Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism — Links Page

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My book, Wonder Woman: Feminism and Bondage in the Marston/Peter Comics is coming out January 14, 2015 (that’s the official release day; availability may vary a bit from place to place.) I’m going to use this page to house links to interviews, reviews, and so forth.

Excerpts

A color gallery of images discussed in the book.

The Atlantic has an excerpt adapted from the book’s intro.

Purchase Copies

Rutgers (20% discount here!)

Amazon

Google Play

Barnes and Noble

Interviews (most recent first)

Nell Minow interviewed me for Huffington Post.

Tara Burns interviewed me for Vice.

Catherine Kustanczy interviewed me for Mic (and did a review of the book, too.)

Suzette Chan interviewed me at Sequential Tart.

Lauren Davis interviewed me at io9.

Paul Semel at his site.

Alex Deuben at Comic Book Resources.

Arielle Bernstein interviewed me at the Rumpus.

On KPCC’s The Frame (audio and text)

Reviews (most recent first)

Anita McDaniel reviewed my Wonder Woman book at the American Journal of Communications.

Chris Reyns-Chikuma at Belphegor.

Joan Ormrod at Cinema Journal (behind paywall.)

Peter Tupper discusses my arguments about Wonder Woman and bondage.

Kent Worcester at Portside says nice things about my book at the end of this review.

Brian Patton in the Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels (paywalled, but you can see the first bit.)

Jancy Richardson at Movie Pilot puts together an article of my Vice quotes on Wonder woman and the coming kinky matriarchal utopia.

Cia Jackson has a review at The Comics Grid.

Irene Javors has a review at The Gay & Lesbian Review.

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela at Public Books.

Matthew Cheney at the Mumpsimus.

Joan Hilty at Wellesley’s Women’s Review of Books.

Liz Baudler at New City.

Aimee Levitt with a brief review and a preview of a reading.

Jeff Hill recommends the book for comics studies and women’s history classes. (Listen up, academics!)

Sheryl Kirby reviews my book and Jill Lepore’s together.

Tim Hanley at The Comics Journal. (Tim had a little more to say at his blog here.

Suzette Chan at Sequential Tart.

Emily Ballaine at Publik/Private reviews the book and thinks about comics as art and bondage as feminism.

Sean Kleefeld at Freaksugar (rates the book 9 out of 10!)

Publisher’s Weekly Review

Monika Bartyzel mentions my book in a piece on the upcoming Wonder Woman film.

Articles by me on Wonder Woman (most recent first)

On why Wonder Woman needs her Lasso of Control back. (New Republic)

On how copyright restrictions made writing about Wonder Woman difficult. (Pacific Standard)

On William Marston as male feminist. (Ravishly.com)

On publishing my book and being plunged into a neurotic fugue of terror. (Splice Today)

On the trauma of having Jill Lepore write your book. (Chronicle of Higher Education)

On Wonder Woman, Bella from Twilight, and love as a superpower. (University of Chicago Magazine)

On Why Marston Would Approve Of Laverne Cox as Wonder Woman (Comic Book Resources)

On Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman. (Atlantic)

We don’t need no stinking Wonder Woman movie. (Wired)

Tim Hanley’s Wonder Woman: Unbound. (Salon)

Wonder Woman shouldn’t be a film sidekick. (Atlantic)

The patriarchal assholery of the Azzarello/Chiang Wonder Woman. (Atlantic)

The gayness of the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics. (Slate XX)

Wonder Woman Blogging

All HU pieces on Wonder Woman.

A roundtable celebrating the book release, including interviews, reviews, and more.

A roundtable on the last Marston/Peter Wonder Woman.

I blogged through every issue of the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman.

I look at post-Marston/Peter Wonder Woman, for better and (mostly) worse

Events (may be subject to change)

Wednesday, January 28, 6:00 PM
Signing at First Aid Comics
1617 E 55th St, Chicago, IL 60615

Thursday, February 26, 7:30 PM
Reading at Women and Children First
5233 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60640

Saturday, March 7, 6:00 PM
Reading at Indy Reads Books.
911 Massachusetts Avem Indianapolis, IN

Wednesday, March 11, 6:30 PM
Reading at 57th Street Books
1301 E 57th St, Chicago, IL 60637

Saturday, March 14, 2:00 PM
Reading at Urbana Free Library
210 W Green St, Urbana, IL 61801

Monday, March 23, 6:30 PM
Discussion with Sharon Marcus at The Institute for Public Knowledge
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, New York, NY

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Gazing At Wonder Woman

I belatedly read Philip Sandifer’s A Golden Thread: An Unauthorized Critical History of Wonder Woman earlier this week. As the title says, this is a blow by blow reading of basically every Wonder Woman comic-book iteration from Marston all the way on up through Azzarello. It’s similar in focus to Tim Hanley’s Wonder Woman Unbound — though Hanley lets his focus drift a bit more, talking about other female superheroes, talking in depth about the matriarchal theories held by Gloria Steinem’s circle, and generally trying to position Wonder Woman as an important cultural force, or at least a center of interest. Sandifer is more committed to close readings of the comics (and the occasional related media property).

In some ways, then, Sandifer’s book has the same problem as Hanley’s only more so; that problem being, it’s not entirely clear why anyone would want to do close readings of all Wonder Woman comics from the primordial ooze to the present, given that (a) they were mostly horrible, and (b) they weren’t at all popular. Why does anyone want to analyze the ways in which this particular unread piece of pulp detritus is mediocre? Why would anyone but hard core fans want to read it? It seems like Sandifer has consigned himself to a misty, bleak pop purgatory, following that golden thread into a bland, milk-covered bog.

Given that he’s in that bog, though, there’s something heroic about Sandifer’s determination to wade through it. The entire history of Wonder Woman comics doesn’t really deserve a decent chronicler, but Sandifer nevertheless determines to provide it with one. His writing throughout is elegant and entertaining and even, almost impossibly, passionate. His respectful, fair, and blistering denunciation of Gloria Steinem’s blinkered take on Wonder Woman, feminism, and (not least) trans people is a highlight, but it’s got lots of company, such as the brilliant discussion of Harry Peter’s art, tracing it to Victorian pornography and Beardsley. His readings hardly ever dovetail with mine; he thinks the I Ching era was exciting and ambitious; I think it was largely dreck; he thinks Greg Rucka brilliantly incorporated Wonder Woman’s history of bondage imagery into the Hiketeia; I think Greg Rucka is a humorless, pompous ass; he thinks Marston was an interesting creator but not a genius, etc. etc. But Sandifer always makes a stimulating case, and if I think his Greg Rucka is a lot smarter and more sensitive to the character’s hsitory than the real Greg Rucka — well, that just means I got to read and enjoy that Wonder Woman story Phil Sandifer wrote. If DC was smart (which they are not), they’d hire Sandifer to write their Wonder Woman comics for them.

Anyway, I thought I’d just quickly talk about one of Sandifer’s discussions which I found intriguing. In his analysis of the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series, he references Laura Mulvey, and notes that her ideas about the gaze seem to work uncomfortably well; Carter, he says, is consistently framed by a male gaze. For instance,”Shots in which the camera tracks the eye movements of male characters looking at Lynda Carter (whether as Wonder Woman or Diana Prince) are exceedingly common. Scenes where Diana and Steve talk in his office are routinely shot with the cameras positioned behind Steve’s desk.” Sandifer goes on:

Of course, Wonder Woman has always been overtly sexualized. Marston’s conception of her as a figure to which men would willingly submit is still based on the external idolization of women by men. But there’s an intrinsic difference between the sexualization of an ink drawing and the sexualization of an actual human being. Carnal desires projected on a page of ink necessarily exist entirely within the realm of imagination. The sexualization of Lynda Carter has an actual person as the object of desire.

Sandifer adds that Lynda Carter herself found the sexualization and objectification unpleasant; in a 1980 interview she said “I hate men looking at me and thinking what they think. And I know what they think. They write and tell me.”

Sandifer draws a distinction between Mulvey’s gaze and sexualization in comic books on the grounds that in film (or television) a real person there’s a real person being gazed at.

I think that’s an interesting take on Mulvey’s theory…but it’s not exactly the theory itself, at least as I understand it. Mulvey’s ethical argument against narrative cinema is not against the sexualization of people, but rather against the way that gender roles are inscribed through the power of the camera placement. I’m sure Mulvey would feel that Lynda Carter’s discomfort emphasizes and extends the criticism she was making…but the criticism doesn’t rely on that alone. Rather, Mulvey’s point was that narrative cinema inscribes men as the looker/doer, and women as the fetishized object of the gaze on whom the male looks/does. Narrative film is denigrated not because it makes individual actresses uncomfortable, but because it seduces its viewers to acquiesce in stereotypical and sexist gender roles.

And I would say that this is something that comics can do as well.
 

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This is a rather obvious example — but still instructive, I think. The pose here is deliberately designed to draw attention to the rear, and especially to what people in those neighboring buildings might possibly see, but which you can’t. The cover encourages you to mentally take Spider-Woman and turn her. There is no narrative, per se, but there remains the sadistic association of viewer (figured here pretty clearly as male) with action performed on a woman, who is frozen and fetishized, her individual body parts (the rear, the invisible crotch) presented as consumables.

And for an example featuring Wonder Woman, how about:

 

Wonder_Woman_Vol_1_219

 
That’s a cover (Update: by Dick Giordano) to a comic by Martin Pasko and Curt Swan. Sandifer argues that the comic itself is intentionally and effectively feminist — which may well be. The cover, though, seems like a textbook example of Mulvey’s theories. The Elongated Man, that virtual double-entendre, looks at Wonder Woman through a video camera while a circle of men point their phalluses, er, guns at her. Tied up, Wonder Woman coos with a come-hither tilt, asking to be “killed”, her hand hovering over her crotch. The heroine is immobilized by and for the male gaze, begging for action that is figured, not especially subtly, as sexualized violence. And note especially that the reader is specifically positioned with, and encouraged to identify with, the male with the camera; we are supposed to watch with Elongated Man, the good guy who stares at the willing, supplicant woman.
 
The bondage there is of course a holdover, and perhaps a nod, to Marston.
 

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Marston just about never fits that easily into Mulvey’s formulation, though. In this panel, for example, there is no man gazing; women are the actors, whooshing about with Peter’s energetic motion lines. But more than that, the motion, or the narrative, is not linear; the Amazons can be seen either as a group in motion, or as one replicating individual racing around the pole, a rushing frozen sequence of bodies with Wonder Woman at the fulcrum. The narrative is frozen in fetishistic contemplation of women…but it’s also a rush of motion, a narrative that doesn’t go anywhere, or need to go anywhere. The (male or female) viewer, is frozen giddily like Wonder Woman, watching without motion a motion that goes nowhere. Mulvey argues that women “connote something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying castration and hence unpleasure.” But the circle here doesn’t disavow the lack of a penis; rather it glories in it, as the still observer is merged with the still, bound woman in a game of delightful submission to disempowerment. Mulvey argues that narrative cinema is about denying male castration; Marston’s gaze, on the contrary, embraces it as an exciting option for children of every gender.
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Sandifer’s A Golden Thread is available here.

And, as you probably know, you can preorder my Wonder Woman book and read more about the joys of castration here.

Superman Will Seduce You to The Good

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Sex and violence go together. Working fist in caress, they can help boost a film from PG to PG-13 and on up into R. They’re both adult, both corrupting, both potentially dangerous. That’s why it made sense when bell hooks looked at a Time cover with Beyoncé in her underwear and declared, “I see a part of Beyoncé that is, in fact, anti-feminist—that is, a terrorist—especially in terms of the impact on young girls.” Beyoncé’s sexuality is violent and damaging; it hurts people, especially young people. Sex is a weapon.
 

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So sex and violence, in media, are commonly seen as continuous. But should they be? A little bit back I was talking with a class at Lakeland College about superheroes and violence. The teacher (and sometime HU writer) Peter Sattler, showed some clips from The Man of Steel, and asked the students to talk about the treatment of violence in the film. But the first reaction when the lights came up had a different focus. Taylor Levitt, one of the women in the class, pointed out that Henry Cavill was something special. “Wow,” Julie Bender, agreed, “I didn’t know Superman was so fine!”

Henry Cavill’s fineness is widely agreed on (students weren’t even shown jaw-dropping image of him wandering about with his shirt off.) But what’s interesting in this context is the extent to which that hotness is superfluous to, or off to one side of, the film’s violence.

The genre pleasures of Man of Steel largely involve the usual action film devastation — things blowing up, cities being leveled, good guys hitting bad guys and vice versa. There is also, though, a line through the film about Superman restraining himself; gallantly refusing to use his powers, or refusing to fight back. And a lot of the energy, or investment in those scenes seems to come from Henry Cavill’s hotness; the pleasure of watching this perfect physique in spandex rendered all restrained and submissive. Superman even allows the authorities to put handcuffs on him, supposedly to reassure them, but perhaps actually for the pleasure of a clearly enjoyably flustered Lois Lane, acting as audience surrogate. You may go to the movie to see Superman commit hyperbolic acts of violence in the name of good. But you can also go, it seems like, to see Henry Cavill be sexily passive — to witness an erotic spectacle that is about seductive vulnerability, rather than destructive terror.
 

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William Marston, the psychologist and feminist who created Wonder Woman, deliberately tried to exploit (in various senses) this tension between sex and violence. The original Wonder Woman comics are filled with images of Wonder Woman tied up elaborately with magic lassoes, gimp mask, and sometimes pink ectoplasmic goo. The point of all this, as Marston explained in a letter to his publisher, was to teach violent people the erotic benefits of submission

“This, my dear friend, is the one truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to moral education of the young. The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound … Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society … Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.”

 

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Marston believed women were better at erotic submission than men, and that therefore women needed to rule so that men could learn from them how to submit. In his psychological writings, Marston referred to the women who would erotically lead the world as “love leaders.” Love leaders would use their sexuality to seduce the world to goodness and peace — just as the soulful-eyed, bound Henry Cavill guides viewer’s thoughts away from the super-battle plot and towards gentler pastimes.

Of course, Marston was kind of a crank, and, in any event, it’s quite clear from Man of Steel that you can have eroticized submission and uber-violence both; you don’t have to choose one or the other. Still, you can choose one over the other if you want; it is possible, to use the erotic to undermine a narrative of violence. This is what happens in Twilight, for example — and it’s part of the reason that many people find the series’ ending so frustrating.

Stephenie Meyer wrote about super-powered vampires, and builds her series towards a climactic, brutal, all out battle. But the focus of Twilight is on the romantic relationship between Bella and Edward; on love, passion, and sex. As a result, Meyer doesn’t feel she needs to follow through on the genre promise of violence — the big all out battle never happens. The series has other interests, which makes a non-violent outcome possible. It’s not a coincident that Bella’s vampire power is literally to neutralize other violent powers, just as Marston hoped erotics could neutralize force. In Twilight, romance and conflict are set against each other, and romance wins. Sex trumps violence.
 

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It’s tempting to conclude hyperbolically by calling Beyoncé a love leader whose command of the erotic will bring about world peace. But that’s no more convincing than calling her a terrorist. Sex isn’t going to save us anymore than it’s likely to doom us. Still, eroticism remains a powerful thing. It seems worth thinking about it not just as a danger, but as a resource — a way, at least, to imagine a world in which heroes don’t always end up hitting each other.
 

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You can keep your hammer, Thor.
 

If Aggression Is the New Pink, Does That Mean We All Have to Hit Things?

Yesterday, Chris Gavaler wrote about female superheroes, arguing that they’ve been around for a while, that people of all genders love them, and that it’s about time we got to see a film dedicated to watching female superheroes hit things. Chris cited a study by Kaysee Baker and Arthur Raney that showed that, in superhero cartoons, women and men behaved just about the same — they hit things, they saved people, and so forth. Baker and Raney found this a little disturbing; they were worried that heroes of either gender had to be more masculine and aggressive to be heroic. To which Chris responds, well, who says that aggression has to be masculine? “Because if aggression is now gender-neutral, how can being aggressive also be “more masculine”?”

Chris has a point — and that point is a neat summation of empowerment feminism, which is the feminist perspective which says that women should be able to do everything men do, especially if that “everything men do” includes holding and wielding power. The lean in movement is empowerment feminism, and so (as Chris shows) is the enthusiasm for female superhero movies and the desire to see Hawkgirl bash in some baddie with her mace. America is really into power (we’re a superpower, after all) and so it’s not a surprise that empowerment feminism is generally speaking the most popular manifestation of feminism.

It’s so popular, in fact, that it can be easy to forget that it doesn’t necessarily appeal to everyone all the time. But here, at least, is one dissenting voice.

[Wonder Woman’s] creator had…seen straight into my heart and understood the secret fears of violence hidden there. No longer did I have to pretend to like the “Pow!” and “Crunch!” style of Captain Marvel or the Green Hornet. No longer did I have nightmares after reading ghoulish comics filled with torture and mayhem, comics made all the more horrifying by their real-life setting in World War II…. Here was a heroic person who might conquer with force, but only a force that was tempered by love and justice.

That’s Gloria Steinem, describing her relief at discovering the original Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics, in which, as she intimates, there weren’t a ton of fisticuffs and violence. Instead, Wonder Woman tied the bad guys up with her rope of love — and was tied up by them. Loving submission and bondage games, yes; bashing people’s heads in with maces, not so much.

Chris rightly points out that there isn’t anything essentially masculine about violence; there are plenty of women throughout history who have enjoyed hurting other folks. And yet, at the same time, you don’t just get out from under millenia of culture by having Scarlet Johansson kick somebody. Violence and aggression and war have traditionally been encoded male. Lots of feminists, from Steinem to Virginia Woolf to William Marston, have pointed out that masculinity is wrapped up in an ethos of force and violence — that being a man means, in many respects, being violent. And while one reaction to that can be, with empowerment feminism, to point out that women can be violent too, another approach is to say that the non-violence which has traditionally been associated with women is not an aberration or a failing, but a resource. Women do not have to be embarrassed or ashamed that they don’t like Captain Marvel hitting people; rather, they can point out that hitting people is possibly not such a great way to solve problems, and that equating goodness manliness and heroism with hitting people is, perhaps, a failure of imagination which can, under the right circumstances, get people needlessly killed.

Along those lines, one of the things that I most enjoy about the new Ms. Marvel series by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona is how uninterested it is in uber-violence. Three issues in, and our teen protagonist, Kamala Khan, has encountered exactly zero supervillains. After she gains her shape-shifting powers, the first thing she does is to turn her hand giant (embiggen!) and fish a damsel in distress out of a lake. The damsell in question fell in the lake after her boyfriend knocked her in — not in the process of a sexual assault, as you’d think if you’d read too many superhero comics, but simply out of stupidity and drunken horsing around. This is a world in which heroes exist and heroism matters, but it’s not a world in which that heroism is necessarily linked to violence.

In issue #3, Kamala does have her first fight. She sees her friend/sweetie-in-waiting Bruno getting held up at the convenience store where she works, and (after trying to call for help and discovering her cell phone is out of batteries) she transforms into Ms. Marvel and starts swinging with her giant embiggened fist.

Sort of. The robber is Bruno’s brother, and he’d already given up on the theft before Kamala barged in. She easily defeats him, crushing him in with that fist (“you’re squeezing really hard!”)…but not before she does far more property damage than he ever could have managed by himself. And then, after she lets him go (he’s promised to apologize and never come back) he accidentally shoots her. The last image of the comic is of Ms. Marvel sitting on the ground, her giant hand extended out in front of her, looking shocked and confused, an iconic hero reduced to a confused adolescent girl, as the guy she was saving freaks out and the “villain” sits off to the side looking at the gun in his hand in horror.
 
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My suspicion is that Ms. Marvel is going to discover that her rubbery hide is effectively bullet proof, and hopefully all will end more or less well. But it’s rather nice to have a superhero story where violence ends up being, not a solution, but a complication.

Ms. Marvel, in other words, critiques super-hero violence — and the reason it’s able to do that is absolutely in part because the series is not just a superhero story, but a girl YA coming of age story. The narrative is interested in Kamala having adventures, definitely, but it’s also interested in her figuring out who she is, which means (among other things) working out her relationship with her (shape shifting, sometimes adult Caucasian va-va-voom superhero, sometimes adolescent Muslim girl) body and discovering that her annoying good geeky friend is in love with her. Lee and Ditko couldn’t figure out how to make Spider-Man a man except through violence and trauma and more violence. G. Willow Wilson, though, is drawing on a narrative tradition quite different from boys’ adventure, which means that for her, growing up doesn’t need to mean watching your dad die and beating up his killer.

Ms. Marvel has been exceedingly popular (it keeps selling out at my local comics store) — but, given the low sales of even really popular comics, it seems unlikely that it will be turned into a superhero movie any time soon. Still,it’s worth noting, perhaps, that other superhero stories about women on the big screen — the Hunger Games, say, or Twilight (where Bella gets to be a superhero by the end) are significantly more ambivalent about violence, its effects, and its efficacy than the standard Marvel/DC superhero/supervillain thump-fests tend to be. Maybe that’s because they’re working to appeal to women (and for that matter men) like Gloria Steinem, for whom narratives of violence are alienating rather than empowering.

Wonder Playmate

This first appeared on Comixology.
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As NBC gears up for its new Wonder Woman series, the internet is abuzz with one burning question. What dastardly villain mugged our heroine with a casino? And does Adrianne Palicki get combat pay if that bustier ruptures and her cleavage assaults her noggin?
 

 
Okay, so those are two questions.

To be fair, NBC has also released pics of an updated (or possibly additional) costume, which isn’t quite as tragically latexy. Here are some action shots:
 


 

 
She looks so darned serious there…and brave! Looking at her face alone, you’d never realize the extent to which her boobs pose a danger to herself and others.

Oh for the days of Lynda Carter!
 

 
We miss your shapeless grandma-bottom bathing suit with the hint of camel-toe, Lynda!

Live-action super-hero costumes are often awful (I’m looking at you Styrofoam-muscle Batman), but Wonder Woman seems to bring out the worst in what I suppose, for the sake of brevity, we must call “fashion-designers.” What, in short, the-hell-is-wrong-with-these-people? Why, lord, why?

I actually have a theory. It’s all the fault of William Marston and Harry Peter.

For those not in the know, Marston was the creator of Wonder Woman. Harry Peter was the original artist on the series — hired by Marston himself. And their version of Wonder Woman looked like this:
 

 
Yes, that’s Wonder Woman with her hands tied behind her leaping backwards to attack a saber-tooth tiger. Which is fairly bad ass.

But the thing to focus on is what isn’t here. Specifically, there is not a whole lot of cleavage visible. Instead, Peter’s supple line dwells lovingly on those back muscles…and on WW’s super-butch shoulders. This was typical: even when the chest is visible in Peter’s drawings, he tends to focus interest on other areas:
 

 
Marston and Peter, in other words, put WW in that skimpy bustier so that they could look at her shoulders flexing, not so they could look down her front. Part of the problem with later iterations of Wonder Woman’s costume, then, has been a simple confusion of erotic focus. The costume wasn’t really designed for large amounts of cleavage. When you put a large amount of cleavage in there to propitiate our breast-obsessed culture, the results tend to be more silly than heroic.
 

 
Even putting aside the breasts, though, there would still be problems. Wonder Woman’s costume just was never imagined with real people in mind. You could argue that this was true for super-hero comics in general; drawings are different than living, breathing bodies, and Kirby clearly wasn’t thinking too hard about how an actor would look in Thing-face. But with Peter’s Wonder Woman…well, look at this, for example.
 

 
That doesn’t look like a drawing of a real woman. It looks like a stiff, posed picture of a doll.

And I think that really was the point. The rigidity and unreality of the drawings is not a bug; it’s a feature. Girls who read those early WW comics were encouraged to see themselves not just as the characters, but manipulating the characters, moving them about like toys. This is part of the pleasure of a sequence like the below, where Wonder Woman’s body is first duplicated (like a reproducible doll) and then inhabited by her friend, Etta Candy.
 

 
Etta and WW are both tied up in the picture above too, of course. Marston and Peter were obsessed with bondage. In their stories, WW often gets tied up every three panels or so. For Marston, this was linked to his odd ideas about feminism and submission; he believed women were superior to men because they were more comfortable with submission. Men, he felt, needed to learn submission from women. Wonder Woman was part of his effort to teach boys and girls the joys of “loving submission” to a wise matriarch.

So Marston was kind of a kook. But he was a kook whose kookiness dovetailed nicely with the interests of his audience. Sharon Marcus, in her book Between Women, noted that dominance and submission have long been an important part of literature for children, and particularly for girls. In the Victorian era, in particular, there were many books which featured “Fantasies of girls punishing dolls, and being punished by them appeared regularly in fiction for young readers.”

Whether Marston and Peter were deliberately referencing this type of story is unclear…but what is clear is that their comics worked with a similar dynamic. The frozen postures of the figures and the bondage themes are of a piece.
 

 
So, for example, the above picture shows the outcome of an Amazon game in which some women dress as deer so that their Amazon sisters can catch them, truss them up, put them on plates, and pretend to eat them. There’s certainly kink here…but it’s not especially focused on a stereotypical male appreciation of scantily-clad, realistically depicted female flesh. Rather, it’s embedded in a narrative of dominance, submission, and play. The kinky frisson is tied (as it were) to the artificiality of the doll-like poses.

Since Marston and Peter, lots of Wonder Woman artists have tried to rework the costume…to turn it into something that appeals to the typical erotics of older guys rather than to the B&D doll-playing interests of Marston and (Marcus suggests) young girls. As a result you get images like this, by, (I believe) Mike Deodato.
 

 
Wonder Woman’s costume was meant to be sexy. But it was meant to be sexy in a particular way and for particular kinks. Those kinks don’t map particularly well onto current mainstream interests or tastes. Efforts to make WW cater to those mainstream interests and tastes tend to be, at best, self-parodic. So if NBC’s costume looks ridiculous (and it does) it’s because they’re trying to squeeze a Playboy fantasy into a costume that was never meant to hold it.
 

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All posts in the series on post-Marston iterations of Wonder Woman are here.

Purchase Pleasurable Venus Girdle, Repeat

A few weeks back I wrote about Dara Birnbaum’s video art piece, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman. Corey Creekmur mentioned in comments that there was an entire book on the piece written by T.J. Demos.
 


Dara Birnbaum – Technology/Transformation… by merzboy

 

So now I’ve read the book…which confirms my thoughts in some ways, and raises some other issues as well.

Demos basically divides critical reception of the work into two waves (analagous to my two takes on the video in my earlier piece). The first reaction — which is close to the intention of Birnbaum herself — views the work as a project of feminist and Lacanian deconstruction. The narrative of the Wonder Woman TV show is broken apart, images are repeated, and the special effects are decontextualized so that they register as studio trickery. Finally, a disco song at the end comments directly on Wonder Woman’s sexuality, showing that she is not an empowered subject but a fetishized object. The video’s purpose in this reading, then, is to defamiliarize the narrative, and to show the artificiality of the transformation from secretary to hero. The effect is iconoclastic, lambasting an oppressive image foisted on women by capitalism and patriarchy.

Again, this is how Birnbaum saw the video herself. Demos quotes her saying that her work was meant to push against “the forms of restraint and near suffocation imposed through this current technological society.” She adds.

all the works completed from 1976-85 are ‘altered states’ causing the viewer to re-examine those ‘looks’ which on the surface seem so banal that even the supernatural transformation of a secretary into a ‘wonder woman’ is reduced to a burst of blinding light and a turn of the body — a child’s play of rhythmical devices inserted within the morose belligerence of the fodder that is our average television diet.

Demos notes that this was in part dependent on the context of the time, when most people did not have access to tools to manipulate video. In a world where you had to take what the studio doled out, repurposing or reshaping the image seemed subversive.

Today, of course, things are somewhat different — and, indeed, over time, the critical take on Birnbaum’s video has changed. Instead of focusing on its deconstructive critique of television, more recent viewers have tended to see it as celebratory. Instead of alienating viewers, Birnbaum’s video itself becomes a source of visual pleasure. The video has, for example, been played in dance clubs…and, as I pointed out in my earlier post, there are video montages of Lynda Carter spinning on YouTube which look a lot like Birnbaum’s video. As Demos argues, late capitalism has “commodified the process of consumerist participation.” (84-85) Mash-ups aren’t critique; their marketing. In this context, Birnbaum’s video looks less like a stinging deconstruction of television, and more like a potentially viral advertisement for it.

Demos acknowledges this…but goes on to insist that while affect is manipulated by capitalism, it still “remains indeterminate”, and he adds that this is especially true because “unlike emotion, it is unstructured by social meanings.” (101)

Which, to me, seems like blatant bullshit. Why isn’t affect structured by social meaning? And if it isn’t structured by social meaning, if pleasure and power don’t have anything to do with each other, then how exactly can pleasure resist or affect power? The whole thing just seems like special pleading; a way to have your shallow media rush and still call yourself a revolutionary. (Or to paraphrase Tania Modleski, “I like Dara Birnbaum, I am a radical, therefore Dnra Birnbaum must be a radical.”) You can try to wriggle and dodge, but I don’t see how you get around the conclusion that Birnbaum’s work has been completely co-opted. She thought she was critiquing, and instead she’s complicit. As Demos says, she’s part of the long history of the avant-garde being assimilated by capitalism — almost as if the avant-garde is a branch of capitalist R&D, rather than some sort of alternative to it.

Of course, the baseline assumption here is that capitalism is evil,and that art which is complicit with capitalism is therefore meretricious. Demos doesn’t question this, but it seems like it might be worthwhile to do so. Specifically, Wonder Woman’s creator, William Marston, believed that new, capitalist modes of reproducible entertainment could be used to change society for the better — specifically by providing new images of powerful, loving women who could challenge conservative ideas about patriarchy and dominance. For Marston (who Demos mentions only briefly), capitalism could be used progressively to change the gendered way in which society functioned.

Marston linked Wonder Woman’s persuasive power to her “allure” — a connection which, as Demos notes, has been controversial with feminists…not to mention with Marxists, for whom the pleasures of capitalist consumption are to be avoided rather than exploited. Yet, in the end, whatever radicalism Birnbaum’s video manages is, at this point, predicated on the libidinous, capitalist, iconic charge that Marston gave to the character. The deconstruction of television tropes has been thoroughly deconstructed by capitalism. All that’s left is the pleasurable thrill of seeing a woman repetitively changed into a sexy hero — and perhaps the rush of creating and controlling that change, manipulating the tools of capitalism not so much for one’s own liberation as for one’s own pleasure. Always presuming that, in capitalism, it’s possible to tell the difference.
 

Video Art and Venus Girdle

Bert Stabler pointed out this Dara Birnbaum video to me…because, of course, it’s about Wonder Woman.
 


Dara Birnbaum – Technology/Transformation… by merzboy

 
So my first reaction to this was fairly intense visceral dislike. The goal seems to be to deconstruct icon and narrative to reveal a subtext of explosive violence, gender dynamics, image making and, most of all, manipulability. The stuttering spin and spin again as Diana Prince turns into Wonder Woman and then turns and turns into Wonder Woman, or runs over the same segment of forest and then reruns over it, makes us see both the narrative and the heroine as constructed and artificial. Like much appropriation art, it’s using camp to destabilize the normal and the normative, so that, for example, when Wonder Woman breaks out of her mirror prison, the rhythm comes not as climax, but as anti-climax — culminating in her stale banter with the inevitable man she saves.

The problem is, this camp undermining of Wonder Woman is significantly less camp than the source material. The intimations of dominance and power from manipulating the tape, for example, or from the connection of WW’s transformation with explosions, are far more muted, and far less sexualized, than the compulsive bondage games in Marston/Peter. The replicated Wonder Womans in the mirrors are less daring, less loopy, and again less sexualized than Marston/Peter’s precocious dabblings in pomo themes of replication and artificiality. The disco double-entendres at the end, rhyming “under” and “wonder”, again seem positively tame compared to Marston’s spiraling fantasies of women dressed as deer eating each other, or giant vulva-flowers consuming men and women alike. Christopher Reed in his book “Art and Homosexuality” argues that the avant-garde always lags behind pulp sources in its use of homosexual and controversial content, and this seems like a painful case in point. Marston and Peter created an incredibly sexually daring, homoerotic, and feminist comic book, and some three decades later the art world comes along and preens itself on “discovering,” in much less confrontational form, all the themes that were there to begin with.

So, like I said, that was my initial reaction. On second thought, though, I probably don’t need to be that harsh. In the first place, the Wonder Woman television show was not the Wonder Woman comic by a long shot. With that in mind, Birnbaum can be seen in part as re-excavating the invention and the sexual charge that the TV writers largely removed. In particular, Birnbaum has rightly figured out that the only part of Wonder Woman the TV show that is really worth keeping is the transformation scene. That explosive (orgasmic?) moment spills out of its original context, as if Marston and Peter’s original erotic vision has shattered the dull genre narrative built to contain it.

Beyond that, it’s probably worth noting that Birnbaum isn’t really part of the avant-garde, at least as Reed discusses it. Feminist art and pop art were both still very much outside the institutional art world in 1978. From that perspective, Birnbaum might be seen not as (or not just as) appropriating Wonder Woman and television, but as identifying with them. Diana Prince’s explosive, exciting transformation into Wonder Woman is also Birnbaum’s accession to the wonderful, gleeful joys of control. Wonder Woman stutters back and forth and spins around and around and runs over the same ground not to subvert her, but because the power over those images, and the power of those images, is just so darned fun. Birnbaum’s video, then, might not be so different, in concept or execution, from those Yourtube compilations of every Lynda Carter transformation ever:
 

 
In other words, I like it more as a fan video than I do as avant-garde art — which isn’t necessarily a dis, since part of what it’s doing (especially in retrospect) is anticipating, or forecasting, or helping to bring about the (ongoing) collapse of the walls between fandom and art. I still wouldn’t say it’s great, and it’s still very simple-minded, ideologically reticent, and formally underwhelming compared to Marston/Peter. But I can see its historical importance and appreciate its energy. It’s certainly one of the most inventive uses of the character since Marston died — which may be damning with faint praise, but is praise nonetheless.