Feminism

Feminism as a concept has an all-at-once fraught and productive relationship with comics as a medium for the political domains associated with gender and sexual difference. In the context of comics, feminism comes to describe a set of approaches that seek to contest the exclusionary status of women and/or female or feminized social subjects in graphic forms and narratives. Such resistance to predominantly sexist and patriarchal attitudes applies to the very question of characters embodying feminist beliefs as much as it applies to creators and assumed readers. The putative consumer of comics has been historically conceived as male, especially the “fanboy,” the geeky male reader obsessed with the particularities of characters or who harbors a fanatical approach to a narrative or franchise. But the figure of the fanboy does not neatly correspond with dominant masculinity. Instead, the passive act of reading—and passivity as a feminized “trait”—associated with an attachment to comics as well as comics’ word-image qualities perceived as infantilized or as subordinated textual forms reflects a difference of reading as a feature of the genre regardless of the gender and sexual identity of the comics reader. If we are to think about comics reading as a gendered form of reading, then its confluence of words and images signals a nonnormativity of visual signifiers that engenders a critique of dominant modes of textual engagement. Nonetheless, until the debut of Archie in 1941 and other teen-themed and romance titles that aligned with the midcentury construction of the teenager, female characters were largely absent or peripheral and were created with the adolescent male reader in mind (Robbins 1999). Functioning as gradual feminist interventions in the longer history of male-focused comics production and reception, female characters, whether cast as liberatory, villainous, or otherwise, presented—and continue to present—nuanced approaches to locating feminism’s representational parameters within the complexities of the genre.