Wonder Woman: Feminist Icon or Patriarchal Pawn?

Maureen Burdock

Figure 1: Ms. Magazine Cover, First Issue, 1972

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Wonder Woman is arguably the best-known superheroine of the past 70 years.

She has served as both an archetype of US patriotism and of feminism. The area

where these two operatives overlap is, like so many of her numerous spandex

outfits, uncomfortable, inconvenient, and very revealing.

In this paper, I will look at how icons in general function and create

dysfunction. How has Wonder Woman as a cultural icon worked to propagate

dominant ideologies, and how have artists, in the interest of undoing racist,

heteronormative, and patriotic ideals, subverted her image? What are some

alternatives to mainstream superhero comics?

In the early 20th century, Walter Benjamin wrote about the evolving

function of art. Originally instrumental to religion and ritual, art eventually became

subordinate to politics. To Benjamin, this shift had everything to do with the

mechanisms that facilitated reproducibility of artworks.1 Perhaps nowhere is this

change more noticeable than in comics. A fetish is an idealized image, stripped

of its context or endowed with a fantasy context, which is sold to the masses in

order to induce unrequitable longing for a beautified mirror image of ourselves,

thus causing a bottomless need—an endless demand. In religious culture, this

phenomenon creates a space for uncontested power and control; under

capitalism, it creates guaranteed demand for commodities by consumers. The

fetishized image of Wonder Woman, through the mass-produced and universally

accessible comics medium, has both shaped conceptions about ideal

womanhood, patriotism, and feminism, and has been shaped by her massive fan

base. There are numerous examples of Wonder Woman’s evolution being

directly determined by her readership. In evidence of how capitalism works, fans,

through their buying power, are able to dictate everything from the

superheroine’s outfits to her relationships to her mortality. This is not as

democratic as it may appear. Under militant capitalism, corporate media very

purposefully shapes public opinion. The biggest whammy that the few remaining

major publishing houses and broadcasting corporations perpetrate is in getting

1 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (San Bernardino, CA: Key Prism Press, 2010) 20

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consumers to believe that the commodities being pushed on them are what they

have always desired.

How did Wonder Woman come to be such a cultural icon? The busty

Amazon sprang from creator William Moulton Marston’s head, much like Athena

sprang from Zeus’s forehead, over seven decades ago. Legend has it that

Marston’s wife urged him to create a female superhero. But as the brainchild of

Marston, Wonder Woman shared some characteristics with female images born

of earlier male creators. The origin story of Wonder Woman was inspired by

Greek mythology, as were many of her attributes. Marston gifted Wonder Woman

with the musculature and pale skin typical of Italian Renaissance paintings of

Greek goddesses, such as those by Michelangelo, who was known to use male

models for his paintings of women. This resulted in figures that are quite

androgynous—essentially men with breasts—and even these breasts look firm

and muscular enough to challenge Michelangelo’s David to a wrestling match.

Michelangelo was not alone in this representation of women during the

Renaissance. Art historian Jill Burke has posited that what was considered the

“normative human body was male, and that women’s bodies were simply

imperfect versions of men’s.”2

In short, there is a history of male creators giving us feminine archetypes

that these writers posit as something for girls to live up to, based both on their

homoerotic male notions of perfection, paired with what they deem as

essentialized feminine qualities. Marston wrote of the impetus for his brainchild,

Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype

lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't

want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are.

Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their

weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character

2 Jill Burke, “Men with Breasts: Michelangelo’s Women,” Jill Burke’s Blog, February 11, 2011, renresearch.wordpress.com.

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with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good (my

emphasis) and beautiful woman.3

According to Marston, “good” women with these essential strong qualities

are to be tender, loving, affectionate, and alluring.4

Gloria Steinem, both fan and critic of the legendary superheroine, states:

“Marston’s message wasn’t as feminist as it might have been. Instead of

portraying the goal of full humanity for women and men, which is what feminism

has in mind, he often got stuck in the subject/object, winner/loser paradigm of

“masculine” versus “feminine,” and came up with female superiority instead…”5

I want to take this critique a bit further. Marston’s belief that “the antisocial,

violent tendencies in humanity were undesirable masculine traits that were best

subdued by the socializing and loving influence of a powerful maternal figure”6 is

problematic. The notion that men are primarily responsible for the demise of our

planet and that women’s rule might right all sociopolitical and environmental

wrongs is not just dualistic and divisive, but it puts women in the position of being

solely responsible for fixing, or healing, the world, all the while keeping men

happily subdued and sexually fulfilled. This notion puts mothers in an especially

impossible position. Paradoxically, Wonder Woman possesses maternal

qualities, but the archetype does not include space for actual biological

motherhood. This fetishized (and presumed heterosexual) “good” woman, with

her allegedly inherent maternal qualities of patience and nurturing, would

ironically no longer be able to personify Marston’s ideal of also being alluring

were she actually to become a mother, with breast-milk stained t-shirts and

stretch marks. She would thus be rejected as sexualized fetish if she were to

fulfill her expected role. It is then understood that her (male) partner is compelled

3 William Moulton Martson, The American Scholar, 1943 4 Marc DiPaolo, War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2011) 72 5 Ibid., 76 6 Ibid., 71

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to gaze upon other women who are in the maiden phase of their lives. The actual

biological mother will be, to various degrees, rejected both by him and by her

children, who view her as spent and undesirable, even expendable, through the

universalized viewpoint of the father. Thus, the modern ideal “good” woman as

shaped by Marston in the form of Wonder Woman is one who possesses all the

essentialized sexual plus motherly qualities of women as imagined by men, but

who necessarily refrains from motherhood. The modern woman hoping to live a

full and viable life under advanced capitalism therefore forsakes motherhood for

the sake of men’s happiness; out of the fear of becoming undesirable; out of the

fear of economic impoverishment; out of a perceived duty to serve a greater

military and economic patriotic good; and for the alleged good of the

environment.

Essentially, Marston’s Wonder Woman was not a model for women’s

liberation, but a product of her creator’s fantasies and a model for women’s

participation in the military industrial complex. She was and has increasingly

taken on the characteristics of a dominatrix—an ultimate male fantasy of being

(consensually) dominated by a beautiful woman, who is really a feminized mirror

image of himself.

Figure 2: Wonder Woman by William Moulton Marston, art by Harry G. Peter

The first Wonder Woman comic book series was created at the outset of WWII.

She left her idyllic island of Amazonian immortal separatist women (separatism

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being necessary in the binary worldview which cannot imagine a partnership-

based society) in order to fight the USA’s best-known and most vilified enemy:

the Nazis. It is understood that WWII was the United States’ just war, the most

famous and most widely accepted scenario of good (smiled upon by the gods)

versus evil (demonic, subhuman, irredeemable). I am not, of course, suggesting

that the Nazis were not evil. But I am suggesting that the US propaganda

machine, which posits the US as being inherently good and in a position of

policing the rest of the world, is problematic. There are no nuances in Marston’s

(writing under the pen name Moulton) depiction of Germans, “Japs,” “Nips,” and

Italians. These subjects are racist caricatures, similar to Walt Disney’s versions

of these enemies of the US, as described by Dorfman and Mattelart in their 1971

book, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. In his

introduction to this book, David Kunzle says of Disney,

He has done more than any single person to disseminate around the

world certain myths upon which that (North American) culture has thrived,

notably that of ‘innocence’ supposedly universal, beyond place, beyond

time—and beyond criticism. The myth of US political ‘innocence’ is at last

being dismantled, and the reality which it masks lies in significant areas

exposed to public view. But the Great American Dream of cultural

innocence still holds a global imagination in thrall.7

In later decades, Wonder Woman would go on to fight communists and the

Vietnamese. Always, there is an evil force, enemy of the US, which must be

combated.

7 Ariel Dorfman & Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York, NY: I.G. Editions, Inc., 1991) 9

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Figure 3: Wonder Woman by William Moulton Marston, art by Harry G. Peter

In recent years, the enemies essential for promoting the myth of US moral

“innocence” and moral superiority have become increasingly internalized.

Theorist and pedagogue M. Jacqui Alexander paints an insightful image of an

emergent icon, very much aligned with the archetype of Wonder Woman:

The triage of defense, aggression, and protection also relied on additional

symbols to complete the task of manufacturing coherence and building

patriotic support for the American nation. Two racialized, gendered

symbols were deployed by the state as it made preparations to attack Iraq.

One symbol was anchored in the notion of the superior might of a white

Western masculinity that would vanquish traditional orientalist masculinity,

the one defender of the globe, the other—in the figure of Saddam

Hussein—enemy of the globe and of the American people. The other

symbol was taken from the newly reconfigured gendered regime in

soldiering: the American soldier woman. She was chosen as the loyal

marker of emancipated modernity, positioned against the “veiled”

orientalist woman who, much liker her masculine counterpart, was

similarly bound by tradition. And although the job of soldiering was being

increasingly overtaken by people of color, the marker of (white) modernity

against (dark) tradition had to be made white.

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Figure 4: Woman soldier at Guantanamo; photographer unknown

Alexander observes that

If in the Gulf War the figure of the white soldier woman-as-loyal-to-nation

was diffused to anchor support for modernity, in the internal war against

an unwieldy, costly state an opposing symbol—the African American

woman (welfare queen, dependent on the state, with too many children)

as disloyal to nation—was diffused to anchor support for the market. …

Thus, welfare, like war and militarization, is a terrain on which questions of

citizenship are being fought out8

Many writers, including Marc diPaolo, have astutely drawn a parallel

between Wonder Woman and Rosie the Riveter. Like Rosie, Wonder Woman

repeatedly asserts that she must fight for America “because America fights for

women’s rights around the world.” This sheds light on the assumption that

patriotic women—“good” women—must be in support of, if not directly involved

with, militarism. The colonialist logic that “America” is the most feminist nation in

8 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005) 99

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the world is deeply flawed. The notion that North Americans “discovered”

feminism is as unsophisticated and problematic as the notion that Christopher

Columbus “discovered” America. This assumption positions white North

American feminists as active savior figures, as Wonder Women who will bring

progress, liberation, and modernity to women in other parts of the world, who are

waiting, faceless, nameless, and without history, context, or agency, for the

superheroine to arrive from the West. As bell hooks points out, “Individual female

freedom fighters all over the world have single-handedly struggled against

patriarchy and male domination. Since the first people on the planet earth were

nonwhite it is unlikely that white women were the first females to rebel against

male domination.”9

Figure 5: Wonder Woman frees imprisoned South Vietnamese women in Justice League: The New

Frontier, a DVD, February 2007

The militaristic, patriotic dominatrix image of Wonder Woman was not, is

not, and never will be feminist. Women’s internalization of male fantasies in

which objectified women exist for men’s sexual pleasure, for the purposes of

infinite healing and nurturing, and as pawns in the patriarchal machinery of war

has resulted in such misdirected contemporary notions as “Gaga Feminism,” as

9 bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000) 44

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coined by Jack Halberstam in his book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the

End of Normal.

Figure 6: Still from Lady Gaga's & Beyoncé's Telephone music video, 2010

Necessarily, cultural icons and fetishized images reflect popular normative

and homogenous paradigms. Feminism is about gender and racial equality and

cooperation. It is inclusive and starkly opposed to militarism and colonialist

domination in its material or ideological forms. Keeping this exposition of feminist

principles in mind, as this essay has elucidated, Wonder Woman as feminist icon

has been problematic from her paternal conception. Some writers and artists

have succeeded much more than others in portraying Wonder Woman as an

empowering role model who does not cave to male-identified fetishistic whims,

whose worldview is unifying rather than divisive, and whose intensions are

peaceful rather than militaristic. But largely, the icon has tended to promote the

image M. Jacqui Alexander describes, of the white soldier woman.

Overwhelmingly, Wonder Woman has not served to bring feminism to the

mainstream, but instead been part of the cultural imperialist engine that serves to

bring “American democracy (i.e. militant capitalism)” to the rest of the world,

which, in this imperialist worldview, is devoid of its own histories and contexts,

lying in spiritual, technological, and economic dormancy while waiting for

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“America’s” redemptive superheroes and superheroines to come and save it. In

this sense, icons such as Wonder Woman serve in large part to dilute and

subvert feminism and their propagation serves to prevent radical change. The

nature of such fetishized images, once established is very tenacious. Wonder

Woman and her cohorts are here to stay. One viable and often effective option is

to appropriate and subvert such icons.

Many artists have had ambivalent relationships with Wonder Woman and

have taken this approach, both from within and without the mainstream comics

world. Two such artists and writers are Trina Robbins and the author of this

essay.

Trina Robbins, Queen of Underground Comics in the 60s and 70s,

steadfast feminist and prolific herstorian, drew a four-part mini-series, “The

Legend of Wonder Woman,” in collaboration with writer Kurt Busiek, for DC

Comics in the late 1980s. In 1998, Robbins created another Wonder Woman

legend. This time she left the penciling and inking to Colleen Doran and Jackson

Guice, respectively, while Robbins wrote the story. In doing so, she made several

significant changes to the origin story, allies, and intentions of Wonder Woman in

order to bring her into a contemporary feminist context. Not only that, but

Robbins also centered this story around the theme of domestic violence, cleverly

using the mainstream comics icon to redress this form of gender-based

violence—the kind of issue-based narrative that is generally seen more in

underground comics and contemporary graphic novels.

The origin story written by William Moulton Marston in 1941 has Diana,

who will become Wonder Woman, living on the separatist Amazonians’ “Paradise

Island.” To her mother’s dismay, Diana falls in love with Steve Trevor, a US

intelligence officer, when his plane crashes on the island. Diana goes against her

mother’s wishes by leaving with Trevor to go off and fight the Axis armies in

WWII. Robbins has placed Diana not on a phantasmagorical separatist island,

but on the goddess worshipping, Anatolian Isle of Ephesus. The militant,

patriarchal early Greeks have invaded Ephesus, and General Theseus has taken

Diana’s mother, Queen Alcippe, away as his captive. Diana/Wonder Woman

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does not defy her mother and leave her native island for a man. Instead, Robbins

has Diana depart her home in order to save her beloved mother. Thus, Robbins

has given Wonder Woman a historical context, grounding her in real-world

possibilities for a protagonist arising not from a gender separatist environment,

but from a peaceful pagan, partnership-based society. Such societies actually

existed, and do not necessitate the fabrication of a utopian/dystopian “paradise”

in which one gender rules over the other. The motive Robbins assigns Wonder

Woman for leaving her island is clearly feminist, as well. It is not necessary for

Diana/Wonder Woman to reject or defy her mother or her community by falling in

love with a man. In Robbins’ telling, Wonder Woman’s romantic attachment

preferences are neither specific nor relevant to the story. She is a character

complete unto herself, grounded in community and history.

Robbins writes a different history for Wonder Woman’s outfit, as well.

Rather than sticking with the concept that the superheroine’s star-spangled

leotard represents the American flag, she has Diana’s Aunt Oreithia present her

with a battle tunic where “the top is red for women’s blood spilled defending our

tribe from the Greek invaders… The skirt is blue as our skies and embroidered

with constellations representing Cybele and our pantheon of goddesses and

gods.”

Another of Robbins’ significant renarrativizations involves Wonder

Woman’s closest allies. In Marston’s stories, the superheroine is aided by a

group of fair sorority sisters, headed by the chubby, charismatic Etta Candy. In

“The Once and Future Story,” Robbins transforms the sorority gang into

clanswomen from a neighboring Isle of Erin, a name which evolved from the old

Irish name “Ériu,” which was the name of the Gaelic goddess and the island

named after her. Again, Robbins gives her characters a deeper historical context,

reclaiming an oft forgotten or marginalized herstory of cultures such as ancient

Ireland, where people worshipped pantheons of goddesses and gods. Wonder

Woman befriends Ettain (Robbins revision of Etta Candy), who is a large woman,

but also powerful and dignified, in contrast to Marston’s comically chubby Etta. In

Robbins’ narrative, Ettain with her Irish clanswomen and Wonder Woman with

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her Ephesian cohorts become allies, united in their quest to escape their

patriarchal captors and return to their homelands.

Robbins’ book has two parallel stories unfolding within it. First, a

contemporary narrative, wherein a small team of both female and male

anthropologists is excavating ancient stone tablets; second, the events of

antiquity which are described on those tablets. Both stories reveal the need for

feminist thought and action in confronting violence against women. In the

contemporary narrative, Dr. James Kennealy batters his wife Moira. In the

parallel back story, the Greek General Theseus batters Wonder Woman’s captive

mother, Queen Alcippe. By creating this juxtaposition, Robbins reveals

feminism’s deep roots, so important for contextualizing the modern-day

movements for gender equality.

Several other writers of Wonder Woman stories have been progressive

thinkers and not propagandistically militaristic or heteronormative in their

approaches, showing that it is possible to present this cultural icon in ways that

are activist and feminist. These writers make it evident that it is possible to reach

a large audience by subverting existing icons such as Wonder Woman, even if

dominant forces often shoot down such enterprises relatively quickly.

One such writer of Wonder Woman for DC Comics, Phil Jimenez, is an

openly gay man, and his liberal worldview is very evident in the Wonder Woman

stories he wrote from 2000 to 2003. Jimenez opined that people need moral

icons—role models to look and live up to. The problem with morality is its

relativity. Fundamentalist Christian morality, for instance, is antithetical to the

morality espoused by people who support a more inclusive Weltanschauung. As

Oscar Wilde put it, “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we

personally dislike.” It strikes me that we may need allies more than we need

icons.

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My own approach to Wonder Woman has been one of subversion and

circumnavigation, rather than appropriation and renarrativization. I was

introduced to the famous superheroine as a recent immigrant from Germany, at

age nine. A pedophile uncle gifted me with a Wonder Woman bathing suit, and it

was in his apartment that I watched my first Wonder Woman TV show, featuring

Lynda Carter. In my semi-autobiographical graphic fable, Mona & the Little Smile,

I depict young heroine Mona, being returned by the fat pedophile uncle’s hand to

her mother, who has come to pick her up. Mona is wearing a swimsuit featuring

Wonder Woman, an icon that, by contrast, painfully points out the chubby, abject

child’s sense of inadequacy and disempowerment.

Comics scholar Sarah Lightman wrote:

Maureen Burdock described how she was bought a Wonder Woman

bathing suit by her great aunt’s live-in, war veteran boyfriend, “Uncle”

Figure 7: Panel from Mona & the Little Smile, Maureen Burdock, 2010

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Victor, who abused her. ‘I thought Wonder Woman was an impossible

archetype to live up to, sort of like Barbie dolls with their unrealistic

proportions, or like the models in Playboy photos [he showed me].’ But

although the image is pervaded with this dissonance, there is a glimmer of

light, ‘I was nine years old that summer so I couldn’t relate to her at all. In

fact, I felt chubby and unattractive, and the sad irony of my complete

powerlessness compared to her superpowerfulness did not evade me,

even at that young age. But simultaneously, I loved the idea of her—unlike

Playboy models she did also kick (rather than kiss) some ass—and yes,

maybe I was longing to meet her, if not in the mirror, then somewhere

down the road. She gave me hope.10

Disidentification with the popular superheroine may have set me on the

trajectory towards healing from girlhood trauma and towards becoming a feminist

cultural critic. I would later create superheroines who are more reflective of real

women, in all of their ordinary extraordinariness. Protagonist Mona “found joy in

books, especially about artists. [She] saw that art can change things, so she

drew and drew until she changed herself.”11 The narrative unfolds to reveal that

magic is simply a change in consciousness, and Mona, by supplying other

disempowered children with her drawings, encourages them to change

themselves and take their power back.

Mona & the Little Smile references such ancient, potent archetypes as Kali

Ma, life-giving and death-dealing great goddess of India, and Medusa, the

cronish vision of innate earth wisdom turned scary-beauty-who-could-turn-men-

to-stone by the ancient Greeks, turned emasculating icon by the paranoid

musings of Freud. These herstoric references, and the plot in general,

circumnavigate the problematic entrenchments of militarism and gender

10 Sarah Lightman, Exhibition Review: There Goes My Hero. Erin Riley-Lopez, New York: The Center for Book Arts, Sept. 3 – Dec. 5, 2009, International Journal of Comic Art, 2010 11 Maureen Burdock, Mona & the Little Smile, (Santa Fe, NM: Narrative Art Center Press), 2010

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inequities that mainstream superheroics are fraught with. This sidestepping is

intentional, as appropriation cannot avoid manifesting the side effects that come

with the original icons’ properties.

An explosion of contemporary graphic novels that center on personal

experiences (Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi; Epileptic, by David B.), post trauma

narratives (Maus, by Art Spiegelman; Billy, Me & You, by Nicola Streeten), social

issues (F Word Project, by Maureen Burdock), and political subjects (Safe Area

Gorazde, by Joe Sacco; Rise, by Tarek Shahin) model contemporary

approaches to comics. This quickly evolving genre offers sequential art

narratives that rely less on superhuman fetishization and one-dimensional

morality and more on the extraordinary qualities inherent in ordinary people, born

of a profusion of world cultures and contexts.

Wonder Woman, though her creator and the overwhelming majority of her

writers and fans have been male, may have modeled a start to recognizing the

need for greater diversity in US comics literature, and worked to foreshadow the

coming of more nuanced narratives in the place of ideological metanarratives.

Though she inherited the DNA of her paternal creator, and though she frequently

served as male-pleasing dominatrix rather than as a free agent of positive

change and gender equality, Wonder Woman’s ever-evolving image has served

as catalyst for generations of comics creators and feminists who continue to

invent protagonists and plots in support of heterogeneity and collaboration versus

moralism and militarism.

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Bibliography

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Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

2005

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

San Bernardino, CA: Key Prism Press. 2010.

Burdock, Maureen. Mona & the Little Smile. Santa Fe: Narrative Art

Center Press. 2010.

Burke, Jill. “Men with Breasts: Michelangelo’s Women.” Jill Burke’s Blog.

February 11, 2011. renresearch.wordpress.com.

Dorfman, Ariel & Mattelart, Armand. How to Read Donald Duck:

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DiPaolo, Marc. War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in

Comics and Film. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and Company, Inc.

2011.

hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge,

MA: South End Press. 2000.

Lightman, Sarah. Exhibition Review: There Goes My Hero. Erin Riley-

Lopez, New York: The Center for Book Arts, Sept. 3 – Dec. 5, 2009. International

Journal of Comic Art. 2010.

Marston, William Moulton. The American Scholar. 1943