viz. - Superheroine

The Politics of the Sexy Pose

clsloan — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 13:31:03 +0000

What's so amazing about Spiderman? Setting aside the superpowers and the solid-gold heart, his greatest talent appears to be marketing. On this 2009 J. Scott Campbell cover, Spidey appears in three different ways: swinging away in person from his on-again-off-again love interest, caught in an action shot on the cover of a newspaper, and staring out at the viewer from an impressive vantage point on Mary Jane's t-shirt. If we think of “amazing” in terms of “eyecatching,” which Spiderman lives up to his full hero title? From a framing standpoint, it's the front-and-center shirt version, the version showcasing Mary Jane's ample breasts. On this cover, The Amazing Spiderman, much like The Amazing Spiderman, draws focus away from the hero himself and onto an idealized female form.

Mary Jane herself features on this cover in an interesting way. Aside from the unrealistic proportions and the highly uncomfortable-looking pose, she also has a few media echoes that emphasize her value as an object instead of a character. Like the newspaper on the coffee table, she has provided the blank ad space necessary for housing Spiderman's image. Mary Jane has effectively become a walking Spiderman news column, and the steaming coffee she clutches not only cheekily reminds the viewer just how “hot” she happens to be, but just how hot off the presses Spiderman's story is. The fashion magazines beside her on the couch feature women on their covers filling a function very similar to her own: they're there to help sell issues. In the world of fashion magazines, it's about selling a certain look. In the world of comic books, it's about selling the female body itself as a consumable item.

Some invested individuals in various online communities, however, aren't buying what's being sold. They pepper the internet with scathing parodies that provide visual counterpoints to overt sexualization of women in visual media. Fan reinventions, for instance, seek to illustrate what they see as the artist's senseless objectification by redrawing this particular Mary Jane cover, toning down the sexy pose and concentrating on her facial expression. The Escher Girls blog includes several impressive examples. Escher Girls itself is devoted to archiving instances of anatomical impossibility in popular culture that hypersexualize the female body, instances that tend to rely on twisting the spine to show off both breasts and rear. Other critics have mocked the cover by trying (and necessarily failing) to mimic the contorted pose in real life.

Image Credit: The Hawkeye Initiative

The Hawkeye Initiative is another homegrown internet movement that sprang up to denounce gender double standards. According to the website, The Hawkeye Initiative “uses Hawkeye and other male comic characters to illustrate how deformed, hyper-sexualized, and impossibly contorted women are commonly illustrated in comics, books, and video games.” Swapping a tantalizingly-arranged female character for a typical male counterpart helps demonstrate the egregious sexualization of women in these genres. While portrayals of idealized women thrive in the mainstream comics industry, an online counterculture of visual commentary questions the politics of the sexy pose.

Starfire Revealed At Last: A Prelude to the Politics of Sexy Poses

clsloan — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 13:35:04 +0000

Image Credit: dc.wikia.com

In future posts I would like to delve into the ongoing conversation in the comic book world about the hypersexualization of the superhero women who fly, strut and kapow their way across the industry's glossy pages. Before reaching out to this debate in abstract terms, I would like to present one of the key images that catalyzed the explosion of feminist rage, feminist approval, and, quite frankly, some sexist reactionary defenses. In 2011, DC announced the New 52: a complete relaunch of their comic book line including, surprise, 52 titles all starting, or starting over, at issue #1. DC followers set the internet aflame with reactions, thoughts and feelings about the ensuing comics, and a particularly impressive inferno sprang up around Red Hood and the Outlaws #1. Why? Here's a hint. It's the reason this post is tagged Not Safe For Work.

Starfire, a lesser-known DC character outside of the comic book subculture, features in this issue, gracefully splaying her body in suggestive poses and sporting one of those magical, physics-defying bikinis of the lift-and-separate class. A quick comparison with a Tales of the New Teen Titans cover from the 1980s provides a thorough story, told through visuals, about this character's meta-bildungsroman. Both Starfires are alien princess and on-again-off-again members of various superhero teams on earth, but the visual shifts that have accompanied Starfire's growth distinguish these two particular avatars. The 80s Starfire, though still scantily-clad, demonstrates some of the abilities that help define her as a superhero. She soars vertically through the air, her long, impressively buoyant hair leaving a flashing trail beneath her, marking her ascent. A beam of energy shoots towards the viewer from her outstretched hand. Sure, she sports a smile, an immaculate coiffure and a bikini, but we are encouraged to see her as active, exercising the abilities that make her super. The text beside her “REVEALED AT LAST! THE SHOCKING SECRET LIFE OF PRINCESS KORIAND'R!” becomes wryly amusing when juxtaposed with the 2011 Starfire. Revealed at last, indeed.

Image Credit: read/Rant

This Starfire's bikini has gotten even smaller, unlike the other prominent attribute of this frame. Admittedly, this outfit is not meant to serve the purpose of a uniform, but that's part of the point. This Starfire is showcased, not as a superhero, but as a hypersexualized pin-up girl. The vapor trail that signaled breakneck speed on the old cover has become a languid, sparkly trail of ripples in the water, marking the sensual path of her Venus-like emergence from the sea. Where the 80s Starfire crosses an arm over her chest to fire a ray at some unseen mark, the new princess's arms are pulled back and away from her torso, drawing attention to her breasts. The creators emphasize her desirability by including the ironic thought “I'm not wanted here” beside her bikini top in hot pink text.

The debate about unrealistically-portrayed superhero women includes the following questions: Are depictions of sexualized women, like that of the New 52 Starfire, inherently sexist in their objectification of the female form? Contrariwise, are they inherently feminist in their celebration of women's sexual liberation? Is there blame to go around for the convention of the supersexy heroine? Are comic book creators morally or ethically bound to make women's bodies more realistic? Or is the audience at fault? The industry itself? Are these images harmful to those consuming them or harmless fantasies of a cultural beauty standard?

Superhero Footwear Part 2: Do Stilettos Have a Point?

clsloan — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 13:36:30 +0000

Image Credit: TV Tropes Wiki

Look closely. There's blood spattered on Black Canary's stiletto. The splash of red suggests that immediately before launching herself into this flying kick she put the heel of her fashionable shoe right through some villain's skin, intentionally using the deadly-looking point to her advantage. Juxtaposed against the Batwoman cover I used last week, it's difficult not to notice a few things about this action shot. For one, Black Canary's trademark fishnets are in full-throttled evidence, drawing the line of sight away from the kick itself and down to her immaculately posed, well-endowed torso. I had to look at this image several times to even notice the blood on her shoe. Batwoman, comparatively, seems a bit more clunky, more roughshod, more loyal to the demands of physics. Black Canary, here, is idealized, positioned in an anatomically unfriendly, spine-twisting way in order to showcase her breasts, hips and legs. The stilettos, perhaps, add to that sense of idealization: the very pinnacle of what's possible for the female body appearing in toto with Black Canary's pose. Neither the idealization of the female body or superhero high heels, each exemplified in this image, can be considered an isolated incident. The TV Tropes Wiki examines the popular trend of “combat stilettos” in superhero fiction, and a future blog post will discuss how the female body has been traditionally represented in comics. The heels, however, demand our attention today.

In Christopher Nolan's most recent Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, Catwoman also sports an incredibly wicked pair of combat stilettos.

Image Credit: Batman-news.com

Nolan's Batman films already walk the line between the campy comic-book universe of highly saturated colors and the practical reality of the everyday, coming down somewhere in the middle with a dark realism he constantly struggles to assert against the unlikelihood of superhero culture. For example, the Batmobile, that iconic, somewhat silly symbol of bat-justice, becomes the gritty lovechild of a tank and a humvee, the product of Wayne Enterprises weapons research for the military. I half-expected Nolan to give Catwoman a costume that emphasized pragmatism and fit in with his drive for realism (in other words, complete with flats), but instead Anne Hathaway made her Selina Kyle debut with heels roughly as long as the film's midnight showing lines. Interestingly enough, Nolan gestures towards a realist explanation for this choice. In one scene, a thug sneeringly asks Catwoman whether such impractical footwear makes it difficult to walk. She snidely thwacks him with her heel and playfully asks, “I don't know. Do they?” The audience's takeaway from this scene is that these heels are basically specialty weapons. They're impractical the way any armament is impractical; they require certain skills.

Girl culture, then, has become a powerful weapon, one requiring great proficiency and talent to wield. Granted, there are critics who remain concerned about the physical cost of some of fashion's demands, for superheroes and citizens both, but Hathaway's brand of strength, symbolized by her deadly shoes, adds a distinctly feminine twist to the male-dominated world of crime fighting. Perhaps where Batwoman make the concession of giving up outward girl culture in order to adopt a masculine martial style, Catwoman's heels signal the validity of interests culturally coded as feminine. All of a sudden, stilettos seem less a hindrance or a mark of weakness than a respectable symbol of both physical mastery and feminist pride.

The connection between girl culture and superhero strength even takes a real-world, physical turn in Anne Hathaway's own comments at a press conference for Nolan's movie. USA Today's Bryan Alexander reports, “Hathaway credited her breakout role as a magazine editor assistant in 2006's Prada as fundamental training her for the required action in Dark Knight. It gave her the leg up on the skills needed to kick right alongside Batman (Christian Bale)...'The Devil Wears Prada was really good training for that,' Hathaway said at a press conference on Sunday. 'I kind of ran all up and down Manhattan then. Now I just ran up and down Gotham.'” The leap from an editor's assistant to supercrook-turned-hero isn't all that large, provided you're wearing the right shoes.