Brian Mitchell PETERS
Author's Profile: Brian Mitchell Peters teaches in the Department of English at
Champlain College, St-Lambert, Quebec. His interests include E.M. Forster, gothic
fiction, cultural studies, communication studies, visual literacy, and American
writers of the post-war decades. Peters's publications include "Camping the
Gothic: Queer Sexualities in Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms,"
in The Journal of Homosexuality (2000), "Gothic Qu(e)eries and Postmodern
Homosexualities: The Vampire and Triangular Desire in Dracula and Interview
with the Vampire," in The Transylvanian Journal (1998), and
"Beyond Psycho(Analytic) Signs: Erratic Homosexualities in Timothy Findley’s
The Wars" in Canadian Landscapes (1996). E-mail: <bryestar@hotmail.com>.
Qu(e)erying Comic Book Culture and Representations of Sexuality
in Wonder Woman
1. It is the young people of our world that decide what works and what does not
in terms of popular culture, from music to television, sports and fashion. Comic
books mark a pertinent role in the formation of ideology and the young: not only
does a comic represent its era and often youth culture, but its crystallization
of ideas, both in surface and subtext, caters to the formation of pop-culture
trends in its pubescent, and later adult, audience. Comic books have always revealed
themes that can be identified as queer, as the majority of superheroes always
had to live two lives, one as hero and one as civilian. Many young people who
will later identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or queer, zone in on comics because
these magazines articulate a space of queer play. One can think of the recent
releases of Queer as Folk, where Vincent (U.K.) and Michael (U.S.) are
obsessed with their favorite comic heroes because of the detectable queer themes
that they have always been able to locate in their comic books. Comics are popular
culture: they speak for an instant, are constantly changing, and attract an audience
that sees something deeper, often comforting, in the printed pages. In the early
years of comics, primarily between the Depression and World War II, the split
between hero and civilian marked a tangible queer theme present in the majority
of superhero comic books. This does not entail that each comic book character
with an alter ego could be interpreted as a closeted homosexual; rather, particular
aspects of certain comic books reflect a queer consciousness, felt and interpreted
by queer readers.
2. Wonder Woman encompasses the very pinnacle of queer themes, and since
her inception into the world of DC comcis she has exhibited varying degrees of
both gay-drag and lesbian subtexts. The result has been a readership, a
cult following if you will, that has followed this character through her various
incarnations throughout the twentieth century. Her comic can be read as
an item of popular culture that has served as a safe haven, a source of inspiration
and a pre-liberation voice for many readers. The result is open to ideological
critique, for how would such a positive voice, however veiled it may be, serve
a yet to be born and often clandestine percentage of individuals? Moreover, how
do these topoi affect the belief system of young queers? How do comic book representations
of questionable queerness contribute to the way young people consider their own
sexualities? The response and its realities lie in a comic series which exemplifies
the crystallization of queer themes in Wonder Woman. In 1995, The Challenge
of Artemis depicts a series of comics which create an evolution in the split
between heterosexual/homosexual, marked through shifting texts of two heroes.
In this series there are two Wonder Women: Princess Diana, the original Wonder
Woman, reinvents herself, and this reinvention marks a highly visible gay text
of masquerade/drag and a particular lesbian continuum; Artemis, as the impulsive
hunter turned Wonder Woman, illustrates a far more visible lesbian text. The result
of this arguably "out" queer text creates an ideological reality of pride and
survival: although brief in its run, The Challenge of Artemis speaks to
queer readers as it emphasizes the queer subtexts that have been visible in Wonder
Woman since the 1940s.
3. To deconstruct Wonder Woman to expose the lesbian and gay (sub)texts
which flourish throughout her comic book run, one must embrace some kind of approach
that can acknowledge the signs in a given image as well as the subtextual underpinnings
that can shift from reader to reader. Comics are notorious for this reality of
text/subtext, for they create meaning through image, hidden meanings, the continuity
of the story in question, and dialogue. Moreover, the reality of the comic book
human form is a highly eroticized physical presence, from hulking men, such as
Superman, to masked crusaders like Green Lantern and Green Arrow, to pubescent
youths with highly developed bodies like Robin, to the focus of combined physical
prowess and beauty seen throughout Wonder Woman's career. Harold Beaver argues
that one can conduct a semiotic demystification of unveiling queer texts in popular
culture. Beaver makes direct reference to Roland Barthes, as he attests that one
can analyze how the homosexual text is "a prodigious consumer of signs of hidden
meanings, hidden systems, hidden potentiality" (105). " A homosexual schema,"
as Beaver calls it, "can never be proved" (103); instead, a queer theoretical
reading often unmasks the mysterious "avenger," something that is often in part
"invisible" (103). Throughout the decades, Wonder Woman reveals aspects of both
gay drag and masked meanings, along with lesbian continuity and further subtextual
underpinnings; these conclusions can be drawn from a detailed exploration of her
history, her costume, her mysterious powers, and her transformations. As comics
shift for attempted sales, my argument will rely on Wonder Woman's original creation
as a foundation, integral changes in the late '60s as an evolution in queer/camp
aesthetics, and a study of a series of issues published in 1995. A liaison will
be established to emphasize a voice of liberation to readers through the recurring
motifs of masquerade and same-sex alliance.
The History of Wonder Woman
4. The original inception of Wonder Woman illustrates the habitual super
hero/secret identity binary. Princess Diana of Paradise Island originally comes
to man's world to save the fate of the planet from the Nazis: in the comic book
world she wins the war with the U.S. As she fights with America, she also has
to have access to the necessary war files, and works in Washington D.C. as Yeoman
Diana Prince. The Plain Jane/Mad Molly split is accentuated as one understands
it as a kind of closet for Diana Prince: her identity was secret and private,
and as she passed as someone conventional in everyday life, she would disappear
and reappear in disguise to fight crime. The sexuality of Wonder Woman
and the subtextual jouissance, an interpretive and suggestive play, has been the
product of William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman. His own
life, his status of Doctor of Psychology, and his fascination with desire (as
revealed in his curiously avant-garde romantic life, see Daniels Chapter 1), is
evident throughout Diana's early comic run. In fact, the lesbianism that was detectable
through the all-woman haven of Paradise Island, the lesbian continuum between
Wonder Woman and her foes, and the recurring bondage motif, did receive significant
attention. In 1954, which coincides directly with a cultural fear of homosexuality
and communism initiated by the McCarthy administration, Dr Fredric Wertham launched
a "surprising successful campaign to persuade Americans that comic books were
corrupting the nation's youth" (Daniels 103). Wertham accused Wonder Woman
of containing "Lesbian overtones," as he described Diana's then cohorts, the Holliday
Girls [sic], as "gay party girls" (Daniels 103). However, despite these
accusations, it appears that even during more conservative times, comics encompassed
images of eroticism or subtexual sexuality that was tolerated. Marston laughed
this off; he "loved his little jokes" (Daniels 102), and as a response he created
a frequent saying for his Amazon: "Suffering Sappho." In Wonder Woman 63
(January 1954), Diana finds herself displaced from her home (after the war moved
from Washington D.C. to New York City). As she realizes she is far from New York,
she exclaims, "Suffering Sappho! I'm not in New York! I'm in San Francisco!" (Daniels
103). And thus Marston emphasizes and liberates the queer theme which is inherent
to Wonder Woman by having Diana mark her own ancient lesbian roots through
reference to Sappho and the humor of having her wind up, however temporarily,
in San Francisco.
5. On a less abstract level, her habitual iconography, which is even more detectable
than her semiotics, is like Wilde's Salome. The history of Wonder Woman
reveals a consistent dragging of the text: as Elaine Showalter argues that the
gay male author often hid his own experiences and desires behind his female characters,
a readership certainly exists where the female super-hero embodies a double identitythat
attracts a gay cult following (as a side remark, the gay cult of Wonder Woman
was intensified, if not actually confirmed, through the popularity of the 1970s
camp television program, and further demonstrated through the many, many diverse
websites devoted to Wonder Woman). Throughout her analyses on Wilde and
Salome, Showalter asks, "is the woman behind Salome's veil the innermost
being of the male artist?" (151). She goes on to explain how and why the queer
male artist of the fin-de-siècle has used the textual space of woman as a boy
in drag. While Wonder Woman cannot stand for Marston in drag, her characterization
does habitually reveal a motif of masquerade, from her costumes as both hero and
civilian, to the varying make-overs she has received throughout the twentieth
century. Thus, her gayness is part of her feyness, and linked directly to the
camp that her character initiates throughout the years. Perhaps Wonder Woman does
portray a space for the queer reader in a type of transferred, imaginary sequence
of drag.
6. In a similar manner, Wonder Woman's questionable powers surpass the often limiting
boundaries of traditionally feminine stereotypes. As masquerade creates a subtextual
gay text, the movement away from gender stereotypes and conventional ideas of
woman illustrate her lesbian subtexts. For Diana, unlike the stereotyped good
girl of the 1940s, has special powers: these include superhuman strength and speed,
granted by the male gods Hercules and Mercury, as well as a paradoxical costume.
She is habitually dressed in star-covered briefs, a bustier with the patriotic
eagle, stiletto boots, and even magic jewelry. She is most definitely burlesque,
like Salome, and she has an almost stripper-like quality to her costume. Nonetheless,
she is the most successful female crime fighter in comic book history: her tiara
is a boomerang, her bracelets deflect bullets, and her trademark is the lasso
of truth. The lariat, spun from Queen Hippolyte's girdle of strength, is unbreakable
and telepathically controlled, and once bound within its coils even Superman has
to submit to its hypnotic powers (note the foundations for the "bound" motif).
In short, Diana's powers encompass iconography and abilities that envelop both
ideas of femininity and masculinity. Accordingly, Beaver theorizes that homosexuality
"is not a name for a pre-existent thing" but part of a network of developing language,
on the model of "male/female" (103). Wonder Woman's queerness, then, stems from
her inherent combination of traditionally male and female stereotypes, grouped
together to form an ideal woman-hero. For Wonder Woman is ideal because
she speaks to and empowers at least three cultural minority groups: women, lesbians,
and gay men.
The Late 1960s
7. Wonder Woman's all-women birthplace provides a haven from patriarchy,
as well as a response to it. For Themyscira, the more contemporary name for Paradise
Island, is governed by women for women, and no man can set foot on the sacred
soil. Despite the constant Sapphic undercurrents that have accompanied this island
throughout the decades, it did leave the strip for close to five years starting
in 1968. The repeated themes of Wonder Woman grew tiresome, and in the
midst of desperately trying to save her comic-book paramour from a prison sentence
or worse, Diana is summoned by her mother to return home at once. Diana is given
a choice: she could stay on and leave with the Amazons to another dimension where
they went to have their exhausted powers restored (via a desired rest period)
and remain the strongest of the Amazons, or return to the outside world, powerless.
Diana undergoes the most dramatic rite of Amazonian passage in her history, and
before an altar she relinquishes her powers to embark upon "the travails of mortals,"
as she begs the gods to have mercy on her (Wonder Woman 179, 9). She returns
to man's world as Diana Prince: Wonder Woman, a type of lone adventurer.
Flustered yet relieved, Diana has a complete make over that only the late '60s
could provide. Her transformation reflects an era, as her new look and mortal-training
mirrors The Avengers, although the creator of the New Wonder Woman, Mike
Sekowsky, attests that he knew nothing about Diana Rigg's role in The Avengers
(Daniels 102). With her new look, she begins her James Bond-esque secret training
with a martial arts expert named I-Ching. Diana Prince gets a new do, new clothes
and a new car, and becomes a kind of private investigator.
8. The Sapphism of the immortal Amazons is replaced with a mortal camp: one queer
text is replaced by antoher, as the comic reflects the changing popular culture
of the campy late 1960s. Because of the excess of popular cultural changes that
occureed throughout the turbulent and often radical 1960s, this decade of artifice
and of aesthetic masquerade really does stand fpr tje decade of camp asethetics
and related cultural manifestations. With a modernization of camp which moved
away from the theatrical burlesque to the urban jungle, camp and queer culture
intersect rahter profoundly in the 1960s: not that they did not prior, but the
1960s marked a heightened and thus queerly modernized version of camp. Therefore,
camp as a popular genre of the 1960s and of comic book history becomes even more
evident. The theme of masquerade receives a camp and fey representation, as Diana
emerges from the beauty parlor with her new do, ready to find the information
she had to seek out at the psychedelic hippie club (Wonder Woman 178, 10-11).
Her character becomes obsessed with secret training, adventure, clothes, and travel,
and speaks an even more concrete gay code attracting an even larger readership
of men. Furthermore, with Steve Trevor's death, the boyfriend is out of the picture.
Diana meets a series of dashing men with whom she fights crime on a very temporary
basis. The strip thus receives a far more detectable promiscuity, and Diana appears
like a female James Bond. But the lesbian theme is not forgotten, for Diana opens
her own carhop clothing boutique with her friend Cathy. While Cathy has a very
minor place in the strip, she does get a lot of attention in the last New Wonder
Woman: Diana moves in with Cathy, Cathy is kidnapped, and Diana and a circle
of empowered female characters save her in this special "Women's Lib Issue" (Wonder
Woman 203, 20-24). Diana becomes smashingly mod, the it-girl around town,
and her unexpected popularity as a female adventurer leaves her as such until
an interference from Ms. Magazine in 1973.
The 1990s and "Bad Girl" Art
9. Before I begin looking at The Challenge of Artemis, it is important
to introduce the oeuvre in question: the series that will be examined comes
from a number of Wonder Woman issues orchestrated by writer William Messner-Loebs.
During the mid-1990s, there is a concrete development in the representation of
comic book women. The muscles that began in the 1980s were continued, but the
weight-induced builds that arguably reflected the popularization of weight training
during the 1980s, is coupled with a highly eroticized, yet unreal, human form.
"Bad Girl" art refers to a counter movement posited against the traditional "Good
Girl" representation of women in comic books in the 1950s. Within the guise of
the bad girl image, a clear echo of the bad boy image of sex-god and rebel, the
comic book woman encompasses a duly ironic yet appealing aesthetic. Les Daniels
explains the turning point in Wonder Woman's recent history: the first
artist to enunciate her bad girl image was Mike Deodato, who created "the most
overly eroticized version of Wonder Woman to see print: a long-legged, full bosomed,
sloe-eyed beauty who may have been an impossible caricature of a woman" (186).
She is sexy yet physically powerful; her motives often reflect the same dichotomy
as her composition. She gains an independence yet a sexual prowess that both liberates
and hinders her, as The Challenge of Artemis exhibits this paradigm for
both Diana and Artemis. The bad girl representation has woman placed on a pedestal,
but she receives too much attention and must suffer the consequences of her heightened
admiration. Moreover, part of "Bad Girl" art is the theme of mysterious doubles
and related conflicts, very often exceedingly physical, as the Wonder Woman-Artemis
series exemplifies. The motif of the double is repeated throughout The Challenge
of Artemis: Diana has a heroic double in Artemis, a career double in Juliana
Sazia, and a series of foe doubles in Cheshire, Cheetah, and especially Poison
Ivy. Through these double-relations, Diana reveals the transformations and developments
in queer paradigms in Wonder Woman, for each double marks yet another woman-woman
entanglement for Diana.
10. At this point, some form of synopsis is required: Queen Hippolyte, Wonder
Woman's mother, dreams that her daughter Diana will die in man's world. She holds
a "tournament," and Diana and Artemis battle for the title of Wonder Woman. Hippolyte
casts a magical spell that transfers Diana's powers to her sister Artemis: Artemis
wins the title and with her own special talent, the bow and arrow of her classical
namesake, she leaves as the new ambassador of Themyscira to the outside world.
Diana realizes she must follow; she cannot give up her life in Boston. She opens
a help agency for women, with her mortal friends, and redesigns herself: she chops
off her hair and presents herself in a new outfit, titled the I'm not Wonder
Woman anymore costume. In a much tougher, fetish-like "uniform," she ends
up working parallel to Artemis, and in Boston she encounters a group of Batman's
foes, primarily women. The combined forces of the new Wonder Woman and the re-vamped
Diana post-modernize the two principal queer subtexts in Wonder Woman comics that
have existed since Wonder Woman's creation: Diana represents the modernization
of the gay man masked in drag, as Artemis represents a lesbian heroine.
1995, Lesbian Themes, and Artemis
11. In 1995 Diana has another make-over, slightly more drastic than the one she
had had close to 20 years earlier. Her new look removes tiara and mane, giving
her a severe dominatrix-like appearance; she ports a bolero with sleeves rolled
up, her magic bracelets, with leather gloves, a leather brazier fastened with
a metal ring, spandex shorts with leather clasps, and leather booties. The comic
receives a dark, gothic feel, almost glam-rock in its representation, revealing
an oozing sexuality and related queerness as Diana becomes an on-the-edge version
of herself. The stories are fully equipped with magical villains, a cliché full
moon, and dangers which Diana has never before encountered. An integral component
to the gay male subtext of Wonder Woman lies in the notion of masquerade.
To solidify this theory, the intersection of gothic themes and the double life
emphasize this paradigm in Wonder Woman stories of 1995: in a manner reminiscent
to the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde split, this comic book hero exhibits a similar
motif. Diana and Artemis depict how one side of the self is governed by self-control,
while the other remains impulsive, volatile, and self-destructive.
12. Aside from the said Diana Prince/Wonder Woman dichotomy, the new Diana reveals
a curious instance of dragging the text. Her masquerade has a certain quality
that can be explained through Richard Dellamora's response to Leonardo da Vinci's
famous Renaissance paintings. To move back is important, as this will not only
solidify Showalter's position on the fin-de-siècle, but also highlight
how masquerade is often linked to veiled homosexual yearnings. Dellamora explains
that Walter Pater examines Leonardo's "erotic attractiveness to other males with
the inclusion in his paintings of images of doppelgangers" (133). Pater explains:
"Leonardo's love for other men affects the meaning of his work, beginning with
the Medusa ... then continues with perverse interpretations of ... St. John the
Baptist and The Last Supper ... and concludes ... by reading the Mona Lisa as
a transvestite self-portrait" (136). The arguments that stem from such a reading
of da Vinci, allow the reading audience to open the space of interpretation to
house repressed or covert desires in other works, similar to the way Showalter
argues her fin-de-siècle theories.
13. The female subject then, on cue from Medusa and solidified through Wilde's
Salome, can encompass masked homosexual sentiment if not a masked homosexual.
As Medusa is associated with homosexuality, Freud has the discussed this figure
with specific attention to same-sex desire: "Since the Greeks were in the main
strongly homosexual, it was inevitable that we should find among them a representation
of woman as a being who frightens and repels because she is castrated" (136).
Medusa's punishment is the loss of her beauty, which psychoanalytically can be
argued as a signifier for lost power; thus, her phallic snake-hair, the tragic
consequence of her stare and even her questionable insanity reveal homosexual
underpinnings. Therefore, the woman who is represented with overtly masculine
character traits, too much presence, or caught within a rage of altered power,
can, according to Freud's psychoanalysis, reveal a distinctly masked homosexual
meaning. By the end of the twentieth century, this type of masquerading female
figure could illustrate a gay-drag subtext. By the 1960s, there exists a paradigm
similar in comic books; these motifs can be decoded as explicit examples of queer
or gay popular culture. Princess Diana, especially in her 1995 form, reveals these
topoi with the clarity of comic book magic. Diana's colorful U.S. patriotic costume
is given to Artemis, as her day-time life comes to a halt. In her new black and
blue costume daylight fades and she finds herself in a comic book gothic, very
close to the hands of death.
14. When Diana returns to Patriarch's world and before Diana can get her women's
help center under way, a plan is in full form to capture her. Mob ringleader Juliana
Sazia has hired the psychotic karate expert hit-woman Cheshire, Poison Ivy, and
Wonder Woman's all-time foe since the forties, Cheetah. Diana is ambushed and
poisoned with a combination of Ivy venom and Cheetah's claws, and awakes with
her bracelets bound. In the old days, this meant no power. This is also the bondage
motif that caused some controversy during the early years of the comic (see Daniels
61-72). However, the bound-motif, which has permeated Wonder Woman comics
since her birth in the 1940s, creates a stronger sexual overtone throughout the
comic's history. Most of Diana's original foes were women, or women disguised
as men. The idea of capture and an often erotic taming of power through bondage
is the foundation on which the Cheshire/Ivy/Cheetah/Diana ménage builds itself.
Four decades later, Diana finds herself bound, once again, but the text that precedes
her escape and the dialogue that follows moves from subtextual theory into textual
reality.
15. As Diana lays unconscious, the villains eat pizza and drink soda, revealing
a central metaphor that embodies the connotation of consumption: for eating, as
seen in Herman Melville's Typee or Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last
Summer, has strong homosexual undercurrents. The captors gaze at Diana's eroticized
form; her bolero has been removed and she is bound, bandaged, and disheveled.
The villains debate what they should do as they wait for Juliana to show up. "I
think we should prune her," suggests Ivy in The Challenge of Artemis. "You
mean cut off her arms and [legs]?" asks Cheetah (27). The aim, as the dotted lines
on Diana's limbs reveal, illustrates dismemberment, and Ivy's strong desire to
dismember and make contact with the bound hero. Dismemberment has two primary
interpretations when linked to a theory of subtextual desire: primarily, the signification
should be traced back to the ancient world, with attention to Dionysus. This situation
reminds of Dionysian frenzy and chaos where dismemberment, as seen with a series
of deities and their respective myths, represents an intense desire. Coupled with
the food that the villains consume prior to her escape, the threat of dismemberment
complements the implied consumption, as both gesture towards a subliminal sexual
interaction. Moreover, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, dismemberment can be
linked with castration anxiety, fear of a loss of power. Ivy's desire to dismember
Diana reflects her own fear of loss of power, along with a desire unspoken within
the text. However, Juliana appears before anything really gothic happens. "What
are these marks on her?" she asks (29). Ivy tries to brush it off, but Juliana
reprimands her. Ivy makes her promise, "we won't touch her dewy blossoms. Pinky
swear!" (29). And the sexualized language of Ivy's remark presents the first of
her attractions for the Amazon; through Ivy, the 1995 text reveals one of its
primary lesbian themes. The desire to capture, bind, dismember and/or consume
reveals a subliminal sexuality that has existed throughout Wonder Woman's
history.
16. As Diana comes to, Cheetah finds the chained bracelets and their supposed
loss of Amazonian power "charmingly medieval!" (38). Despite Cheetah's enjoyment
of the image of the hero in chains, Diana moves quickly, belts away Cheshire,
and before she is re-ambushed she snaps her chains, as she informs her captors:
"don't believe everything you read" (39). Ivy's undertones are further illustrated
as she attempts to recapture the Amazon: "Just let me touch you, sweetheart. Ordinarily,
I'd do this with a kiss, but we don't want to get emotionally involved" (40).
Diana gives her a kick, and crashes through the window to take to the sky. To
couple the queer innuendoes, another motif of desire is relayed through the environment
and its violence. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has articulated that within the trajectory
of English literature, and especially in the nineteenth-century novel, the all-male
environments of friendship, bonding, rivalry, and mentorship are not exempt from
erotic undertones (1-15). In a similar fashion, this comic book continuum of female
alliance and competition reveals a similar pattern. The precise environment of
Diana's capture mimics the homosocial spectrum that Sedgwick claims nineteenth-century
English fiction presents. Thus, Ivy's suggestive remarks are not that out of place,
and to queer theory, accordingly expected. Moreover, the violence serves as a
metaphor, as graphic sequences of wrestling and boxing, from moderns such as D.H.
Lawrence and Tennessee Williams, reflect repressed same-sex desires. The punch
or kick, like the motif of dismemberment, is an intensified touch, reflecting
the power of both repression and desire. Ivy flees, as she thinks to herself:
"So I ask myself, self , do I stay here and bravely try to fulfill my contract
while ... Wonder-Babe hunts me down like a mad dog ... or do I take my advance
and run like hell? Well, duh!" (47). The language not only emphasizes the psychological
state of the typical comic book villain, but words like "babe" and "hunt" further
imply a subtextual nuance of same-sex yearnings, and emphasize a strong subtext
that is directly associated with this series, Diana's capture, and the Ivy/Diana
liaison.
Artemis: The Silencing of the Lesbian
17. Artemis is Diana's heroic double. Diana believes in love and condemns violence,
even though she is a trained warrior, and attempts to respond to villains and
the troubles of man's world through thinking and kindness. However, she must habitually
use her strength and powers to overcome the obstacles she encounters. Artemis,
on the other hand, responds immediately with impulse and a self-destructive nature.
Diana functions with love and wisdom, as Artemis is molded from her namesake,
and with the help of her magic bow and arrows, she reacts impulsively through
instinct. Artemis thus envelops the traditionally masculine attributes associated
with the hunter; her downfall in Patriarch's world is her maleness. Artemis reacts
instantly with physical force, and like Oedipus who flees the oracle in denial,
she will not listen to Diana's reason when Diana provides her with the truth.
The consequence is the symbolic blinding -- her loss of power at the hands of
the white magician -- and her death. Lacan's contribution to Freudian orthodoxy,
argues Jane Gallop in The Daughter's Seduction, is the shifting in signification
from Freudian penis to Lacanian phallus: symbolic, phallic power deals with cultural
behavior and psychoanalytic consequences, rather than exclusively male genitals
(95-96). Hence, Lacan centers "the castration complex around the phallus, which
is symbolic, the maternal phallus, to be understood by reference to Freud's phallic
phase … the ultimate Lacanian goal is for the subject to assume his/her
castration" (96). Artemis's primary resistance to man's world is her particular
iconography: her bow and arrow are the extensions of the Lacanian phallus, and
her ability to NOT react without direct interaction with her weapon reveals her
hesitation towards completing her phallic development. It is curious that the
same arrow with which she attacks her assailant will bring her to her own gruesome
death. Therefore, Artemis's inception into the comic reflects yet another intersection
between psychoanalysis and queer theory that not only outs her through her psychoanalytic
arrangements, but kills her as well. In comic book land, it appears that while
gay subtext is acceptable and almost habitual, texts that oscillate between subtext
and surface text with too much detection are regularly altered, and subsequently
discontinued.
18. Artemis's arrival in Patriarch's world is marked through deception: as the
new Wonder Woman lacks Diana's association with Athena, Artemis is deceived. A
series of men attempt to publicize her, to make her think she is freeing the world
of patriarchal danger, as a stronger force secretly lurks in the shadows. When
Diana tries to explain this to Artemis, Artemis is already in a rage. In an attempt
to claim the city, to expand her territory, Artemis attacks Diana, and Diana must
fight before she can explain. Diana attempts to withhold her strength, but Artemis
will not stand still and listen to Diana. Finally, to support her insights, Diana
supplies her sister with the files that explain her knowledge, and Artemis can
believe the facts on her own time.
As she suspects the truth about the contest between herself and Artemis, Diana
returns to Themyscira to confront her mother. In the outside world, the fictional
mob ringleaders have become much stronger, principally through their chief villain,
The White Magician. He has transformed himself into a giant beast-like devil,
living in a gothic and violent Hades. In Diana's absence, Artemis seeks him out,
and she instantly draws her ammunition. Diana does appear, to save the day as
one expects, yet it is too late for Artemis. Artemis has used no thought, as she
is fixated on her phallic power. As the combined forces of feminism and psychoanalysis
argue, the symbolic movement from Freudian penis to Lacanian phallus does not
liberate woman: her phallic power is merely a more threatening symbol to patriarchal
power (Gallop 99-100). As she dies by her own arrow, Artemis's strength, her phallic
fixations and related angst prove to be her deadliest enemies.
19. Artemis's end marks an end to the inception of a very erotic and graphic lesbian
subtext into the comic book world of Wonder Woman. Artemis, if she is lesbian,
is too out: her gender insubordination is arguably too detectable, and
she is removed from the comic, which eliminates the power of the lesbian-type
super-heroine. Diana and her women colleagues could not pose such a threat to
the patriarchal realities evident in both our world and the many parallel worlds
in comic books. Her costume is restored, her contribution to the outside world
of men is globalized, and, following the footsteps of Artemis's death, Diana's
own queerness is muted once again. Like the original texts and the late 1960s
campy texts, the 1995 story line reveals a very important reality for comic book
readers: Wonder Woman allows for a lesbian jouissance, in Lacanian terms, where
the interplay of identity, desire, and freedom are not exempt from Freudian and
related sexual undertones. Henceforth, in her stories from the mid-nineties Diana
illustrates a kind of queer alter ego, breathing a voice of freedom, space, and
interactive queer play. The paradoxical reality is that popular culture provides
a space for queer representation and related patterns that influence the formation
of varying ideological patterns in its reading audience, for the comic book queer
can only exist for a brief time, every now and again, until he or she becomes
detectable. Part of the ideology that comics create for queer kids becomes curiously
homophobic, whether intentionally or not: if the comic book queer meets a habitual
end (or reconstruction) time and time again, the message of closeting versus out
becomes far too clear as it mimics the outside world's often far too hesitant
response towards queer identification and queer life.
Works Cited
Beaver, Harold. "Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes)." Critical
Inquiry 8 (1981): 99-119.
Daniels, Les. Wonder Woman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 2000.
Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism.
Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990.
Freud, Sigmund. "Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality." The Standard Edition
of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth
P, 1953-74. Vol. 7, 135-231.
Gallop, Jane. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1982.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W
Norton & Co., 1977.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle.
London: Bloomsbury, 1991.
Wonder Woman 178 & 179. Ed. Jack Miller. Illinois: National Periodical
Publications, Inc., 1968. Wonder Woman. Ed. Denis O'Neil. Vol. 31, No.
203. New York: National Periodical Publications Inc., 1972.
Wonder Woman: The Challenge of Artemis. Ed. William Messner-Loebs. New
York: DC Comics, 1995.
Wonder Woman: The Challenge of Artemis. Ed. Jennette Kahn. New York: DC
Comics, 1996.
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