Abstract
Cory Albertson on a resurgence of “courageous womanhood.”
Image Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
When director Zack Synder announced Gal Gadot would play Wonder Woman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, online discussion didn’t focus on Gadot’s acting abilities or that she was once a combat instructor in the Israel Defense Forces. “They said that I was too skinny and my boobs were too small,” Gadot told website Ynet.
Herein lies the tightrope Wonder Woman has walked for most of her 75-year history. The character’s comic tagline declares that she is “strong as Hercules” and “wise as Athena,” but also “beautiful as Aphrodite.” Her physical and intellectual strength position her as a feminist icon, but that distinction is often overshadowed by aesthetics that serve Western, heterosexual men. In The Secret History of Wonder Woman, historian Jill Lepore says she is “feminism as fetish.”
Image Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Lepore argues that Wonder Woman’s roots stem from the suffragist movement and the intersecting birth control movement that began decades before the character’s 1941 debut. Wonder Woman’s creator William Moulton Marston, a psychologist and member of The Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, wrote storylines depicting Wonder Woman working alongside other women to fight injustice. Marston also routinely showed Wonder Woman being chained, roped, and gagged—symbolic displays suffragists had frequently used to protest their inability to vote. But these images of Wonder Woman ended up creating her paradox—a symbolic figure protesting the general censorship of women’s voices on one hand and a sexualized, kinky image on the other. According to Marston, Wonder Woman was ultimately meant to “set up a standard among children and young people of strong, free, courageous womanhood and to combat the idea that women are inferior to men.”
After Marston’s death in 1947, though, Wonder Woman’s new writers refashioned her into everything from a babysitter in the 1950s to a powerless streetfighter in the 1960s. In 1972, Gloria Steinem, appalled at the state of Wonder Woman, used her for the cover of the first regular issue of Ms. magazine. Emblazoned with the headline “Wonder Woman for President,” the cover repositioned her as a political savior, bridging the feminism of the 1910s with the feminism of the 1970s. Then, three years later, the television series The New Original Wonder Woman starring Lynda Carter debuted. For many feminists, Carter’s skimpy outfit as Wonder Woman and passivity as Wonder Woman’s alter ego Diana Prince felt like a sellout. In Where the Girls Are, media and American studies scholar Susan Douglas characterized the portrayal as television’s “compromise with feminism.”
The new Wonder Woman offers a surprising hint of complexity, bringing her closer to “courageous womanhood” than she’s been in a long time.
Since Carter’s TV portrayal, Superman has had three live-action television series, six films, and seven different actors. Batman has had a television series, seven films, and five different actors. Now, after many failed attempts, Gadot’s Wonder Woman marks the character’s live-action film debut and the first live-action portrayal since Carter. But is Gadot’s version simply another “compromise with feminism?” Or, does she navigate her paradoxical, feminist history and engage with today’s generation of feminists?
Superheroes always seem to seek out information about their villains at fancy galas. It’s at such an event, hosted by villain Lex Luthor, that Wonder Woman, as Diana Prince, makes her movie debut. Dressed in a fitted, cleavage-baring gown, she towers above everyone. As she moves through the crowd, Bruce Wayne, otherwise known as Batman, takes notice. He turns to reporter Clark Kent, secretly Superman, to comment, “Wow, pretty girl. Bad habit. Don’t quote me on that.” Here, Bruce instantly binds Diana with the “male gaze,” film scholar Laura Mulvey’s term for how filmmakers objectify women through the use of the camera lens and/or fellow characters. Disappointingly, Diana is defined by heterosexual men’s pleasure before she ever utters a line of dialogue. But Gadot’s portrayal deviates from her comic version as well as Carter’s depiction, in that she seems to understand this relationship. She knowingly employs an exaggerated form or femininity that serves the desires of men as a strategy to gain access to male privilege. Thoroughly subordinated by Bruce and written off as a “pretty girl,” she’s able to slip past him and steal a computer hacking device he’d planned to use to discover Lex’s nefarious plot.
Image Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
As she proves she can intellectually outmaneuver the famed cape crusader, the filmmakers also rely on her physical strength and appearance as Wonder Woman to mark a semblance of progression past the blatant objectification of Diana Prince. Unfortunately, when she first appears as Wonder Woman, fighting superhuman villain Doomsday at the film’s climax, the male gaze (this time, coming solely from the camera lens) intensifies. Next to the fully clothed Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman looks like a Greek-goddess-dominatrix: flowing hair, tight armor, thigh-high armored boots, and modified pteruges (leather strips often worn by ancient Greek warriors at the waist). Neither Batman nor Superman seems surprised or distracted by her appearance; rather, it is her fighting prowess that elicits their stunned reactions.
Historically, Wonder Woman (most notably in Carter’s embodiment) hasn’t solely relied upon or sought out physical combat. But Gadot’s version brandishes a sword and shield alongside the signature lasso of truth and bullet-deflecting bracelets. She looks like a warrior, and she grunts, growls, and lunges, sword first, at Doomsday, hacking off his hand. And when he knocks her to the ground, she looks up at him not with fear, but with a smirk. Once she decides to fight, this Wonder Woman enjoys it.
As gratifying as it may be to see Wonder Woman “kick ass,” this progression is a ruse. Being “one of the boys” is a tactic needed if she’s to be taken seriously as hero. This is what sociologist Michael Kimmel calls “emphatic sameness,” a strategy women use to access legitimacy in male spheres.
Wonder Woman has always functioned within a patriarchal realm encompassing male domination and female subservience, a primary mechanism of which is female objectification. And in switching between violent masculinity used to gain respect in the male-dominated field of superheroes and traditional feminine aesthetics that gain acceptance as a woman, Wonder Woman makes what gender scholar Deniz Kandiyoti calls a “patriarchal bargain.” Where feminism, in its many forms, has sought to disrupt patriarchy, Gadot’s Wonder Woman reifies comfortable positions within the gender binary and then uses them to survive rather than thwart a male-dominated society. In this respect, she fails to push past the character’s history of compromise.
Still, the newest Wonder Woman manages to connect with feminism in two unexpected ways. First, this incarnation offers a direct, scathing review of men and male-constructed society. At a museum gala when Bruce Wayne accuses her of stealing his hacking device, Diana Prince retorts, “You know, it’s true what they say about little boys. Born with no natural inclination to share.” Though Diana essentializes men, she rightly infantilizes hegemonic masculinity, alluding to a view that men’s stubborn refusal to share causes war, poverty and, generally, problems—a point she makes clear at Superman’s funeral. Walking up beside Bruce, she observes, “Man made a world where standing together is not possible.”
Such cynicism leads to an important, second connection with feminism, and, in particular, a connection with today’s generation of feminists. It has been argued that millennial and some Generation Z feminists tend to focus less on shared political oppression and more on intersectionality, individual choice, and expression. One of Susan Douglas’s main critiques of Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman is the character’s all-encompassing altruism—noble, but undercutting her feminism. The ‘70s-era television show made little exploration of her identity, feelings, and ambitions as a person, much less as a woman. She had little individual choice or freedom to define herself—Diana Prince had to be Wonder Woman.
But in Batman v Superman, Diana reveals to Bruce that she retreated from being Wonder Woman 100 years prior because of what she calls man’s “century full of horrors.” Despite enjoying a good fight, witnessing the endless divisions and bloodshed indicative of “man” makes her waver when Doomsday literally and figuratively arrives. Worry and reluctance wash across her face. Is mankind worth nurturing and protecting? Or does one turn their back on mankind to preserve personal peace? Feminism in the form of honesty about male-dominated society and in the form of personal choice collide in a pivotal (and new) moment for the character: defeated by society, Diana chooses to be Wonder Woman. And in doing so, the new Wonder Woman offers a surprising hint of complexity, bringing her closer to Marston’s goal of “courageous womanhood” than she’s been in a long time.