sexual identities.
I also wonder if it’s in some ways possible to sort of see the Victorians in this more positive light because things are…because Eve Sedgwick, part of what was going on with her, part of why it was such a grim view, was because she was writing during the AIDS epidemic, and it was really depressing. And I’m wondering if the fact that now we’re moving towards a place where most people think of marriage between women as okay — if that’s one of the things that makes it possible to recognize that the Victorians thought it was all right as well.
Well, I think it’s impossible to write about the past without being influenced by what’s going on in the present, and I think it was really interesting to me to see how in my lifetime, I’m 44, people had gone from being really incredulous about the existence even of actual lesbians, I mean, like really, is that even possible, what do they do? Side by side with the constant pornographic representation, usually not too accurate, but still it’s there, of what lesbians do. But there was this sense of unreality about lesbians, and maybe hyperreality about gay men.
How quickly people could move from that to, oh yeah, they get married now. Oh yeah, they have kids now. It took so little for people to be able to acknowledge the existence of something which a little while before they had thought of as completely unthinkable. So I definitely approached the Victorian period with a sense that what people thought was possible erotically or what people accepted or what people would or wouldn’t be shocked by could be very different from what I expected, and might be different from one decade to another or one group of people to another. Because I had seen how rapidly attitudes could shift.
So it wasn’t so much only that things had gotten better, but that things had changed so fast and so intensely in ways that you know that in the middle of the AIDS epidemic it didn’t seem possible that things could change that quickly, just as when it started it came out of nowhere. From the 70s being such a period of sexual celebration, and then all of a sudden there was a really huge health crisis going on.
So a lot of what the book is about over and over again is plasticity and mobility and elasticity and how much things can change. And I had definitely lived through that. I hope we don’t live to see things take a massive turn for the worse. But experience says it could happen. It could definitely be something on the horizon.
So getting towards the end maybe I’ll force you to talk about comics. I gave you that link to the post about the superhero swimsuit issue, with the beefcake — which presumably was mostly for men, and in fact, superheroes in general are male fetishized bodies to be observed by men. And that is more or less okay as part of a heterosexual identity — you take some flak for it, so maybe it’s not entirely ok, but mostly ok. So obviously male homosexuality and lesbianism are different, but I wondered if you felt like there was a parallel there.
There definitely seemed like a parallel — it seemed like there were multiple parallels, which made it a parallel. There are these exaggerated bodies that are rendered in ways that are on the one hand are kind of realistic, I mean there’s sort of a photographic aesthetic going on, but the bodies are completely unrealistic, like the bodies of women in fashion plates of the Victorian period — no one could have certain features of those bodies.
by June Brigman and Tom Palmer from the Marvel Superheroes Swimsuit Special
And this is clearly for a male audience, and a male audience that has to be very mixed. I read a lot of the comments, and I know that physique magazines were ways that — the audience for physique magazines in the 50s was a very gay audience, and it was a way to sort of send material through the male that looked like it wasn’t gay.
from Tomorrow’s Man, a 1950s-1960s physique magazine
You know that the guy who drew Superman was sort of really into body building magazines.
Didn’t he also have a whole set of fetish drawings? I saw that book….?
I thought that was really interesting…
So, on the one hand you could say that there’s a double audience. Yes, this is for people who really think of themselves overtly as having gay desires, and then it’s for a straight audience that is just into superheroes. But I think that what is also going on is that it’s for the double audience in each of us. It’s for the gay guy who wants to be into this pretty straight thing of the super-hero, and for the straight guy who’s into superheroes, but, you know, who enjoys looking at these pictures of men with their huge muscles and their bulging speedo bathing suits.
by Jae Lee
And you don’t have to, really more for the straight guy than the gay guy, but you don’t have to have an existential crisis about it the way you would if you were looing at something that was more overtly gay. And also it’s not overtly gay in the sense that it’s not images of men having sex with each other. And I think that’s an interesting difference too. Enjoying looking at pictures of sexualized bodies, it feels different to a lot of people I think than looking at pictures of people having sex, which at this moment in time it’s really easy to find also.
Right. Just a click away.
Yes. (laughs) Hard to avoid them sometimes.
Is there a parallel with the Victorians at all, in terms of there being heterosexual males expressing or being allowed to express desire for other heterosexual males and having that reify their heterosexual identity rather than calling it into question?
Well, in the Victorian period there definitely is a lot of the painting and the photography, there’s a lot of imagery of beautiful men. And people have often glossed over that in talking about the way the body is represented in the 19th century as if only female bodies were represented, but that’s just not the case. And a lot of people producing the imagery of beautiful men were men. Some of them were gay, some of them were not. The audience for this imagery was huge, and so has to have included people of all kinds.
I definitely found a lot of examples of young men talking openly about their admiration for — you know, men in our equivalent of high school or even college — talking about how beautiful another man was or how much they love him, or how jealous they are because he seems to be more interested in some other guy than in him, and it’s not always clear to me, and I didn’t do the kind of in-depth research that might give me a chance to clarify — whether they were talking about someone with whom they were having some kind of physical sexual relationship with, or whether it was just this romanticized friendship that women have with each other. Although I think Eve Sedgwick was right about the cases she was looking at and about the culture in general, I think that even for the Victorians and despite there being more repression of male homoeroticism, it wasn’t completely repressed, and there were male friendships that had a real erotic component.
In terms of pornography I would say, for highly sexual imagery — well comics are not, I mean nobody thinks of speedo bathing suits as pornography — it would just be a comic. I mean you wouldn’t get nervous if you were a teenaged boy buying that in a store, right?
Probably not.
Because Victorian pornography was much less visual. It was much more textual. And the thing I really noticed when I was reading it was how polysexual it was. It was almost as though the convention of it was, okay, now we’re going to have the men having sex, and now we’re going to have the women having sex, and what was really noticeable and very different from now was that so much of it was about family members having sex with each other. Now the uncle and his nephew are going to have sex, now the aunt and niece are going to have sex, now the brother and sister are going to have sex.
That exists now too…
But it’s a niche now.
You know where it has historically been a bigger deal recently is Japan. There’s a…
I know there’s stuff about mothers and sons, I read this…
That’s a fabulous book. That was one of the best books…I read that when I was doing the research for Between Women and I didn’t really get to use it that much, but I thought that was a really really great book.
So I think part of my answer has to be, hmmm, I don’t know, because I didn’t focus on men. I mean in that sense I presumed some of the gender differences that in a way I ended up saying might not have existed, but I had to limit what I was doing somehow. So I think that there are other people that could answer that better than I can. But I know that there are a lot of images of St. Sebastian, and he was kind of a gay icon and they were sort of prized among gay men.
Saint Sebastian by Titian, 1570
But they were hanging in museums and showing everywhere and nobody was saying take that down. It was something that all male art critics and all the men who would go to art galleries would look at. And I think that there were plenty of statues of men, basically the neo-classical equivalent of superheores in speedos, I think that was as common in statuary as images of women. It depends on the country of course, so France seemed to show a bit more of a predilection of images of women. And then in the 19th century there’s sort of less and less imagery of men.
I mean, one of the famous Victorian boys books of the 19th century, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, it’s all about boys worshiping each other, and that book was seen as one of the key contributions to the Victorian discourse of manliness. So boys’ adventure fiction would be another place I would like, a guy named David Agruss has been writing a lot about the homoeroticism of Victorian boys’ adventure fiction. So I think there’s definitely sites like this, sites that seem to be the sort of ne plus ultra of masculinity, of heterosexual masculinity that are so involved with masculinity and so interested in masculinity that they end up being also homoerotic.
Which Eve Sedgwick would say would get them in trouble, but which seemed to not necessarily have done so.
I don’t think the authors of boys’ adventure fiction were getting in trouble.
I was winding the conversation up, but Sharon brought up Lost Girls…so we decided to talk about that a bit.
I was surprised actually that Lost Girls hasn’t come up.
Oh yeah? Have you read that?
Yeah.
What did you think?
I didn’t know it existed while I was writing Between Women and then in 2008 I was actually in Paris on leave for a couple of months and I decided I wanted to engage with an aspect of French culture that I had not engaged with before. So I thought, French movies aren’t what they used to be and I’d seen enough of — I mean, I still went to a lot of movies, but there was another time before that I had been in Paris that I think I went to a movie every night.
So I thought what is there? It’s not going to be pop music, that’s just going to be too depressing. So I thought, oh they’re so into the bande desinee…and in the meantime I had of course read more graphic novels and things like that. And I would frequent these various comic book stores, which were really pretty inspiring and they would have a lot of American stuff. And they had Lost Girls which is British not American right, and I was like — what is this, I’ve never seen this before.
And I think of it as a great retort to A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which is — there are a lot of neo-Victorian literature that one of the main things it does is try to go back and imagine, well, if we were to rewrite all these Victorian stories and put sex into them, what would they be like? So that’s what A.S. Byatt, and that’s what Sarah Waters does, really trying to imagine what lesbian Victorian stories would be. And I really like the idea [in Lost Girls] of taking these actual fictional characters and imagining sex lives for them. And I was really pleased on all levels to see how much lesbian sex there was in there.
(laughs)
It really was like a Victorian pornographic world, because it was just like, let’s go for every configuration possible.
from Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
So you liked it.
Yeah, I did.
I mean I wasn’t — I’m not a comics critic, so I wasn’t trying to have a really critical take on it, but I found it sort of delightful. Like Alice and Dorothy and Wendy get together, and have a kind of Bocaccio you know Sadeian exchange of stories and sex that just goes on and on and on
It’s interesting because that book is all about the evils of repression.
Well, that’s true…
Right, I mean the idea is that if you — not just if you have sex but if you talk about sex…pornography will free your soul.
Mmm-hmm, mm-hmm right. Yeah. Well, I think I have enough of a late 80s legacy in me that I think, sure, I don’t believe completely in sexual repression and therefore can’t believe in sexual liberation, but I do think that expanding the sexual discourse that we have is better than the alternative, which is closing it down. And I felt that the book — it felt like it had a different sensibility to me than a lot of stuff you read, and so I enjoyed that. That aspect of it.
Did you know that Alan Moore was in a unconventional — he was in a long term relationship with two women.
No — I didn’t know that. Polyamory?
Yes, they were in a polyamorous relationship, which ended when they dumped him. And then the woman he did the — Melinda Gebbie who did the art is his sweetie now. Then and still.
No, I didn’t know that. Nor did I know that, if I’m remembering correctly from your blog, that the creator of Wonder Woman was with two bisexual women. Two bisexual women who were like his roommates?
No, one of them was his wife and one of them was his lover, and he had kids by both of them, and then after he died — he died of I think lung cancer relatively young, and the family stayed together after he died, the two women stayed together until they died. He was an odd fellow.
It’s so interesting to me — it’s not surprising there there are all these varieties of relationship and there are billions of people in the world, so if there are even hundreds of thousands of really distinctive kinds of relationship it’s not necessarily statistically significant for the sociologist. But what is interesting is that people who are in relationships that are so different from what we think is the norm are able to create these culturally central characters and narratives and imagery that a whole bunch of people who might feel really alienated form these people’s life choices can embrace and identify with. It’s kind of like the Rock Hudson phenomena.
The interesting thing about it too, especially for Marston, saying that he was able to create this very popular character despite his kinks — isn’t really right. I mean it’s because of them.
Yeah, no, I wasn’t saying despite his kinks. The “despite” part that you’re hearing is that I think if you polled everyone who’s ever enjoyed Wonder Woman, what do you think of polyamory, a lot of them might be like, “oh not for me,” or “I wouldn’t want anything to do with that,” or “I’m against that.” But then…and it’s not like Wonder Woman was about that, but there must have been some relationship between his life and what he was…
She was totally about his kinks. I mean, it’s kind of insane.
I loooove Wonder Woman.
Have you seen the early stories?
No… I’m not that knowledgeable.
She gets tied up like every other panel.
Yeah…
I remember being a little kid and wasn’t the Lone Ranger always getting tied up? I think he was always getting tied up. Maybe it’s a theme in comics in general.
It’s way more in Wonder Woman — you know he has her getting tied up, and there’s all this very — there are lesbian relationships which are not especially repressed, and there’s all this cross-dressing and there’s — oh, there’s the one story where the Amazon ritual is that they dress up as deer and then they hunt each other and then when they get caught they get put in these giant dishes, and they pretend to eat each other.
Oh my god.
from Wonder Woman #3, William Marston and Harry Peter
Yeah, it’s crazy. He was nuts. And it was great. He was a genius. But it’s really — this is for under 8 year old girls.
Wonder Woman #22 was probably the worst one of Marston/Peter’s run…so bad, in fact, that I wondered whether significant parts of it might not have been ghosted.
Issue #23 is much better. It’s not one of the series high points — and notably, like 22, it has three short stories rather than one long epic, a change which I presume must be related to Marston’s sickness (he actually died of cancer in May 1947, which is this issue’s cover date.) Still, whether Marston was writing shorter stories on his death bed, or whether these are leftover scripts that he had lying about unpublished (and they can’t be too old, because they’re post-war) the result is perfectly acceptable, if not great.
As the Holiday girl there in the lower right indicates, the first story is a paradise island adventure. All the more welcome since Harry Peter seems to be in fine form; that picture of WW sitting on the telephone wires waiting for her robot plane with the buildings slanting down vertiginously in the background is pretty fantastic.
Anyway in this story Amazons are disappearing from paradise island’s beach. This gives Hippolyta a chance to watch as her viewfinder presents her with a Perils of Pauline moment:
Anyway, the viewfinder breaks inopportunely, shattered by a bolt from Odin, whose Valkyries are flying down to Paradise Island to kidnap Amazons. Why you ask? Well….
Odin has captured heroes (i.e. veterans) and wants them to go to earth to incense others to fight. But the heroes are tuckered out; all they want to do is sleep. Since his Valkyries can’t get the men to fight, Odin tells them to kidnap Amazons so *they* can get the heroes to go to war again.
As usual with Marston, the gender politics are delightfully convoluted. Obviously, the main instigator of warfare is the sadistic male patriarch, Odin. But the male “heroes” are shown throughout as being soft, manipulable, and not especially violent — they need a strong female hand if they’re going to be effective fighters. So in some sense it’s really women who are the embodiment of military virtues.
The funniest panel here is the bottom one, where the male heroes claim to be sick of being ruled by women “who want us to fight” — the implication being that they’re perfectly happy to be ruled by women who don’t want them to fight.
The rest of the page is interesting as well, though; the Valkyries have encased WW and Amazons and Holiday Girls in energy to trap them and turn them into Valkyries themselves. The purple energy happens in this case to look like the outline of Russian dolls…and of course, standing stock still in their various outfits, the transforming women look more than a little like dolls themselves (with special wing attachments!) I talked about the connection between Wonder Woman and doll stories before. In this case, the Valkyries eroticized dominance/appreciation of the Amazons is both about enjoying femininity *and* enjoying martial virtues. In fact, there’s barely an *and* there; for Marston, the more effectively militant you are, the more feminine you are (at least if you’re a woman.)
Which is why, in the middle right pane abovel, Aphrodite emphasizes that WW and the Holiday Girls are “courageous, loving girls” — the point being that courage and loving femininity go together. The natural conclusion is shown in the bottom left panel, where Odin, the supposed wargod, just gives up and offs himself (throwing down his phallic sword) when WW robs him of his Valkyries.
That page is pretty great in other ways as well, with winged Holiday girls and winged Amazons flying about with sky kangas and that magnificently phallic spaceship that Steve is piloting. I especially like the way the spaceship in the upper left panel mirrors the motion of the sky kanga in the upper right — as if the ubermaleness is just an image of, or subsumed within, the undulating sea of femininity. Maleness seems part of the harmonious whole of femininity rather than an opposition to it.
I also love that middle left panel; the scribbly sky-kangas and the valkyries being tied up here and tied up there, with scale all off-kilter so everybody looks like paper doll cutouts. This is definitely one of Peter’s most Henry Darger moments.
And as long as I’m gushing about Peter — check out this horse.
Or this bizarre backlit Etta as femme fatale from the second story.
This weird Egyptian ghost rising from the tomb is pretty fantastic too….
And how about this ancient Egyptian headgear?
Storywise there’s not a whole lot going on here; Marston makes some noises about the evil dangers of superweapons and generally suggests he doesn’t want the world to go to war again. It’s fine…but the art is definitely the main thing here.
The third story is the most interesting of the lot. It’s a tale from WW’s childhood, explaining the origin of the giant sky kanga’s. Also, incidentally, it lets us know that before there were sky kangas, the Amazons rode on giant bunnies. What is the origin of the giant bunnies? That, alas remains a mystery….
As always, Peter’s animal drawings are something special. The lines of the giant bunny and the giant kanga flow sensuously; the whole page is filled with sensuous curves. And the sensuousness adamently includes the prepubescent Wonder Woman herself; her short frilly flared red dress placed in the center of the composition.
In Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Sharon Marcus argues that the eroticization of female children was a common iconographic trope of Victorian fashion illustration, as well as of Victorian society more broadly.
Victorian culture represented girls as epistemological paradoxes, so innocent that they could be intensively eroticized without raising comment. But unlike images and stories that eroticized girls for a mixed audience of men and women, fashion imagery displayed girls in erotic dynamics with adult women for the delctation of a female audience. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the intensification of family ties in the nineteenth century also sexualized them, and fashion plates show that in the process all cross-generational ties were eroticized, including those between adult women and girls…. Designed to be objects of an appreciative female gaze inside and outside the image, girls in fashion plates also embody a desire to look at and touch a woman, a desire figured as both self-abasing and self-important.
Marston reproduces this dynamic even more self-consciously than the fashion plates:
WW’s “childish tricks” (involving, essentially, disrobing at super-speed before her mother), lead Hippolyta to remember her daughter’s actual childhood. The eroticized affection between mother and daughter is then displayed (via film) for the delectation of an all-female audience.
In her discussion of the Victorians, Marcus follows her look at fashion illustration with an analysis of debates about corporal punishment in women’s magazines of the period. Said debates involved numerous women writing to the magazines to describe, in detail, their own experiences with corporal punishment — descriptions which dwelt on the removal of clothes, the physical sensations of whipping and being whipped, and other immodest details. All of this, according to one magazine editor “aroused…intense, not to say passionate interest.”
Here’s one letter which Marcus quotes.
I put out my hands, which she fastened together with a cord by the wrists. Then making me lie down across the foot of the bed, face downwards, she very quietly and deliberately, putting her left hand around my waist, gave me a shower of smart slaps with her open right hand…. Raising the birch, I could hear it whiz in the air, and oh, how terrible it felt as it came down, and as its repeated strokes came swish, swish, swish on me!
Marcus notes that “Corporal punishment is where pornography, usually considered a masculine affair, intersects with fashion magazines targeted at women.” She adds that “flagellation scenarios represented, interpellated, and excited women as well as men, and that the power differences inherent in scenes of discipline and punishment were erotically charged in any gender configuration.”
So here’s some scenes of the young WW being disciplined as little girls ought.
That upper right panel, in particular, eroticizes the adult mother and the child daughter in exactly the same way; both are bound side by side, with Peter’s stylized drawing and the wrappings deemphasizing the age difference; they look like different sized dolls rather than like mother and daughter.
Peter emphasizes the connection, and the parallel fetishization, of mother and daughter in other ways as well:
Mother and daughter both attack in the same way; leaping up to grab the antagonist by the neck. And in both cases, the attack is, I’d argue, fetishized; Hippolyta’s straight posed stiffness emphasizes the curves of her dress and of her breast. In the second sequence, Peter shows us, in both panels, WW’s underwear beneath that short miniskirt.
In addition, of course, any display of female power is eroticized for Marston, as is any display of female disempowerment. As with the corporal punishment fantasies Marcus describes, the woman empowered and the woman disempowered are both subjects of the fantasy. So it’s as exciting to see WW in the cage as to see her breaking out of it:
Note in the bottom left panel that we see her underwear again…and that her crotch is level with her mother’s face. The energized swoops of motion lines; the violent rescue of the damsel in distress — this is a typical erotic fantasy, not any the less so because it involves daughter/mother rather than hero/heroine.
You see it again here; the Amazon being unwrapped is decidedly butch; her shoulder-width emphasized by the narrowing of her lower body caused by the wrapping. Young WW, with her dress flaring up as always, is decidedly femme. But in this case the femme is rescuing the butch, rather than the other way around — a role reversal which I’m certain Marston appreciated.
And speaking of role reversals:
The sky riders who the Amazons initially assumed were men are, as it turns out, masked women. Thus Aphrodite’s law preventing men from setting foot on Paradise Island is not broken. Or, to put it another way, men are not the defilers of Aphrodite’s virgin soil — women are. Inevitably, the sky raiders are stripped to their underwear and bound under the watching eyes of the Amazon. In defeat, the powerful men are feminized — though, since this is Marston, the feminization is actually their triumph, as they will now (eventually) become reeducated and made Amazons (better than any man!)
Marcus notes that the Victorians created eroticized images of and narratives about women for women. The fashion plates allowed women to experience powers and pleasures around control and consumption of female bodies that were, in other areas, reserved for men. In a somewhat analagous way, it’s worth pointing out that the eroticization of children in WW is meant to be consumed primarily, not by adults, but by children. The hints of adult pleasure, power, dominance, and submission, leavened with childish adventure and playfulness — the very things that made Frederic Wertham choke up his soup — were, I’d guess, exactly the features which appealed to children of every gender.
