Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Penney, Dana Mateline
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Wonder Woman (2017)’s action sequences rearticulate the gendered binaries of male/female, masculine/feminine, active/passive, and mind/body by centering women as the film’s heroes. I map director Patty Jenkins’s representations of the female/feminine body and mind (what I refer to as the bodymind) in her film as transgressive. The filming techniques that Jenkins uses speaks to and against the conventional and sexist filming strategies of Hollywood film. Traditionally, film negotiates the troubling and anxiety inducing female/feminine action hero and superhero by limiting her speaking, action, and power. I situate Jenkins’s film in the action and body genre as it centres the body and the action sequence as a primary site for Diana’s (Wonder Woman’s) character development. To analyze how Wonder Woman (2017) rearticulates gendered binaries, I compare Jenkins’s use of containment strategies in her film to that typically found in Hollywood film as well as in the comic book tradition. Filmmakers use these strategies to inhibit female/feminine characters’ action sequences. I find that Jenkins uses some containment strategies such as casting a white, hetero-passing, able-bodied, and conventionally attractive woman as the film’s hero, Diana, and presenting the German scientist Dr. Isabel Maru (also known as Dr. Poison, for her ‘advances’ in chemical warfare), the villain, as physically disfigured. Although Jenkins uses some traditional containment strategies, however, the film regularly challenges others. The film not only defies but also scrutinizes many of the containment strategies that restrict the action-effectiveness or even emphasize the passivity of the female/feminine hero. In contrast to most action and superhero cinema, therefore, Wonder Woman (2017) consistently presents Diana and the Amazons as performing physically demanding feats of skill, strength, and determination in convincing ways. Thus, the film presents exerting female/feminine bodyminds that overcome obstacles in their physical environment. Contrary to many action and superhero films, Jenkins’ film provides action sequences that show an exerting female/feminine hero who develops her skills while countering external forces with her forceful bodymind. As popular film is a powerful medium that reflects societal assumptions, Jenkins’s representation of female/feminine bodyminds effectively challenges and rearticulates the gendered assumptions that the ‘female’ and ‘feminine’ are passive and weak.
i THE WOMAN WARRIOR AND HER BODYMIND IN ACTION: AN ANALYSIS OF BODIES, MINDS, GENDER, AND MOVEMENT IN WONDER WOMAN, 1941 - 2017 by Dana Mateline Penney B.A., University of British Columbia-Okanagan, 2018 B.B.A., Okanagan College, 2015 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) August 2022 © Dana Mateline Penney, 2022 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: THE WOMAN WARRIOR AND HER BODYMIND IN ACTION: AN ANALYSIS OF BODIES, MINDS, GENDER, AND MOVEMENT IN WONDER WOMAN, 1941 - 2017 submitted by Dana Mateline Penney in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts. Dr. Marie H. Loughlin, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisor Dr. George Grinnell, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Jennifer Gustar, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Ilya Parkins, Gender, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University Examiner iii Abstract Wonder Woman (2017)’s action sequences rearticulate the gendered binaries of male/female, masculine/feminine, active/passive, and mind/body by centering women as the film’s heroes. I map director Patty Jenkins’s representations of the female/feminine body and mind (what I refer to as the bodymind) in her film as transgressive. The filming techniques that Jenkins uses speaks to and against the conventional and sexist filming strategies of Hollywood film. Traditionally, film negotiates the troubling and anxiety inducing female/feminine action hero and superhero by limiting her speaking, action, and power. I situate Jenkins’s film in the action and body genre as it centres the body and the action sequence as a primary site for Diana’s (Wonder Woman’s) character development. To analyze how Wonder Woman (2017) rearticulates gendered binaries, I compare Jenkins’s use of containment strategies in her film to that typically found in Hollywood film as well as in the comic book tradition. Filmmakers use these strategies to inhibit female/feminine characters’ action sequences. I find that Jenkins uses some containment strategies such as casting a white, hetero-passing, able-bodied, and conventionally attractive woman as the film’s hero, Diana, and presenting the German scientist Dr. Isabel Maru (also known as Dr. Poison, for her ‘advances’ in chemical warfare), the villain, as physically disfigured. Although Jenkins uses some traditional containment strategies, however, the film regularly challenges others. The film not only defies but also scrutinizes many of the containment strategies that restrict the action-effectiveness or even emphasize the passivity of the female/feminine hero. In contrast to most action and superhero cinema, therefore, Wonder Woman (2017) consistently presents Diana and the Amazons as performing physically demanding feats of skill, strength, and determination in convincing ways. Thus, the film presents exerting female/feminine bodyminds that overcome obstacles in their physical environment. Contrary to many action and superhero films, Jenkins’ film provides action sequences that show an exerting female/feminine hero who develops her skills while countering external forces with her forceful bodymind. As popular film is a powerful medium that reflects societal assumptions, Jenkins’s representation of female/feminine bodyminds effectively challenges and rearticulates the gendered assumptions that the ‘female’ and ‘feminine’ are passive and weak. Keywords: Wonder Woman, warrior, warrior woman, Amazons, bodies, minds, fighting, woman, female, feminine, action, movement, passive, active, hero, gender, sex, superhero, action sequence iv Lay Summary Until very recently, action and superhero films have represented female or feminine characters as either passive, or as performing action that is limited and unconvincing. However, Patty Jenkin’s Wonder Woman (2017) represents several female and feminine characters who are active and perform action in convincing ways. Contrary to much action and superhero cinema, Jenkins’ film provides action sequences that showcase Diana/Wonder Woman as a female and feminine hero performing physically demanding feats of skill and strength in powerful ways. As popular film is an influential medium that reflects social attitudes, this film counters the belief that ‘female’ and ‘feminine’ must also mean ‘passive’ and ‘weak.’ Thus, Jenkins’ film, which also responds to Wonder Woman’s comic book shifts as a feminist icon, shows women, girls, those who identify as feminine, and gender queer individuals, who might identify with the main character, that ‘female’ and ‘feminine’ also means ‘strong’ and ‘active.’ v Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... vi Dedication .................................................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: The Super Woman Warrior, the Female/Feminine Bodymind, and the ‘New’ Female Action Hero in Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) ............................................. 19 2.1 Wonder Woman’s Long Journey to the Cineplex............................................................. 20 2.2 Containment Strategies and the Female Action Hero ....................................................... 22 2.3 Themyscira’s Amazons and Wonder Woman’s Exerting Body in No Man’s Land and the Battle for Veld........................................................................................................................... 24 Chapter 3: Origin Narratives: Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) and the Comic Book Tradition, 1941-2014 ................................................................................................................... 42 3.1 The Origins of Wonder Woman’s Origin Stories ............................................................. 42 Chapter 4: Bodies in Wonder Woman (2017): Sexuality, the Armour of Women, and Disfigurement .............................................................................................................................. 56 4.1 Sexuality ........................................................................................................................... 57 4.2 Women’s Armour in Man’s World ................................................................................... 60 4.3 Disfigurement, the Monstrous-Feminine, and Bodyminds in Wonder Woman (2017) .... 61 Chapter 5: Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 73 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................. 78 vi Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the support of my supervisors, peers, friends, and family. My supervisors, Dr. Marie Loughlin, Dr. George Grinnell, and Dr. Jennifer Gustar, thank you for your support and confidence in my ability to pursue this project. Your passion and knowledge for teaching and academic research have inspired and fuelled my writing goals. Moreover, I would not have been able to do this project without the endless support of my graduate school cohort. Thank you, Dr. Rina Garcia Chua, Deserae Gogel, Mehnaz Tabassum, Kyla Morris, and Anne Claret, for being there for me. I want to acknowledge my friends who have kept me outdoors and active while cheering me on. Even in the moments when I had stopped believing in myself (academically or athletically), you knew I could do anything. For this confidence, I am eternally grateful. My self-doubt has melted away and is little more than a small puddle. Thank you. To all my friends and family, near and far, thank you for your messages of encouragement. Thank you for the inspirational words, heartening wisdom, and the music suggestions that have kept my playlist full of triumphant and energizing tracks. Lastly, I would like to thank my mom and dad for teaching me to pursue my goals, enjoy life’s challenges, and work hard for the things that matter to me. vii Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my grandmothers Luba and Daphne, my aunt Jane, and my bonus grandmother, Seemah. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction The woman warrior is a contentious figure in literature and film. Historically, she is feared as a threat to the gendered assumptions of hetero-patriarchy as she disrupts the borders and binaries that maintain the sexist and heteronormative hierarchies that discipline bodies. While Sydnee Wagner’s summary description of the sixteenth-century woman warrior as a “transmasculine Amazon cannibal” applies specifically to early modern travel writing, this phrase neatly encapsulates the long history of the woman warrior as a “violent,” “dangerous,” “gender-deviant as well as fierce, savage, and hypersexual” figure, an object of both horror and desire (137-38). Contemporary films such as Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017)1, however, offer a different presentation of this troubling figure. Jenkins’s Diana (Gal Gadot) of Themyscira (Wonder Woman) disrupts gendered tropes common not just to this dominant historical representation of the woman warrior, but to her more recent iterations in action cinema and superhero narratives. The film, moreover, specifically celebrates Diana’s warrior identity with its action sequences. Aside from celebrating Diana as a woman warrior, then, Wonder Woman (2017) shows such women (including women other than Diana) as bodies in action, moving beyond their traditional sexualisation, both in history and in cinema. The action sequences in Jenkins’s film, in short, are crucial to the presentation of Diana’s warrior body in action as one that troubles gendered binaries and contests the most common charge made against Wonder Woman as a feminist icon: that her body is too often rendered as an object of erotic consumption (Kohl; Cocca 25–55). The following literature review situates my thesis in the extant criticism 1 At each mention of the film, Wonder Woman (2017), I include the year as to best differentiate between the film, the character, and other Wonder Woman texts throughout this document. 2 that discusses bodies, gender, and action cinema. Moreover, this review allows me to present the relevance of my argument to a broader discussion of bodies, gender, and action in film. Wonder Woman, of course, is not only a woman warrior but also a superhero, and thus the scope and stakes of the woman warrior’s action takes on epic overtones in keeping with the politically-charged spectacle that is a hallmark of this modern cinematic genre (Brown, Modern 63-89). Therefore, I look to critical work on both the woman warrior and the superhero to inform my analysis of Wonder Woman (2017). I borrow terms, frameworks, and ideas from scholars such as Sami Schalk, Judith Butler, Yvonne Tasker, Lisa Purse, Iris Marion Young, Darlene Juschka, Carolyn Cocca, Stéphanie Genz, Scott Bukatman, and Jefferey A. Brown. To unpack the critical literature on the figure of the woman warrior, particularly the figure of the Amazon, is to unpack both the tangled history of Wonder Woman, the oldest female superhero, and the stakes involved in the female action hero’s representation on screen. As I have already indicated, the woman warrior has always been a threatening figure, as she challenges an ancient and pervasive Western gender binary, a binary from which patriarchy derives much of its linguistic, political, and social power. In Political Bodies/Body Politic: The Semiotics of Gender (2009), Darlene Juschka discusses “a general mythology of warfare and masculinity in the Eurowest and conjecture[s] on why the mytheme of man the warrior has become one of the most powerful determinants of Eurowestern mainstream masculinity in the gender/sexed signing system” (71). In these terms, the woman warrior challenges the power of one of the most primary determinants of masculinity: the ability to fight and engage in warfare. To maintain the gender hierarchy, patriarchal language and sexist norms must erase or alienate “[historical] women [who] have armed themselves and fought for the survival of the group, have gone to war as combatants or in support of combatants, or joined and fought in resistance 3 groups” (Juschka 77). Similarly, mythic women such as the “Amazons of ancient Greece” are “mapped out in relation to the idea of monstrosity either as the phallic female or the butch lesbian. […] A woman who embraces death, as a soldier must, is, in the current gender/sex ideology of the Eurowest, a monstrous-feminine whose vagina and womb consume rather than produce” (Juschka 77). The woman warrior in history and literature, then, crosses boundaries and often blurs binaries, just as the woman warrior in film and television does. According to Linda Purse’s Contemporary Action Cinema (2011), “the ‘warrior women’ of the 1980s and 1990s action cinema […] foregrounded their bodily exertions and their physically capable bodies” in unprecedented ways, and “[i]n doing so, they deconstructed the notion of masculinity and femininity as ‘natural’ categories: their bodies declared that the traditional markers of masculinity [especially “aggression, anger, and a pronounced musculature”] were not the exclusive preserve of men” (77). As a result, if a film places a female/feminine2 action hero, superhero or woman warrior at the center of its narrative and action, then she “raises interesting questions of symbolic transgression, of the extent to which the positioning of a woman at the centre of the action narrative generates problems for the genre at the level of connotation” 2 Female/feminine/woman are slippery terms. To acknowledge their slipperiness, I use the term female/feminine throughout this thesis. I find this strategy useful as one’s embodiment generally operates within and beyond the gendered terms female, feminine, and woman, and their respective binaries, (male/female, masculine/feminine, and man/woman. Moreover, I aim to make my analysis inclusive as bodyminds may identify, for example, as female and masculine or male and feminine. I use the word ‘female’ in the most inclusive sense of the word as many identify as female, yet they were assigned ‘male’ at birth. Moreover, I use the term female/feminine to emphasize the femininity embodied by Diana and the Amazons. My emphasis highlights how these characters embody feminine and masculine traits at once. This embodiment, as a result, further illustrates the slipperiness of these terms. Moreover, this embodiment rearticulates gendered binaries as female/feminine bodyminds are active and progress towards mastery in action-oriented domains, such as war, traditionally a male/masculine space. 4 (Tasker 15). Tasker notes Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien (1979) as an example (15). While patriarchy’s tendency to label warrior women as monstrous resists the discursive potential of such a challenging figure, action and superhero cinema faces both the challenges that this figure poses to Western gender binaries, and the challenges she poses to the male-centred coherence of these popular movie genres. Moreover, the woman warrior, female action hero and female/feminine superhero all have intriguing connections to the subversive bodies discussed by Judith Butler. In Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1994), for example, Butler looks at the subversive potential of drag, partly by analyzing Paris is Burning (1990), a documentary about Black and Latino drag balls of the New York City queer community. The film explores issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in America. Butler notes that drag defamiliarizes widely-accepted gender norms and categories (181). Female/feminine action heroes and superheroes in film are not in drag, but their radical discursive potential has some similarities with the drag performer. Like the figure in drag, Diana/Wonder Woman, both in the comics and in Patty Jenkins’s 2017 film, consistently troubles the hetero-normative matrix that drag, as Butler points out, also profoundly disturbs. As a woman who fights, has hyper-abilities, is a hero, and does not need a man for sex, Jenkins’s Diana, in particular, reveals widely-accepted gender norms as constructed and negotiable. In other words, Jenkins’s version of the character rearticulates gendered boundaries. Butler’s assertion that “heterosexual gender norms” are severely limiting since they “produce inapproximable ideals” (181) is also valuable in this context. These ideals, she points out, are “hyperbolic versions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’,” and we “are forced to negotiate” these ideals as we perform gender. However, these ideals are a cultural myth as they are “haunted by their own inefficacy; hence, the anxiously repeated effort to install and augment their jurisdiction” (181). 5 The film industry perpetuates these heterosexual gender norms by sexualizing female/feminine characters as objects of erotic consumption. To be sure, Hollywood producers and studios actively avoid female superheroes, and especially avoid writing them into prominent or lead roles, based on sexist assumptions. As the preceding discussion suggests, however, the assumption that a female action hero spells box office disaster for a movie is also underpinned by a deep unease with this figure’s upsetting of gendered and genre conventions. However, “thanks to public demand and the proven success of action heroine franchises like Hunger Games and Divergent the tides begin to turn” (Brown, Beyond 235). In Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture (2015), Jeffrey A. Brown asserts that “if the filmmakers can resist gratuitously sexualizing the characters, [these] films will represent a huge step in the depiction of action heroines” (241). If filmmakers stop sexualizing female action heroes and superheroes, then these figure’s radical discursive potential can be realized. This potential is threatening to the power structures of hetero-sexist patriarchy. Sexualized or not, female/feminine superheroes and action heroes tend to occupy a non-binary space already. I do not mean to say that these film characters identify as non-binary. Instead, I adopt Stéphanie Genz’s exploration of a “non-binary” expression of the female action hero and superhero in her book Postfemininities in Popular Culture (2009). Genz describes this expression as, a non-dualistic space characterized by the interaction of seemingly irreconcilable opposites. The action heroine’s conflicting identifications involve a continuous play between passivity and activity, vulnerability and strength, feminism and femininity, individualism and communality. Each action heroine has diverse ways of bringing together these components and her negotiations can take the form of 6 an apparently unproblematical alliance of contraries or, more interestingly, a painful and alienating struggle between binaries. I maintain from the outset that the contemporary action heroine has to be conceptualized as an intrinsically ambiguous persona who walks a tightrope to achieve an almost impossible balance. No portrayal of the action-adventure heroine is ever straightforward and unequivocal, allowing a definitive resolution of her inherent contradictions. (Genz 153, my emphasis) The non-binary expression found in female superheroes and action heroes works against the structure of the West’s sex/gender binary system. Such a fluid figure challenges the rigidity of gendered prescriptions. Although Patty Jenkins’s Diana is a conventionally attractive woman who reiterates many aspects of the heterosexist “inapproximable ideal” of “woman,” Jenkins’s film techniques and overall presentation of the character subvert rather than reiterate this ideal and these gender binaries. Diana’s characterization, dress, origin story, and action sequences challenge the gendered assumptions that identify the female/feminine as weak and passive. Diana remains female/feminine in her presentation, yet she fully embodies many masculine aspects otherwise thought to be the domain of ‘man.’ Therefore, the film’s presentation of Diana challenges these sexist norms, as she embodies masculine traits and makes them female/feminine. According to Butler, “the resignification of norms is thus a function of their inefficacy, and so the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation” (181). It is, in fact, this kind of rearticulation that Jenkins accomplished in her film. In the following chapters, I identify where the film’s presentation of Diana performs a complex rearticulation of those gender norms typically found in popular action cinema and in the Wonder Woman comic book tradition. First, 7 I will discuss the gendered dynamics of the action body in action cinema, since Diana’s action sequences are central to my analysis of gender in Jenkins’s film. Contrary to popular assumptions, the action body of action film, male or female, has been a site of shifting gender boundaries and rearticulations since at least the 1980s. Yvonne Tasker’s ground-breaking book Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (1993) was the first sustained analysis of the representation of gender and race in Hollywood action cinema. Tasker locates the particular representation of various action hero bodies in the health, race, and gender politics of the time, noting a significant shift in the casting of action films in the 1980s. This shift, she argues, points to a growing popularity and centering of body builder and hypermasculine bodies as typifying the cinematic action hero. Historically, the “action movie often operates as an almost exclusively male space in which issues to do with sexuality and gendered identity can be worked out over the male body. It is perhaps no surprise then that the heroines of the Hollywood action cinema have not tended to be action heroines” (Tasker 17). Moreover, whether male/masculine or female/feminine, the action-oriented body in cinema has a history of troubling the binary understandings of gender. Tasker notes, in fact, the contradictions embodied by the muscular hero in 1980s action cinema, since this hero “is both posed and in motion at the same time” (Tasker 77). Interestingly, “this combination allows us to problematize any clear set of critical distinctions between passivity, femininity and women, on the one hand, and activity, masculinity and men, on the other” (Tasker 77). As a result, this presentation of the male/masculine action hero reveals the inefficacy of the gender binary and the ideal “man” and “woman” described by Butler. Tasker notes, “the figure of the muscle man hero dramatizes the instability of [male/masculine and female/feminine] categories and equations” (Tasker 77), so too do cinema’s super/action heroines, but in different ways than the muscle man. However, it is 8 worth noting that the positioning of the male body as spectacularly muscular both asserts an idealized masculinity and feminizes the male body and its positionality (as passive) at the same time. As there has been an increase in action-oriented female heroes in Hollywood film, such as Jenkins’s Diana, Hollywood action and superhero cinema, as well as speculative fiction, are the sites I have chosen in order to analyze the bodies of female action/superheroes/warrior women and the stories their bodies and actions tell as they move across the screen. As Diana’s female/feminine body is the central focus of the action in Wonder Woman (2017), I will adopt Tasker’s methodology of reading the gendered body. In addition, as the action sequence is still primarily a male space, I will consider the implications of a female/feminine body entering and dominating this space. My work in this thesis, moreover, analyzes the implications of a moving body communicating a character’s interiority and development through action. My method of emphasizing mind, action, and body as inextricably linked is not new, but it also helps dismantle the oppressive binary assumptions of Cartesian dualism. The mind-body binary is, of course, deeply gendered and exclusionary for women. The sexist assumptions of the West’s mind-body binary limits female/woman/feminine access to both rationality (the mind) and physical competence (the body), since woman has long been assumed to lack both. However, in practice, this binary, like most binaries, is highly contradictory. According to Cartesian dualism, the body and mind operate separately from one another. My reading of Wonder Woman (2017) challenges both Cartesian dualism and the assumption that the action and superhero genres are primarily focused on the spectacle of the body and speak little to the experiences of the mind. In Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ablility, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2018), Sami Schalk discusses her decision to adopt the idea of the ‘bodymind’ as a grounding principle of her critical practice: “Bodymind is a 9 materialist feminist disability studies’ concept from Margaret Price that refers to the enmeshment of the mind and the body, which are typically understood as interacting and connected, yet distinct entities due to the Cartesian dualism of Western philosophy” (5).3 For Schalk, “bodymind […] is an important and theoretically useful term to use in analyzing speculative fiction, as the nonrealist possibilities of human and nonhuman subjects […] often highlight the imbrication of mind and body, sometimes in extreme or explicitly apparent ways that do not exist in our reality” (5). The term allows theorists to discuss the inter-relational reality of the physical and psychic stresses of oppression. As Schalk notes, “bodymind provides, therefore, a politically and theoretically useful term in discussing (dis)ability in black women’s speculative fiction and more” (Schalk 5-6). Bodymind as a term collapses a constructed separation and its sexist relationship. I will explicitly draw the representation of the body and mind together, since the postfeminist and non-binary representations of female/feminine action/superhero bodies enact physical and mental agency through bodily movement across the cinematic screen and through the characters’ respective narratives. The assumption that the body and mind are separate, and operate as separate entities, limits the opportunity to study female/feminine embodiment in film, particularly in action or superhero genres where the spectacular site of the body is central. Although Wonder Woman (2017) is not strictly an action film in the traditional sense, action sequences dominate it and drive the plot. In Contemporary Action Cinema, Purse includes action cinema in the “category of body genres,” since action cinema “is operating at physical extremes, and [...] has the potential to prompt involuntary physical responses in the spectator” 3 For the original article, see Margaret Price’s “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 268-284. JSTOR, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/24542071> 10 (43). Moreover, action cinema and related “body genres” locate character and narrative development in their “persistent and detailed attention to the exerting body” (Purse 2). In these terms, Wonder Woman (2017), as a female-centered contribution to the action-oriented superhero genre, is also a film in the body genre as well. My centering of the body and mind as one and my focus on the action sequences in my analysis challenge widespread gendered assumptions about the genre. As a body-centered art form, critics and scholars often treat action/superhero cinema and its cultural interventions with contempt. Much of this contempt can be attributed to the fact that the heroes are often silent and the body takes precedence “over the voice in telling the [films’] stories” (Tasker 6). My adoption and implementation of the bodymind concept collapse this generic hierarchy that privileges the art of the mind, words, and voice over the art of the body and movement. When I read the action sequence as an aspect of character development, I can note the character’s interiority. The action sequence, in short, tells the story of the female action hero’s and female superhero’s subjectivity and how she chooses to be a subject in the world. The action sequence, therefore, is a space where female/feminine bodies can assert their subjectivity. While patriarchy’s prescriptive limitations on female/feminine body movement not only restricts motion but also a female/feminine body’s connection to her mind, female/feminine action heroes and superheroes alike can offer the spectator a sense of bodily power and exhilarating liberation. Purse is careful to note that in the action film and in action sequences, the spectator’s fantasy lies in experiencing vicariously “that transitional state where the possibilities of the body are both in the process of being revealed and still full of potential; where the body’s power is not ‘fixed’ in place but open to the imagination’s speculations and aspirations, to fears of loss of power and aspirations to becoming-powerful” (48). However, it is important to look at how specific action films present the agential body in a broad cinematic context, since cinema as 11 a whole presents different bodies in different ways. Depending on its race, gender, ability, and sexuality, the action body will be presented in ways that will either augment or contain the action hero’s power and progress. Historically, as Purse notes, in action narrative and action sequences, the “access to the act of overcoming is allocated” to the male/masculine body, supported by wider cultural assumptions that “vest agency in the man and passivity in the woman” (62). African-American women and Black female action heroes are, therefore, the most marginalised group in action cinema, as “it seems, simply ‘too much’ to permit a woman to possess both narrative agency and express her heroism through physical aggression onscreen if she is African American” (Purse 117). To regulate the excess and transgression committed by the female/feminine body in general, and by the Black female/feminine body in particular, the film industry employs what Purse calls containment strategies. These strategies target most stringently the female action hero and female superhero. In this context, Purse discusses how the different aspects of the action sequence break down the central character’s development: through the action genre’s representation of movement and the exerting body (e.g., dodging, deflecting, fighting, training, breathing, and running). Purse also discusses the genre’s use of containment strategies to “naturalize” the exerting, action-engaged female/feminine body. These containment strategies restrict action-effectiveness or even emphasize the passivity of the female/feminine action character. This kind of containment limits, of course, the film’s representation of the female/feminine bodymind as one that can overcome obstacles and pursue mastery over a challenging situation (Purse 81). Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) represents Diana as an uninhibited action hero/superhero, exerting her body and mind while overcoming challenges and developing her skills. As a result, the film’s action sequences potentially rearticulate the 12 heteronormative matrix that I note above from Butler’s work. These sequences also rearticulate previous iterations of female/feminine action heroes, whose physical expression of their bodies has been consistently controlled and contained, limiting in turn the full expression and reading of these earlier heroes’ minds. With new representations of female leads in popular cinema, a fuller and more diverse picture of bodyminds is presented to viewers. There is a cultural assumption that female/feminine bodies, women and girls, as well as those who identify as feminine, are inhibited in their movements. This assumption extends to the idea that their bodies are weaker and less coordinated than those of boys, men, and those who identify as masculine. As a result, this assumption affects female/feminine embodiment and the experiences of their feminine comportment. Iris Marion Young discusses the experience of feminine comportment and expands on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir’s work on the experiences of being embodied (Young 28-30). Girls and women “often approach physical engagement with things with timidity, uncertainty, and hesitancy” (Young 34). This approach leads to a belief that one will fail at a physical challenge before even trying. Young adds, “we feel as though we must have our attention directed upon our bodies to make sure they are doing what we wish them to do, rather than paying attention to what we want to do through our bodies” (34). Sexist assumptions about female/feminine comportment fuel a woman’s distrust of her body. It separates a feminine individual from her bodymind as she feels that she must exert effort and watch her body. Instead, if women knew that they could trust their bodies and abilities, then they could experience the joy of moving through them. I think this is why Wonder Woman (2017) often brings tears to my eyes, and my experience is certainly mirrored by that of many audience members (Karlyn 6/8). I recognize in the Amazons’ movement that they believe that they will move through their bodies. This belief and their trust in their bodyminds 13 are two modalities of existence that I strive to embody in my life as a female/feminine athlete. In fact, the media presents few examples of this type of female/feminine comportment. It is no wonder that women, girls, and gender-queer and feminine-identified individuals distrust their own bodyminds as they move through the world and interact with it physically. Young primarily develops her discussion of feminine comportment from Beauvoir’s work on the experiences of being an embodied woman. Young notes that Beauvoir outlines social reasons for the differences in the experiences of embodiment among men and women, and, ultimately, Young aims to provide “intelligibility and significance to certain observable and rather ordinary ways in which women in our society typically comport themselves and move differently from the ways that men do” (30). Young analyzes observational studies that record differences in body movement between girls and boys while throwing a ball or engaging in other movements, such as walking (28, 32-3). The studies are obviously sexist, since they conclude that there is an essential biological difference or “feminine essence” innate in girls that leads to their more restricted and contained movement while throwing a ball, for instance (Young 29). Young carries on Beauvoir’s work and points to the sexist social norms that affect a girl and her socialization as a moving body (29). In short, patriarchy’s prescriptive limitations on female/feminine body movement not only restrict motion but also a female/feminine body’s connection to her mind, a connection that always runs two ways as the body and mind are inextricably linked (Schalk 5). Given Wonder Woman (2017)’s representations of women warriors as uninhibited and uncontained bodyminds in action, Jenkins’s action sequences work to rewrite and rearticulate sexist and heteronormative prescriptions that have limited the female/feminine bodymind in society and on the screen. 14 While Jenkins’s rewriting subverts many of the tropes of the conventional action film that I have been discussing, this rewriting also creates a certain pleasure in the audience, a pleasure described by both Tasker and Purse, and developed by Kathleen Rowe Karlyn in her 2018 article “Wonder Women: Women’s Tears, and Why They Matter.” Tasker suggests that the pleasure of films with action heroines partly relates to “the dissolution of […] rigid categories [such as those found in heteronormative patriarchy] within the imaginary space of the cinema” (146). Karlyn identifies characters and films like Diana in Wonder Woman (2017) as “giv[ing] women something [they] crave”: the tears of viewers and the joy they felt in watching Wonder Woman and her Amazon sisters battle it out and stand for their values and beliefs are a cathartic release (6/8). As Diana and her sisters embody and successfully mobilize the power of female unruliness (Karlyn 6/8-8/8), female/feminine audience members are not only empowered but also are thrilled by a sense of recognition, as they watch the female/feminine bodies on the screen enact assertive agency through bodily power and motion. In my analysis of Wonder Woman (2017), I theorize the film’s representation of Diana’s bodymind in her movement, dialogue, and abilities. I analyze throughout the film’s expression of female/feminine agency in spectacular physical ways that challenge the gendered binaries of the heterosexual matrix. Decentering rationality as the source of knowledge and agency, Diana, the female action hero/superhero, learns and enacts agency with her body, movement, and physicality in ways previously restricted (like rationality) to the male/masculine hero. Jenkins’s Diana grounds the narrative and viewers in a profound sense of female/feminine embodiment, that, at the same time, challenges gendered binaries governing assumptions around the embodiment of (dis)ability, strength, and power. Although I historicize and analyze other aspects of the film, such as the development of Wonder Woman’s origin stories, dress, and sexuality, my 15 focus will be on Wonder Woman (2017)’s representation of Diana’s action sequences and their potential to rearticulate the gender binary. Much of Wonder Woman (2017)’s narrative deliberately confronts the restrictive sexist assumptions of WWI England, America, and the Western world more broadly, as Diana’s superhero and action hero body moves through space. I look at these assumptions throughout my thesis. In Chapter 1: The Super Woman Warrior, the Female/Feminine Bodymind, and the ‘New’ Action Hero in Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017), I historicize the lack of superhero women in film. I further discuss Purse’s containment strategies and how they affect the representation of female superheroes and their action sequences. With these containment strategies in mind, I analyze the representation of the woman warrior in Wonder Woman (2017). My analysis in this chapter begins with a focus on the opening and establishing shots of the film that communicate a dominant theme: to be a woman from the Amazon island of Themyscira means that one is not only female/feminine, but also strong, powerful, and physically-skilled. Next, I analyze the film’s representation of Diana’s action sequences as she fights her way across No Man’s Land and into the town of Veld. I discuss the film’s use of dialogue, music, postures of mastery (Purse 66), postproduction sound, and the sequences’ representation of Diana as she exerts force on her surroundings with her bodymind. Closely related to Chapter 1’s discussion of Diana’s female/feminine bodymind, Chapter 2: Origin Narratives: Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) and the Comic Book Tradition, 1941-2014 outlines the differences in Wonder Woman’s origin stories. I compare her origin story as told by Patty Jenkins’s 2017 film with earlier versions in the comic book tradition: the original ‘origin story’ written by Wonder Woman’s primary creator, William Moulton Marston (1893–1947); the important 1980s feminist ‘reboot’ by writer George Pérez (1954–2022) and his team; and, most recently, the misogynist 16 2011-2015 re-writing by Brian Azzarello (b. 1962). In contrasting and comparing the origin stories, I note the sexist assumptions and feminist subversions in each. Finally, in Chapter 3: Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017): Sexuality, the Armour of Women, and Disfigurement, I work through three sections that analyze three aspects of bodies in Wonder Woman (2017): sexuality, dress, and disfigurement. In the first section, I look at the representation of sexuality in the film as the woman warrior and female/feminine society of Themyscira complicates the heteronormative language of gender, battle, and sexuality. I argue that the film suggests that the Amazons’ all-female society enjoys and maintains a robust and pleasurable female-exclusive sex life. In the section “Woman’s Armour in ‘Man’s World’,” I consider the implications of dress and clothing as armour in the sexist and patriarchal man’s world that lies outside Themyscira. I argue that the film suggests that women use clothing to assert and protect their bodyminds. Depending on the social context and situation, women will choose different clothing to best negotiate the heterosexist patriarchy’s interpellation of their subjectivity. I note how the film carefully presents clothing both as a source of power and resistance, as well as a source of oppression. In the last section “Disfigurement,” I explore the representation of the female/feminine villain Dr. Maru (Elena Anaya) as disfigured. I compare Dr. Maru and Diana as each woman is presented as a weapon. However, one is presented as a weapon for ‘good’ while the other is a weapon for ‘evil’. Visually speaking, Diana is idealized as the beautiful hero, while Dr. Maru embodies the monstrous-feminine as a violent, physically-marred woman. As both women are violent (albeit in different ways), the film tempers Diana’s strength and violence with her beauty and kindness, while marking Dr. Maru as villainous with her facial disfigurement. In the end, however, the film complicates this stereotypical opposition between the beautiful, virtuous female hero and the disfigured villain as Wonder Woman saves 17 Dr. Maru and destroys Ares (David Thewlis), the god of war, with her love, empathy, and compassion. In short, although Wonder Woman (2017) appears on an initial viewing to repeat problematic tropes related to beauty and virtue, ugliness and sin, the film finally troubles the media’s repeated use of scars, disfigurement, and disability as a signal of evil, criminality, and amorality. In Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (2003), Scott Bukatman argues that American popular cinema has seen a sharp increase in films devoted to action spectacle and the heroic body in motion. As he has pointed out, spectators’ delight in such representations are a response to the restrictive nature of modern spaces and society: “With the kinesis of spectacular visual effects, often accompanied by a sense of utopian possibility, movement becomes a passage across borders that promises resistance to external control” (125). Broadly speaking, this thesis addresses movement as resistance. Movement not only provides an opportunity for oppressed bodies to reclaim control, but it also allows these bodies/selves to assert their subjectivity. When I say ‘movement,’ I mean movement in every sense of the word. Admittedly, movement is imbued with ableist, sexist, racist, and classist assumptions and connotations. Not everyone can move all the time, and not everyone moves in the same way. However, it is crucial to recognize that movement is resistance, and that this resistance comes in many forms. For me, when I see bodies move, I am inspired to move as well. I love to watch and learn from all bodies, disabled and abled. However, I do notice a difference when I see bodies like mine on the screen. As a conventionally attractive, white, able-bodied, and cis and hetero-passing woman, I regularly see bodies like mine. From this position of privilege, and with my recognition of how common it is to see bodies like mine on the screen, I advocate for the critical analysis of the politics of representation in mainstream media. Given its popularity and global 18 audiences, recent superhero and action cinema, in particular, with its increasingly diverse characters, has the potential to produce real change, as oppressed and marginalized individuals see bodies like theirs performing amazing and heroic actions. Moreover, I have not always felt empowered by the women I see on the screen, even though these women have arguably mirrored my own positionality and privilege. I argue that there is a change in how women are presented in action and superhero film, and I locate this change in the action sequence. In Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (2017), the action sequence highlights Bukatman’s utopian possibilities, at the same time that it makes viewers acutely aware of cinema’s long history of controlling, limiting and effacing gendered, raced, classed, and disabled bodies. 19 Chapter 2: The Super Woman Warrior, the Female/Feminine Bodymind, and the ‘New’ Female Action Hero in Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) Director Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) is the first effective challenge to the female action hero’s hyper-sexualisation and agential containment in American superhero film. The film achieves this intervention by revising a number of gendered filmic conventions that dominate American popular cinema. It is also a dramatic intervention in the long history of Wonder Woman’s comic book iterations, as these iterations shift in relation to America’s long and troubled relationship to the Women’s Movement and feminist thought (Kohl 90-100). In terms of American popular action cinema, Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) revises popular structures, such as the male hero’s journey of personal development, wherein he gains a combination of physical and mental mastery. Inserting the figure of Diana/Wonder Woman into this narrative, Jenkins does two things. First, she creates a narrative that challenges and makes apparent the sexist assumptions guiding this trope. Second, she creates a film that asserts a female/feminine “bodymind,” creating a female/feminine agential self that, employing Purse’s analysis of the exerting body in action, is uncontained by hyper-sexualisation and other sexist tropes and production strategies used by popular film genres. In contrast, Jenkins embeds throughout her film her construction of a specifically female/feminine bodymind integrity that defines both her hero and her hero’s woman-exclusive culture. This chapter further argues that Jenkins’s film fashions narrative and action sequences that position women as active characters in Themyscira (the woman-only island populated by Amazons) and in “man’s world” (the rest of the world that is ruled by patriarchy and is meant to reflect Western history and society). 20 2.1 Wonder Woman’s Long Journey to the Cineplex According to Blair Davis in Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page, since the beginning of the twentieth century, comic book heroes have been adapted for the screen (2). Why is it, then, that it took so long for there to be a Wonder Woman feature film despite her being a superhero since the Golden Age of comic books (1938-1956)? Unlike Spider-Man, Hollywood writers and producers did not have to wait for computer generated imagery (CGI) technology to develop to render Wonder Woman slinging webs and swinging from building to building. In contrast, Superman, similar to Wonder Woman in abilities and superpowers, has his first modern feature-length film in 1978, followed by sequels, and recent re-boots. Why is it that Wonder Woman’s first feature-length film was released thirty-nine years later? Brown notes the pervasive sexism in the film industry that has long excluded visible minorities, women included, from lead roles in superhero films (Beyond 237). The sexist assumption that women are unattractive and uninteresting unless they are “sexy” leads to the film industry hypersexualizing the female/feminine character to ensure a film’s success. The assumption is that if a female-led film fails, it is because of her gender. When a male-led film fails (and they do!) no one says it happens because of his gender. Executive producers, however, take such a failure as ‘proof’ that woman-centric superhero action films are risky, and avoid supporting another female superhero lead (232). In reality, as Brown puts it, “the problem is that culturally we still tend to think along mutually exclusive gender lines that permit handsome men to be strong, but limits the strength of beautiful women” (237). In contrast, “the general public and media critics alike have become impatient with the apparent sexism behind decisions about which superhero projects get approved and which do not” (Brown, Beyond 233). Brown notes the resulting disparity, as “over fifty superhero movies have been released in the last decade and only three of them have focused on superpowered women. Of these films, Catwoman (2004) and 21 Elektra (2005) were critical and financial flops, and My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) was a lighthearted comedy that went pretty much unnoticed” (232). The dearth of female-led superhero films is directly related to Hollywood’s gendered norms and expectations, and these, in turn, shape the CGI images and sequences so central to this genre. For example, The Avengers (2012)’s movie poster featuring Black Widow is an altered image of the superhero, with CGI used to add curves to the character’s hips and waist. Black Widow is not alone. In Catwoman (2004), Hally Berry’s eponymous heroine is rendered “curvier, prettier, and sexier” in her action sequences, in contrast to “Spider-Man, Hulk, and Iron-Man [who] are rendered as active, powerful, armored, and muscular in their moments” (Brown, Beyond 238). It appears, then, that film producers have been wary to take a “risk” investing in the writing, production, and distribution of a film featuring a female superhero, even if it is the famous Wonder Woman. However, these ‘failed’ female-led superhero films are also films that engage in a common set of gendered tropes, images and sequences that result in their female protagonists’ hyper-sexualisation or trivialization, the latter through their reduction to roles in comedic or romantic narratives. Both of these treatments are containment strategies that the film industry typically uses to guard against the perceived failures that arise out of featuring strong female leads. That Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) was a box office success, however, indicates that there is nothing inevitable about the failure of a woman-centered superhero film that rejects these typical approaches to the female action hero. In fact, Jenkins’s deliberate centering of Diana and her action sequences made the film not only a challenge to sexist practices in film but also enormously successful. 22 2.2 Containment Strategies and the Female Action Hero In action and superhero films, fight scenes and action sequences are where much of the narrative and character drama plays out. Often, it is in these scenes where we see our heroes step into their full potential and grow as protagonists. However, superhero and action cinema, in general, and fight and action scenes, in particular, are usually void of female/feminine heroes. Let’s take a look at why and how this happens. Purse identifies the tendency for “male-fronted action cinema [to] regularly [posit] situations in which the hero achieves the impossible feat of repeatedly taking out ‘a dozen or more armed men’ [and] such situations are staged in a film world whose correspondence to real-world physics and physiology can be quite stretched.” However, despite the widely accepted cinematic conventions that allow for such ‘stretching’ even in the most realist of action films, many complain about a lack of realism if female-fronted action cinema stages similar situations. Purse notes that “such complaints are not contemplated in relation to equivalent scenes featuring a man, because the male action hero’s surprising ability to carry off this kind of impossible feat has been utterly naturalized” (76). As the cinematic tradition only naturalizes the hyper-abilities of the male body, when the female hero engages in “impossible feats” of action, her body is, in contrast, rendered unnatural and exposed. Inevitably, then, containment strategies are used to maintain the “believability” of the action involving the female action hero or superhero. Containment strategies are, in short, a necessary component to the Hollywood film industry’s portrayal of women as naturally passive heroines who certainly take action, but not too much action. As Purse’s work suggests, these containment strategies are varied, and most female action heroes find themselves subjected to one or more of the following. They are overtly 23 sexualized or hyper-sexualized;4 they are reduced to their function in a heterosexual pairing or romance plot; they are defined through their roles as mothers or potential mothers; they do not survive the end of their story; they are placed in unrealistic or clumsy and unconvincing action sequences, inflected with camp and/or comedy; they are not really heroes but villains, so powerful and therefore monstrous that they must be destroyed; or they simply never assume centre stage, performing secondary or supportive roles in relation to the male hero. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with a female character falling in love with a man, becoming a mother, or being the villain. Problems arise, however, when most female characters and their development are restricted or contained by any of the strategies listed above. The politics of representation5 has long dictated that white, male, heteronormative, young, and able-bodied men are predominantly featured as the hero in most films. In contrast, women, and Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, people with disabilities, and non-heteronormative individuals are rarely featured as the protagonist or hero. Instead, the film industry casts women, disabled, queer, and BIPOC folks as the villain, a plot device, the hero’s desired object, or the support for the male hero. For Purse, the history of Hollywood action cinema is simultaneously the history and practice of these strategies of containment. As Purse notes, there are indeed female action heroes in Hollywood films, but for these figures “the traditional heroic qualities of toughness and 4 Admittedly, male heroes are often sexualized too. However, their attractiveness is rarely to the detriment of their ability to act and be a hero (Brown, Beyond 237). 5 Long a phrase used in media studies to refer to the way representations are shaped by a culture’s dominant ideologies, the politics of representation in superhero films involve the almost complete alignment of traditional superhero narratives with whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality, an alignment that has only recently begun to be challenged (Cocca 1-5, 17). 24 resolve are reframed in relation to gender-biased notions of decorum: grace and dignity, perfect hair and make-up; and unconvincing physical action” (82). One such group of containment strategies, particularly popular in the early 2000s and 2010s, is sometimes termed ‘postfeminist.’ These postfeminist containment strategies are no doubt a response to the “warrior women” of the 1980s and 1990s, “action cinema [heroines] who foregrounded their bodily exertions and their physically capable bodies in ways not witnessed previously in Hollywood” (Purse 77). The postfeminist trend in media marks a return to the sexually exploitative television series of the 1960s and 1970s; the 2000s and 2010s’ postfeminist approach may have “provided a space for women who possessed and displayed agency,” but the media of this period still featured hyper-sexualized female characters (Purse 79). Action cinema presents the new heroine of the early 21st century as “physically empowered [but also] overtly sexualized, a tendency evident in tight or revealing costumes” (Purse 78-9). Here, we see the postfeminist, popular culture tendency to represent white, affluent, cis, and straight women as not only strong, empowered, and agential but also as conventionally beautiful and sexually “hot.” The overt sexualisation of the female action hero is, moreover, a containment strategy mobilized by mainstream filmic techniques that render the female/feminine body—specifically in her performance of feats of strength, agility, and power—as non-threatening to patriarchal heteronormativity. 2.3 Themyscira’s Amazons and Wonder Woman’s Exerting Body in No Man’s Land and the Battle for Veld Patty Jenkins’s revolutionary 2017 film Wonder Woman carefully presents and foregrounds its titular hero in ways that both negotiate the dominant male gaze and focus on Wonder Woman’s/Diana’s physical capabilities instead of her conventional beauty. Jenkins’s cinematic strategies prioritize the convincing representation of Diana’s force: that is, her ability 25 to withstand or mitigate the impact of objects and adversaries attacking her, and not only to exert her physical body but also to practice and hone her abilities and skill in battle. Although Wonder Woman is a superhero film and not strictly an action film, Jenkins employs many of the action genre’s conventions to convincingly portray Wonder Woman’s journey to realizing her strengths and power as a woman warrior. This progression―portrayed by the exerting body confronting physical, emotional, and mental challenges while building confidence and competence―is an action film convention that allows the viewer to relate to the protagonist’s character growth. It is also a convention that comes into direct conflict with the equally conventional containment strategies that historically limit female character growth. The action sequences in Wonder Woman (2017) spectacularize the growth and development of Diana’s bodymind as she exerts herself physically and mentally in order to overcome the challenges and obstacles in her way. As discussed in my introductory chapter, throughout history Western patriarchal societies have demonized women warriors as monstrosities and also as social ‘losses,’ since a fighting woman is perceived as a female body that could have reproduced for the hetero-patriarchy but is too busy training, fighting, or dying. Jenkins’s presentation of Diana and the Amazons is more complicated, however, than the woman warrior’s traditional dichotomous representation as both beautiful and monstrous. Though the film’s Amazons are conventionally attractive and beautiful according to hetero-patriarchal norms, their entire presentation is not preoccupied with this goal. Instead, the film presents a variety of female/feminine and active women as heroes. Three minutes into the film’s beginning, the viewer is first introduced to the Amazons and their homeland, the island of Themyscira, through a scene featuring the Amazons fighting and training as an army. This establishing shot is crucial as it sets up a dominant theme that is present throughout the film, that of the fighting woman as a hero who asserts her subjectivity as a 26 physically-confident, battle-ready bodymind. The 2017 film uses strategies found in action cinema to build a compelling and convincing depiction of Wonder Woman’s bodymind as she develops from her early life on Themyscira into the hero she becomes at the end of the film. According to Purse, “action cinema is defined by its persistent and detailed attention to the exerting body, a focus which shapes its audio-visual aesthetics as much as its characterisation and narrative design” (Purse 2). Jenkins’s film takes particular care to lend its attention not only to Diana’s exerting body but also to the exerting bodies of the Amazons as a people. Purse’s outline of the effects and affects of the action sequence and action body illuminates Jenkins’s focus on the active and exerting female/feminine body. According to Purse, in documenting acts of physical exertion, action cinema does so precisely through a spectacular mode of presentation that calls attention to the physiological attributes and corporeal attitudes of the body in action, as well as to the exhilarating, risk-infused environment which that body is moving through, the forces it is subjected to and the counterforces that it directs outwards at that environment. This body is a physically empowered one, strong, agile and resilient, asserting itself in the field of action and risk, and thus acts out fantasies of empowerment that are inherently literalised and physicalised, rather than abstracted. The fantasies of empowerment that action cinema offers are affecting precisely because, through staging and presentation, the work of exertion, of moving towards mastery of the situation, is also foregrounded. (3) The film first calls attention to the corporal attitudes of the Amazon warrior’s body, and therefore, of her culture, by presenting the viewer with the training grounds initially forbidden to the young Diana (Lilly Aspell). The film opens with an exhilarating spectacle of exerting 27 female/feminine bodyminds “moving towards mastery”6 of each training “situation,” as the Amazonian warrior women power through a high-paced and risk-infused environment that is their training grounds. The scene foregrounds their counterforces that they direct outwards into the environment and against their training partners as the Amazons train and move in precise and powerful ways. Often, many of the women are forced back while receiving a blow from a fellow combatant. With the crescendo of triumphant music and the clash of swords in the background, the film first emphasizes that these women warriors are intense, skilled, and determined fighters (3:01). There are shouts and growls of effort, women engaged in one-on-one combat, and other women flipping through the air while they aim their swords at a target. The movements are not obviously choreographed. Instead, the sequence shows the women combining practiced skill and physical force (3:38). Through their work of exertion and continual practice towards an evolving proficiency, the women in this scene assert female/feminine bodyminds that speak not only through their bodies and actions but also through their physical training in the language of fighting as Amazon warriors. It is this embodiment, language, and mind that the young Diana desires to achieve and develop. In terms of traditional action and superhero film, this scene is clearly transgressive. The simple act of foregrounding a female/feminine body as exerting “outward counterforces” 6 To be clear, I use the term mastery in this thesis to discuss how a bodymind triumphs over the challenges of a particular situation. I use mastery, moreover, to describe the bodymind progressing towards a certain proficiency unique to each bodymind in question. Thus, in this sense, the idea of one’s experience of mastery is continually evolving moment-to-moment and from one situation to the next. My use of the term in my analysis, consequently, counters the sexist, ableist, and racist ideal of “mastery.” The ideal requires the body and mind to match an inaccessible idea of mastery. This ideal, additionally, typically requires one to exhibit absolute control over the body. Thus, this sexist, racist, and ableist ideal reinforces Cartesian dualism, and, consequently, it is inherently contradictory. 28 troubles otherwise clearly gendered framings of the female body as passive. This transgression contradicts the tendency for film makers to objectify female/feminine bodies as unable to counter and respond to forces from the outside world. Jenkins’s establishing shot eliminates the assumption that female/feminine bodies will be objectified as needing protection from risk-infused environments. Moreover, this opening scene sets the stage for the dominant gendered themes in the film and builds a world in which the viewer can accept Diana’s abilities and body as believable (in the context of the fictional world of the film). Setting Diana’s abilities in a foundation of female/feminine history and culture that cultivates the warrior skills of its fighters creates an opportunity for the viewer to experience the sensual responses to the work of exertion and moving toward a mastery of their particular warrior-prowess; this work is foregrounded by the practicing female/feminine bodies in this scene. Moreover, the scene makes it clear that young Diana desires to train and fight in the traditions of her mother, aunt, and Amazon sisters. In this way, the film challenges popular cinema’s unrelenting focus on traditional gender roles, where young girls are typically represented in terms of heteronormative and patriarchal assumptions, particularly those that insist girls are “fragile and immobile” and that to be feminine means a girl must “actively enact her own body inhibition[s]” (Young 44). Jenkins’s Amazons comprehensively challenge the assumption that the female and feminine are automatically to be equated with the passive and weak. Instead, we see that in Diana’s world to be female/feminine is to be strong, active, educated, and, if one so desires, a warrior. The conventionally male/masculine traits of strength, power, and combat-readiness are aligned with women on Themyscira, and to be strong, powerful, and skilled in physical combat is to be a beautiful and valued member of society, not a monstrous pariah. 29 The film, then, introduces action and combat as a female/feminine dominated way of life for the Amazons, explicitly rejecting the action genre’s emphasis on these defining features as exclusively the province of the male action hero. This rejection of the genre’s sexist norms continues as Jenkins moves into the central action of the film at WWI’s Western Front. Even though Diana has less speaking time than her supporting character, the American WWI army officer and intelligence operative Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) (Jones 24),7 she features centrally in far more action sequences than he does, and crucially it is Diana on whom the film focuses in the important No Man’s Land and Veld sequences. Soon after arriving at the Front, Diana learns that the people of the French village of Veld are being killed and enslaved. Diana expresses her desire to save Veld, but in response Steve tries to explain to Diana that “[No Man’s Land] is not something that you can cross” (1:13:28). Diana not only knows, however, that she can get across, but she also desires to save those who are suffering. To this desire, Steve says, “This is not what we came here to do.” The music changes; the background noise of artillery and explosions falls into muffled silence as Diana turns from Steve only to turn back and say, “No, but it’s what I’m going to do” (my emphasis, 1:13:28). This exchange between Diana and Steve is the deliberate prelude to Diana’s movement onto and through the battlefield, and it is an exchange that models and precedes what Purse has called the “postures of mastery” in action cinema, which includes the “empowered stance […] that action heroes adopt prior to intense moments of confrontation” (66). Before climbing the scaling ladder which will take her from the allied 7 This imbalance in dialogue plagues most popular North American movies, and affects not just women, but racialized, disabled, and non-heteronormative individuals, who typically have less significant and far fewer speaking lines than white male counterparts. There have been several quantitative studies, but in addition to Jones, see Anderson and Daniels. 30 trenches into No Man’s Land, Diana’s declaration helps constitute her empowered stance, where she asserts her intentions and mastery of the situation before a moment of spectacularly intense and “impossible” confrontation with the opposing Germans on the famous Western Front. In the context of the 2017 film, No Man’s Land resembles what Purse identifies in action cinema as an “exhilarating, risk-infused environment which [Diana’s exerting body moves] through” (Purse 3). This action sequence centres “the forces” Diana “is subjected to and the counter forces that [she] directs outwards at that environment” (Purse 3). Steve explains the meaning of No Man’s Land to Diana: “That means no man can cross.” He speaks, ironically enough, before Diana states finally her intention to do precisely that, and she proceeds to cross No Man’s Land not as a man, but as a woman. Diana’s turning to mount the trench ladder and her physical stance of mastery are, moreover, reinforced as a bodymind-moment, since these actions are prefaced by an instance of self-linguistic assertion: “No, but it’s what I’m going to do” (original emphasis). At the same time, this traditional gesture to the male hero’s physical and mental mastery is implicitly reframed as challenging this and other masculine tropes relating to war as the sphere within which an action hero demonstrates his attainment of true male selfhood. No Man’s Land is a particularly evocative setting for such a reframing, even more than a century after the end of this war. WWI’s No Man’s Land still exists in the popular imagination, after all, fuelled by movies like Sam Mendes’ 1917 (2019) and Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien (2019). Both of these recent films represent No Man’s Land as a monstrous, liminal space (Montin 107-111), as an antagonist that seeks to destroy the very masculinity and integrity of the self that its male heroes cling to in their attempts to face and even (in Mendes’ film) to cross it. As Eric J. Leed points out, for WWI memoirists, No Man’s Land was “the most lasting and disturbing image of war” (14-15). Uncanny and asocial, No Man’s Land was both a violated and a violating landscape 31 (Montin 105-114). In choosing No Man’s Land as the setting for Diana’s pivotal character development, Jenkins draws on this historical and geographic space as a deeply symbolic and cultural space. It can be no accident that Jenkins chooses to situate Diana’s first and most emotionally-resonant intervention as an action hero in a setting that “remains one of the most haunting symbols of the dehumanisation of man in the modern Machine age” (Montin 111).8 No Man’s Land is a site of stillness, oppression, death, pain, and inaction. It is a real place that held soldiers captive and immobile for long periods of time. As a result, Jenkins’ decision to use No Man’s Land as a setting and create a mise-en-scène of stillness and immobility emphasizes the significance of Diana’s disruptive presence in action and superhero cinema and in a narrative that highlights aspects of the unnecessary suffering of war. In addition, of course, the No Man’s Land/Battle for Veld sequence is couched within the action that both precedes and follows it. Jenkins carefully organizes this sequence and its relationship to the rest of the film so that the action stretching from Diana’s exchange with Steve in the trench to her entering of the town of Veld followed by Steve, their team, and the allied soldiers specifically plays against all the other ways Western media culture has taught us to see the beautiful female body in motion: through the male gaze, voyeurism, and the insistence on a universally applicable body–mind division. By this point in the film, viewers have had the experience of earlier scenes, some of which I will discuss more fully in a moment, where Diana confronts the heterosexist and normative gender binaries of woman’s conventional body-mind division as enabling the expression of other binaries related to power and powerlessness, 8 The deliberate choice of this setting is even clearer if we consider that Jenkins’s source material, the Wonder Woman comics beginning in 1942, were originally set during WWII. On Wonder Woman’s representation in a WWII context, see Knaff. 32 dominance and submission, masculinity and femininity. These binaries are encoded earlier, for example, in Diana’s contemptuous treatment by the allied generals, where one general, appalled at her presence in a war-room briefing, exclaims that someone needs to “see her out” (57:37); and in her experience of shopping for gender appropriate, early twentieth-century clothing (48:27). In filming Diana’s climbing of the scaling ladder, Jenkins takes the risk of repeating some very common camera angles that most often code an invitation to treat the female body as a sexualized object. These angles often anatomize the female actor’s body for the pleasure of the male viewer. The tilt shot is a mainstay of this kind of sexual objectification, because it mimics the action of looking at a person’s feet and then tilting the head/gaze up until reaching the top of a person’s head. As a survey of the eroticized female body, this shot is so ubiquitous that viewers may not even be conscious any longer of its anatomizing function, so naturalized has it become as a way of offering the sexualized female body for our consumption. This anatomization of the female body can also be accomplished through a set of point-of-view shots where the viewer takes up the voyeuristic position of the male gaze. Some recent examples would include Menahem Golan’s 1985 remake of King Solomon’s Mines which features a tilt shot of a nude female statue (which doubles as a map leading to fabulous treasures) (Shohat 145-8); Martin Scorsese’s short film ‘Life Lessons’ (part of New York Stories, 1989) concludes with a series of shots from the artist Lionel Dobie’s point of view, as he surveys each bodily part of a lovely young woman before offering her a job as the replacement for his disillusioned lover, Paulette (Tye). To be sure, directors play with techniques that objectify the female body in various ways. Female director Catherine Hardwicke reverses the gendering of the tilt shot by having Bella subject Edward to it in Twilight (2008), while James Cameron uses the same shot to hilarious effect in Aliens (1986). Here, the tilt shot that surveys Private Vasquez’s body focuses on her 33 atypical strength and muscular definition, and is the prelude to a male character asking her, “Have you ever been mistaken for man?” to which Vasquez replies, “No. Have you?” Even the reversal and satire of these anatomizing techniques proclaim their continued use and power in women’s cinematic sexualisation and objectification. As Diana moves up the trench ladder, we are reminded of this kind of voyeuristic treatment of female beauty, but Jenkins informs this scene with dialogue and action that emphasize, as I have already discussed, Diana’s agency (“But I know what I’m going to do”). However, the scene also invites viewers to assume interpretive control over the traditional language of film that frames the female body within the male gaze and voyeuristic pleasure. In Diana’s trench ladder scene, the camera’s movement is both like and unlike the traditional tilt shot where the female body is subject to the controlling male gaze of the camera. Here, the camera follows Diana as she moves through the frames. The eye of the camera subordinates its gaze to Diana’s moving body, rather than subjecting this body to a gaze that controls and objectifies. The mastery stances that Diana models earlier are emphasized by this use of the camera, since it is Diana’s control that the shots’ composition emphasizes. Moreover, unlike in the traditionally sexualizing tilt shot and other anatomizing techniques, the camera follows Diana up the ladder and emphasizes her battle-ready gear and warrior culture. As the camera moves up Diana’s body her cloak slips away to reveal not her beautiful lips, legs, breasts, hair, or butt, but instead, her shield, silver gauntlets, lasso, knee and shin armour, and the crown that previously belonged to her aunt, Antiope (Robin Wright). Known as Themyscira’s greatest general, Antiope dies earlier in the movie protecting her Amazon homeland and Diana specifically from an invading German force, taking a bullet meant for our heroine. Thus, the camera’s movement emphasizes this culture and history. 34 Indeed, this sequence visually foregrounds Diana’s battle gear, much of which is iconic, well-known through her comic books, such as her lasso. As a result, this set of shots functions in opposition to the heteronormative tendencies of the Hollywood filming practice of sexualizing the female/feminine hero. Moreover, the film revitalizes this and Diana’s other iconic accoutrements, like her armour, full-length silver gauntlets and suggestively ancient and durable shield, with a more convincing composition. When compared to Wonder Woman’s traditionally tight-fitting and sheer costuming, knee-high boots, and silver bracelets, the new gear presented in the film adds to the physically-convincing effectiveness of Diana’s fighting in the action sequences, and her assumption of serious heroic subjectivity. Instead of focusing on her curves, the film focuses on her implements and armour, emblems of her Amazon culture and warrior status. And indeed, the entire scaling scene, and later Diana’s surge across No Man’s Land, employs slow motion, a traditional filmic sign of a scene’s emotional weight and thematic importance (Kydd 107), beginning when Diana turns away from her exchange with Steve and the others; continuing through her movement towards the ladder; and the reaction of the young soldier in background who stares silently at her as she dons Antiope’s tiara and prepares to cast off her black cloak (his expression is a mixture of shock, disbelief, and perhaps awe). There is a pause, as time returns briefly to a normative scale for Diana’s line “No, but it’s what I’m going to do” (1:14:13), before the resumption of slow motion, and her movement up the ladder, over the top of the trench and onto the verge No Man’s Land. These shots are very powerful, and they also invite the audience to engage in a different kind of spectatorship, one that is specifically and pointedly non-voyeuristic. We are, of course, still invited to participate, to move with her, by having motion too fast for the human eye and brain to register slowed down. 35 The music enhances her purposeful climb out of the trench as Diana prepares to do what she came here to do, to save everyone from the war and Ares. In the film, Ares is the god of war, who in Amazonian history has corrupted humanity with blood lust before being banished by Zeus, and whom Diana believes is the moving force behind this world war that she must defeat for the conflict to end. Slow-motion is used here to emphasize this moment of growth for this character, since in this scene Diana’s superhero powers and disposition are first tested. The slow motion shows the audience the significance of the scene and signifies Diana’s discovering of her powers as she puts them to the test. The rhythm and volume of the music crescendos as Diana begins to run towards the German trenches and their firing rifles, machine guns, and heavy artillery. Not only is Diana presented in an empowered stance, but also as running towards the forces that her body is subjected to and skillfully directing her counter force outwards toward this risky environment. Diana counters by deflecting bullets with her gauntlets as she increasingly builds confidence in her mastery of the situation. As her confidence builds, so does her speed. Developing and exploring her skill further, Diana convincingly deflects bullets with her gauntlets and artillery with her shield without breaking a stride. To further foreground the female action hero’s exerting body, the sequence temporarily slows Diana’s progress as the German soldiers blanket her with machine gunfire. In opposition to this onslaught of external force, Diana directs her counter force outward as she stands behind her shield in a deep stance. She is flexing her muscles, gritting her teeth, face contorted, and leaning progressively further into the increasing gunfire, pushing it back with her super human strength. Eventually, Diana is brought to her knees as she leans into the fire against her shield; her bodymind is centred in the middle of the frame, highlighting the convincing force she is exerting and responding to. The 36 female/feminine hero is presented here as digging in, mind and body, despite the onslaught of deadly forces, emphasized visually by dirt flying up from explosive shells and gunfire and sparks from a blanket of heavy-ammunition striking her shield. Like the scaling ladder scene that references strategies to contain the female action hero only to disrupt them, the scene where Diana crosses No Man’s Land sees Jenkins referencing and dismantling the gendered nature of post-production sound dubbing. According to Purse, “the female action body is […] prone to audible gasps or sharp inhalations in the middle of an action sequence, as if unable to sustain an attack or evasion” (74). As a result, female action heroes and characters often present not only “more breathing sounds” than her male counterparts, but also ones that are “louder and less controlled” (Purse 74). The disparity “contributes to a sense that the heroine’s body is reactive rather than proactive, weaker rather than stronger. At the same time, the persistent aural emphasis on the ‘breathiness’ of the female body also refers us to conventional cinematic representations of female sexual abandon, the sound track eroticising the display of female physical agency” (Purse 74). In the No Man’s Land action sequence, Diana’s breathy sounds of exertion are taken directly from these gendered sound conventions, and her breathy utterances contrast strikingly with the forceful grunts of the German soldier using the machine gun to shoot at Diana (1:15:00). Here, Diana gasps and lets out sharp intakes of breath, which can be jarring compared to her otherwise convincing displays of bodily exertion. At the same time, however, the crossing of no Man’s Land contains any number of characteristics that insist on Diana’s hyper-able physical body in the face of conventions that seek to contain the threat posed by it. Purse notes popular action cinema’s pervasive gendering of exertion signifiers, both visual and auditory, as “male fronted action films routinely add cues to cement this understanding; the male body will sweat, become bloodied, will grunt, will contort 37 his face in the moment of exertion, veins popping, face red” (Purse 81). However, in “many recent female action films,” bodily exertion is limited to “choreography and presentation that refuses to reference real-world consequences of bodily momentum, weight and impact; there is a persistent tendency to downplay significantly the physical consequences of action, such as pain and injury” (Purse 81). As a result, Diana’s breathiness here, in this specific scene, might seem to limit the viewer’s sense that the female/feminine bodymind is gaining mastery in an otherwise risk-infused and unsafe environment. However, when we examine the scene more closely, we see that these breathy sounds are contextualized within the film’s insistence on the way Diana faces and gradually masters the real-world consequences of bodily momentum, weight, and impact, as she leans progressively more into the ever-heavier gunfire. This sequence is actually very typical of those in the movie, which regularly feature Diana’s contorted face, flexing muscles, and impactful hits, landings, and blocks, signalling her hyper-competent employing of her bodily strength and exertion. In the trenches and No Man’s Land, however, Diana’s female body is presented in explicitly conflicting terms. Despite having shown that she is not only able, in spite of ableist and sexist assumptions about the female body, but hyper able, she is presented as naïve, needing protection and constant explanation as her questions, emotions, and desire to help seem to ‘de-rail’ the mission. Led by Steve and his small strike team, this mission aims to destroy a new weapon of mass destruction created by the German general Erich Ludendorff (Danny Huston) and his ally, the German scientist Dr. Isabel Maru (also known as Dr. Poison, for her ‘advances’ in chemical warfare). In contrast, once she is alone and running through No Man’s Land, Steve, the team, the allied soldiers and viewers alike have an even more powerful sense of Diana’s hyperability, as she draws the German fire and her team and the soldiers climb out of the 38 trenches in her wake. Interestingly (and perhaps this compounds the irony), her declaration and her action turn No Man’s Land into a land that all the allied men can and do cross. When team member Charlie (Ewen Bremmer) asks frantically, “What does she think she’s playing at?”, Steve’s response is: “She’s taking all the fire. Let’s go.” And when she and Steve’s team end the barrage from the German lines, all the allied soldiers go over the top, and the audience can hear them saying, “She’s done it.” And right at the beginning as they surge forward, the viewer can just hear repeated, “Let’s go!” In terms of the dialogue, Diana’s agency is exemplified as a bodymind emblem. Her speech and her action are joined. In the end, all the men echo her words and her actions; they ‘do’ and ‘go,’ and in fact they encourage everyone around them to ‘do’ and ‘go.’ “Let” is, of course, English’s answer to the optative mood of verbs in other languages. With this little word English speakers can suggest, offer, or command action. The film’s presentation of Diana’s action not only asserts her heroic subjectivity but also her bodymind through convincing depictions of her movement across the treacherous No Man’s Land. Although this action sequence presents Diana as a superhero with superpowers, it is careful to represent her ascent to master-warrior in relatively convincing ways that are careful not to disrupt the fictional ‘real world’ physics of the Wonder Woman (2017) universe. This maintenance of action ‘believability’ is crucial, as I have already discussed, to Jenkins’s project of creating the serious female action hero, by refusing to use the containment strategies typically found in popular media. The film carefully establishes Diana’s abilities as the narrative progresses, and this action sequence builds on the film’s facts about Diana and her training. For example, after the earlier scene in the clothing boutique in London, Steve and Diana are quickly cornered in an alley by several men with guns. Steve tells Diana to “stand back” (53:00) as he covers her body with his own, reinforcing the assumption that the female/feminine body is 39 passive and weak, and the male/masculine body is, in contrast, active and strong. Diana, nevertheless, reaches around Steve’s body, using her silver gauntlets toshield Steve’s body from the first bullet shot by the attackers. Steve responds with a searching look at Diana and says, “or, maybe not.” Just as Steve completes his utterance, Diana acts, blocking bullets and using her speed, strength, training, and strategy not only to neutralize the attackers and their weapons, but also to assert her bodymind as a trained warrior and protector in a world that assumes otherwise. In this scene, Diana’s gaze and movements suggest that she is at home as she moves and fights, and it is here, in fighting, that she grows as a bodymind. Although she does not speak before or while fighting the attackers, Diana asserts her presence, character, interiority, and, therefore, bodymind with her movements. Diana’s action while running across No Man’s Land, as a result, builds on the action of the scene in the alley as well as her training in Themyscira. As I briefly note above, although Diana is a demi-god and, as a result, seemingly impervious to physical injury in the mortal world, the action sequences present her body as experiencing and imposing the physical consequences of action in both spectacular and convincing ways. Once across No Man’s Land, Diana yells at Steve, “Let’s go!”, before leaping over the trenches and to the very edge of the village of Veld. Following, the team gathers around the entrance to the village. While behind cover, Diana looks to the group and says, “Stay here. I’ll go ahead” (1:17:00). Diana then runs ahead into Veld under fire. Two other team members, Sameer and Charlie, look to Steve for guidance, and Steve responds with a quick shrug, suggesting that they follow Diana’s orders. Following hard on a leap reminiscent of those wearing seven-league boots in European folklore, Diana’s authority here is based in her extraordinary physical abilities, and her leap (undertaken with no apparent effort or difficulty) reminds us of her semi-divine nature. In her movement through Veld, however, Diana’s muscles 40 flex; she grunts and yells; resonating booms sound as she hits the ground; bricks fall when she slams or leaps onto walls, and metal bends when she strikes it. The scene in Veld, then, further develops the film’s established rules and physical limits as Diana fights her way through to the villagers, emphasizing the reality, seriousness and believability of her actions. Running through the streets, Diana, under fire, dodges, ducks, and deflects bullets. An explosion launches her up onto the side of a brick building, which Diana uses as a springboard—crushing part of the brick wall to send her body through the large window of the adjacent building. In slow motion, Diana smashes through the window with her shield raised, centred in the frame and facing the camera straight-on and she lands in an empowered stance. In contrast to the breathy sounds dubbed in earlier, a resounding boom emits from her forceful and controlled landing. From a deep lunge, shield in front, hand poised to grab her sword, Diana looks up to find a large room filled with German soldiers. Taking stock of the situation, Diana decides to shin kick a table at two of her opponents. She then launches into an attack that exhibits her training and quick-thinking skills as she navigates around the soldiers in the room. The sequence is reminiscent of those showing Diana’s training on Themyscira. The climax of the retaking of Veld features the meeting of Jenkins’s various strategies for presenting Diana both as the extraordinary demi-god and superhero, and as the female/feminine action hero, freed from the containment strategies that continue to haunt this figure in popular American cinema. Towards the end of the battle for Veld, in the Veld town square under the bell tower, Diana confronts an armoured fighting vehicle (an AFV) firing explosive shells (1:18:00). Leaping into the air, Diana shields herself from one such shell, and in the aftermath her extraordinary invulnerability is evident. Upon making contact with her shield, the shell explodes, sending Diana to the ground. However, she is up almost immediately and storms the AFV, body- 41 checking the machine. Although the action is unrealistic, the viewer understands that Diana has hyper-abilities that make her exceptionally strong and less prone to physical trauma. Despite this physical reality, the film presents Diana’s forceful body-checking of the vehicle, crushing metal, flexing her muscles, and projecting an appropriately loud boom, as her body springs back from the force. Diana then upends the partly damaged AFV, with a cry expressive of convincing exertion and aggression, a raging battle cry, though still in a female/feminine voice. The cry explicitly contrasts with the breathy sounds that appear briefly earlier and that are typically dubbed throughout female action sequences in action films. Joined to the battle cry’s contrast with Diana’s breathy utterances behind her shield during the crossing of No Man’s Land, the scene’s CGI convinces the viewer about the female superhero’s extraordinary physical abilities. While in the aftermath of the winning of Veld, especially in her dance scene with Steve, Wonder Woman is still conventionally attractive, the focus is on her being a hero. A hero who fights for and saves the ordinary people of Veld and her team from harm. Jenkins’s decision to present Diana in powerful and convincing action sequences both intervenes in the traditional sexualisation of female superheroes and action heroes and demonstrates that such intervention can result in box office success. 42 Chapter 3: Origin Narratives: Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) and the Comic Book Tradition, 1941-2014 As discussed in the previous chapter, Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) engages with the long history of the female action hero’s containment and trivialization in American popular cinema, since the film challenges many of the long-standing containment strategies limiting the action and agency of female/feminine action heroes and superheroes. The film, at the same time, engages with another tradition that oscillates between liberating and containing the female superhero generally and Diana in particular: the Wonder Woman comic book tradition. As one of the American comic book’s Golden Age heroes, Wonder Woman has a long history of origin story rewrites and reboots. In this chapter, I outline and analyze several such rewrites which are particularly relevant in light of Jenkins’s determined rearticulation of the female action hero/superhero. From the character’s inception, Wonder Woman’s origin stories and comic book narratives have had explicitly feminist goals and messages. These origin stories and narratives, however, have also been given ambiguous and even outright misogynist treatment. Jenkins’s Wonder Woman approaches Diana’s origin story with new material, while both supporting and undermining some of her creator William Moulton Marston’s original feminist themes, as well as engaging with some of Diana’s most famous feminist and anti-feminist revisions over the last eight decades. 3.1 The Origins of Wonder Woman’s Origin Stories Wonder Woman is one of the longest-running superheroes in the comics, beginning with the publication of William Moulton Marston’s first ‘Wonder Woman’ story, which appeared in DC’s All Star Comics #8 (December 1941), before the immediately popular character received fuller treatment in Sensation Comics #1 (January 1942), and got her own comic book line not six 43 months later in Wonder Woman #1 (June 1942) (Lepore xi). Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), however, documents Wonder Woman’s representational history, before Marston and his collaborators began to produce her comic book narratives. As Lepore points out, Wonder Woman’s origins are grounded in Marston’s proto-feminist convictions, and his desire to create a popular culture figure of ideal womanhood. Marston hoped Wonder Woman would “combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and […] inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations and professions monopolized by men” (qtd. Lepore 202; see also Finn 7–21). As a result, Wonder Woman has always been the most consciously political creation in the American superhero tradition, and her representation by a long list of writers, illustrators, and editors over the last 81 years relates explicitly to the shifting history and status of the American Women’s Movement, as well as developments in feminist theory and analysis. Wonder Woman’s representation as a feminist icon has shifted and changed between 1941 and 2017, just as the aims and concerns of North American feminism have shifted and developed over the same period (Lepore xiii). Although space prevents a full account of these fascinating shifts, some themes are important to detail, because these are particularly illuminating when considering the cinematic uses of Wonder Woman’s comic book tradition in Jenkins’s 2017 film. However, it is also important to bear in mind the complexity and fluidity of Wonder Woman’s representation in relationship to feminist principles, and the following analysis will necessarily confine itself to only a few of the most telling comic book instances where Wonder Woman’s bodymind is most at issue. The critical literature treating Wonder Woman has also developed in ways that mirror the analyses of the American superhero in general, moving from an examination of the superhero’s promotion as a moral, ethical and ideological emblem to an exploration of this figure as 44 increasingly shaped by its immediate historical, political, social and cultural circumstances. However, unlike her male counterparts, Wonder Woman possesses an agency and an embodiment that have always been linked sites of vociferous debate and controversy, arguably since her inception in 1941, but at least since Gloria Steinem’s first issue of MS Magazine, featuring Wonder Woman striding across a divided landscape of peace and war, surmounted by the banner ‘Wonder Woman for President.’ While the critical tradition dealing with the female action/superhero generally and Wonder Woman in particular is rich and varied, the tradition’s treatment of agency and the female body has largely become stalled in the binary oppositions between body and mind, embodiment and agency, that this thesis seeks to dismantle and reframe. Even Joan Ormrod’s recent book Wonder Woman: The Female Body in Popular Culture (2020) which “contextualizes [Wonder Woman’s] body over several eras from the 1940s as culturally defined, a phenomenological and a social object ” (15), nevertheless embeds the various versions of Wonder Woman from the 1940s to the present within an implicit mind-body dualism. On the one hand, Jenkins’s 2017 movie Wonder Woman (2017) is only the most recent in a long line of representations that grapple with Diana/Wonder Woman’s embodiment and agency as linked feminist issues. On the other hand, this movie’s intense grappling with the containment and trivialization of the female action hero in American cinema consistently turns, as I have been arguing, to a notion of bodymind that refuses the Cartesian valuing of mind over body. This hierarchy, as I discussed in the introduction, has been consistently gendered, with the valued mind/reason as masculine and the devalued body/passion as feminine. Moving into the genres of the origin story, history, and myth, Jenkins’s animated story of how the Amazons and Themyscira came to be addresses a narrative that is the central site of the comic tradition’s shifting relationship to Wonder Woman’s feminism: the so-called ‘origin story,’ the narrative of 45 how a particular superhero gains or discovers their powers, socially-positive mission, and iconic costume (Coogan 24, 30-42). Jenkins decides, in contrast, to have Diana gradually discover her true origins as she fights, experiences her powers, and confronts the physical, emotional, and intellectual challenges presented by her interactions with allies and villains alike. As a result, the film’s structure presents Diana’s origin as gradually unravelling as Diana’s bodymind moves and encounters the world. William Moulton Marston’s original origin story of 1942 is based on an imagining of a purely matrilineal and parthenogenetic Amazonian society, where Diana is jointly born of the power and will of Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, and of the Amazon Queen Hippolyta’s desire for a child. Following the teachings of Athena, Hippolyta sculpts a child from clay, which Aphrodite, responding to the Queen’s prayers, brings to life (Marston, Wonder Woman, issue 1, 6A). As a result, Wonder Woman’s origin story is not only matriarchal but also a political intervention that challenges patriarchal norms, down to the discarding of male participation in biological reproduction (Curtis 308). In Marston’s story, moreover, Aphrodite is also the creator of the race of the Amazons, “superwomen, stronger than men” (Marston, Wonder Woman, issue 1, 3A). She sculpts the Amazons by hand, out of clay, in response to Ares’ masculinist and violent creation of his “swordsmen (now called Mars)” (Marston, Wonder Woman, issue 1, 2A), and their slaying of their brothers and enslaving of all women. In this origin, the Amazons are born without men or fathers. Instead, they are a matriarchal project, independent of and resistant to Ares, his men, and their heteropatriarchal endeavours to destroy non-conforming men and dominate all women. The challenge posed by this startling set of origin stories led to any number of efforts to contain Wonder Woman’s radical implications: from the American psychologist Fredric Wertham’s attempts in the early 1950s to have her comic book banned as an incitement 46 to lesbianism (This 30-1, 35) to her later metrosexualization and domestication under the newly instituted Comics Code Authority (1954) and her transformation into a 1960s romance heroine, with plots preoccupied with questions of love, marriage and children (Valcour 67) to her changing styles of female heroism related to broader shifts in women’s roles in the American home and workplace (Kohl; Lee; Smith; Johnson) to her present oscillations in relation to America’s longstanding, fraught relationship with feminism (Hammontree). Although Wonder Woman’s re-imaginings, as we will see in relation to writer Brian Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang’s The New 52, can sometimes be explicitly anti-feminist, more often writers and artists have recast her origin story in response to more recent misogynist threats and discourses. George Pérez’s famous rebooting of Wonder Woman (1987-1992) changes the origin of the Amazons of Themyscira so that they are no longer women moulded from clay by Aphrodite, as they are in Marston’s original origin story, but are women reborn as a collective effort by the goddesses of Olympus. In Pérez’s origin story, the Amazons are reborn from the womb of Gaea (the Earth) through the combined actions of the goddesses Artemis, Athena, Demeter, Aphrodite, Hestia, and Hermes (often a gender fluid figure as a goddess/god), acting as “midwives to Gaea’s new offspring” (Pérez, vol. 2, issue 1, 8-9). In this version, the Amazons are the reincarnations of women who have been killed by their domestic abusers. In Pérez’s version, Diana’s origin is likewise significantly revised: Hippolyta tells Aphrodite that she desires a child. Aphrodite then goes to the womb of Gaea to retrieve the last of these souls and breathes life into the woman born as Diana. In this iteration, the Amazons’ and Wonder Woman’s joint origins could not be more reflective of Pérez and his team’s conceptualizing of this origin as a feminist intervention in American culture. This intervention, like many after it, led readers and writers back into the real world. As Philip Smith notes, “writer Andy Mangels, who subsequently served as writer for 47 Wonder Woman in 2016, organized and ran Wonder Woman Day from 2006 to 2010 with the primary goal of raising awareness regarding domestic violence” (233). Like Pérez and the other comic book writers and illustrators that followed him, such as Phil Jimenez and Gail Simone, Themyscira and Wonder Woman are figures of hope and embody the possibility of a more just and peaceful world. However, Wonder Woman’s reimaginings have not always been so committed to this feminist vision. In his Wonder Woman comics (2011-2014) for The New 52, a series that aimed at revamping and relaunching all of DC’s major superheroes, Brian Azzarello rewrites Wonder Woman’s origin story yet again, but this time Hippolyta has to confess to Diana that her origin story as told by Marston, Pérez, and a host of others, is a lie to hide an unpalatable truth: that Diana was not formed of clay which was then given life by the goddess Aphrodite. Instead, Diana was conceived in a “consensual [if adulterous] heterosexual relationship” between Hippolyta and Zeus, king of the gods (Curtis 308). As Curtis notes, “in the Pérez story, while there may have been a father or fathers related to the spirits of the dead women, the creation of the Amazons and later the creation of Diana was an autonomous, independent, willful action (in defiance of Zeus) born of a matriarchal, homo-social bond, and as such it is utterly different in conception and intent to what is presented by Azzarello. The first is based in the non-compliant decision of women free to choose in matters of conception and reproduction, while the latter is the unintended by-product of a woman who has abdicated control and whose only course of action is to try to hide what she has done” (314). In addition to the erasure of Diana’s parthenogenetic and matriarchal origin, the theme of duplicity and truth is important here. This theme reinforces a typical patriarchal conception of women as untrustworthy and duplicitous, and it also reframes Wonder Woman’s feminist or matriarchal realities and histories as false, 48 contrary to the patriarchal and phallocentric ‘truth’ of female lack, subservience, and compulsory heterosexuality. Commenting on the full-page depiction of Hippolyta and Zeus’ heterosexual coupling as the origin of Diana, Curtis succinctly notes that “in one page, the matriarchal society and female lineage was erased as Wonder Woman was finally made subject to the male seed and the symbolic norms of patriarchy” (308-309). That Azzarello goes on to revise in similar terms many of Wonder Woman’s founding narratives and principles is perhaps hardly surprising. Instead of Marston’s and Pérez’s immortal Amazons who have been removed from patriarchy and gifted a world of women-centric relationships, Azzarello gives his reader a woman-only culture that engages in socially-sanctioned rape, murder, and infanticide. Periodically, the Amazons lure male sailors to have sex with them, after which they kill the men, and those who become pregnant and give birth will keep only the female infants, trading the male infants to the god Hephaestus for weapons; in turn, Hephaestus raises the boys as his helpers at the forge of the gods. As Curtis notes, Azzarello’s explicitly anti-feminist revisioning erases the series’ longstanding feminist and matriarchal history (308), an erasure that suggests how deeply disruptive Marston’s original work remains. As Curtis points out, Azzarello’s re-writing not only illuminates Marston’s transgressions but also attempts to “remedy” the feminist and matriarchal world and history of Wonder Woman (308). Azzarello does so by re-centering the origin narrative on Zeus, none other than the powerful father of the gods, as well as on patriarchal power, generally. As Curtis aptly concludes, in Azzarello’s version “there is a tragic inevitability to all this. It seems that women can be portrayed as strong as long as they mimic patriarchal representations of strength, and more importantly, bend their knee to male authority as the normative source” of this power (308). Jenkins’s rewriting reintroduces Zeus as a key aspect of Diana’s origins as well. However, 49 there are crucial differences as to how Jenkins presents Diana’s origins when compared to Azzarello’s telling. Jenkins’s 2017 Wonder Woman has a complex relationship to this history of Wonder Woman’s origin narrative and its politically-informed rewritings. Interestingly, Jenkins rejects any easy return to Marston, Pérez, Simone, Jimenez and other comic book writers and illustrators’ joint commitment to a Wonder Woman whose character, origins, and home society stand collectively for a just and peaceful world and an unquestionably feminist intervention in American culture.9 Instead, Jenkins addresses precisely Wonder Woman’s origin story as a battlefield of competing ideological claims, claims that often surround the central issue of Diana’s biological, familial and cultural origins and not just her ‘superhero’ origins. Jenkins’s Ares (the self-proclaimed god of truth) reveals a ‘truth’ that resembles the “truth” proclaimed by Azzarello’s anti-feminist revision. In Jenkins’s film, Ares reveals to Diana that “Zeus left the child he had with the Queen of the Amazons as a weapon to use against me [i.e., against the god of war, Ares]” (1:50:00). At first it would seem that the film is erasing Wonder Woman’s matriarchal lineage and parthenogenetic origin just as Azzarello’s retelling before it does. There are some pragmatic explanations here for Ares’s statement. Ares may be telling the truth and Hippolyta’s (Connie Nielson) lie may have grown initially from her reluctance to discuss reproductive biology with the young Diana. Alternately, Ares may simply be lying. However, the issue of whether Ares’ statement is true or not is in some senses beside the point. Jenkins still chooses to reintroduce the figure of the father, replacing Marston’s and Pérez’s joint focus on the 9 This decision is particularly interesting given Patty Jenkins’s widely repeated Tweet from 24 May 2017 in response to a question about her influences: “The original Marston run, of course. The George Pérez run. Then lots of things from here and there” (qtd. Riesman). 50 Amazons and Diana as creations of a loving collaboration of Olympian goddesses with a return to the traditional father-creator. This displacement becomes even more troubling when we consider the film’s final revelation that Diana is the “god-killer,” destined by Zeus to destroy Ares when the god of war returns from his long banishment to start an eternal war on Earth. This patriarchal weaponization of Diana’s body by the power of the divine Father would appear to play entirely against the film’s insistence on Diana’s bodymind empowerment and agency that I outlined in the previous sections. However, Jenkins’s choices actually highlight how Diana employs, in some highly principled and feminist ways, her bodymind in the world despite her weaponization by the patriarchal god Zeus. Jenkins, in short, refuses to forget in her movie how Wonder Woman’s bodymind has been subject throughout her long comic book history to revisions that try to drag Diana back into compliance with a world of patriarchal and gendered norms, at the same time that she has struggled to reject these norms. In representing Hippolyta’s story of the origins of the Amazons, Jenkins focuses on a highly traditional representation of the powerful patriarch as creator-god. This animated sequence, a child’s picture book set in motion, portrays Zeus as both a loved idol and as the creator of man, mapping this Greek god onto Judaeo-Christian concepts of God as the great patriarch-creator. Hippolyta explains to the young Diana that the Amazons, along with “man,” were created in his image (6:40). Visually, the film suggests that Zeus includes female/feminine bodies in what Hippolyta refers to as Zeus’ creation of “man” (6:38). However, contrary to Marston’s and Pérez’s representation of the gods, and their focus on divine female creativity, Jenkins’s film offers only one female/feminine god standing alongside the rest of the male gods atop the mountain of Olympus (6:34). The imagery and voiceover in this scene suggest that the Amazons and the Amazon Queen, though living in a society wholly built and populated by 51 women, subscribe to a patriarchal belief system and mythology. As Hippolyta prays to Zeus, the patriarch, and uses totalizing language like “man” to encompass the diverse multiplicity of human beings, the Amazons’ otherwise woman-dominated society is uneasily inscribed with patriarchal hierarchies and ideology. The film’s origin story initially appears to be simply another containment strategy, employed to negotiate the transgressive nature of the woman-only Themyscira for a mass popular audience. Although neither the Amazons nor Diana ever mention Zeus again after this first telling, nonetheless, this containment strategy limits the film’s transgressive potential and is concerning as it reinforces patriarchal norms. For all its female-exclusive nature, Themyscira is embedded in a story of patriarchal power, with Zeus as its creator-god, who has given this people a divinely-mandated purpose: to wait and be ready to act when Ares returns. Ares’ role is equally troubling in this founding myth of Amazon society. As the evil son of Zeus, Ares is jealous of his father’s creation and desires to corrupt “man,” a mythic conflict that is just as conventional as the representation of Zeus as patriarch-creator. Ares’ role and relationship with Zeus obviously align him with the many son-usurpers in Greek myth, such as Cronos who usurped his father Uranus, and Zeus himself who usurped his father Cronos. At the same time, Ares’ intended corruption of man, the good creation of his divine Father, assimilates Ares with Satan, intent on turning Adam and Eve against God. In response to Ares’ successful corruption of mankind, Hippolyta tells the young Diana that “the gods created” the Amazons to “influence men’s hearts and restore peace to the Earth” (7:20). Eventually, men enslaved the Amazons, and Hippolyta and Antiope subsequently led a “revolt” to free their people (7:50). As Zeus used the last of his power to destroy Ares (who had attacked and killed the other gods), he left the Amazons a weapon “powerful enough to kill a god,” anticipating Ares’ return. Then, 52 “with his dying breath, Zeus created” Themyscira to hide the Amazons from the rest of the world and ultimately from Ares (8:41). A deliberate overlay of Judaeo-Christian elements on ancient Greek myth, with Zeus in the end modelling Christ’s sacrifice for the life of the world, Jenkins’s animated origin story is both a troubling return of the patriarchy and also a metafictional comment on Wonder Woman’s own revisions. The transparency of Zeus’ rehabilitation from the Greek myths’ adulterous rapist reminds the viewer of the way Wonder Woman’s own origin story has been subject to a similar ideological jury-rigging. In a canny reversal, the monstrous Zeus becomes the loving creator-father dying for his creation, just as in Azzarello’s hands the gracious Amazons of Themyscira become themselves murderous rapists and child traffickers, and Diana’s matrilineal and parthenogenetic creation is displaced by her conception in the sexual encounter between her mother and Zeus. As with Brian Azzarello’s rewriting, the film’s origin story erases the divine matriarchy and parthenogenetic creation present in both Marston’s original and Pérez’s reboot. Against its ironic, patriarchal myth of origins, however, Jenkins’s film presents a fully realized woman-exclusive society as the true source of Diana’s origins. Diana is born not only of the moulding, desires, and prayers of Hippolyta, but she is also raised by the women of the island, who themselves constitute a matriarchal sisterhood. Diana is trained by the Amazons, and this training shapes her bodymind. The film represents this knowledge through the filming and staging of the Amazons’ fighting and combat training. Although Hippolyta initially denies Diana access to her bodymind as the Amazonian warriors of Themyscira express it, young Diana has a profound desire to express her bodymind through the Amazonian warrior’s craft, fighting. However, given the troubling narrative of the origin story, how much of Diana’s desire to create herself in this traditional bodymind pathway is really her own? According to Hippolyta’s account 53 at the beginning of the film, told to young Diana, the Queen’s prayers prompted Zeus to give life to the child she modelled out of clay. However, as the viewers and Diana later find out, and as indicated by some of Hippolyta’s long pauses and searching glances while she tells Diana Amazonian origin story, Hippolyta knows that the “god killer” that Zeus created and gifted to the Amazons is not the sword held in a special guarded repository on the island. The “god killer” is really Diana herself. Despite this knowledge, Hippolyta initially denies Diana the opportunity to develop her bodymind through the warrior craft, and she lies to Diana and tells her that the sword hidden in the tower is the “god killer.” As in Azzarello’s re-writing, but in less disparaging terms, Hippolyta is again represented as at least partly duplicitous. However, in the film, there is a focus on Hippolyta’s motivation to limit what information that she tells Diana, since she is worried about her daughter and fears for her safety, given her marking out by Zeus as Ares’ final opponent. In contrast, Azzarello places Hippolyta’s fears for Diana in Greek myth’s consistent focus on the jealousy, rage and spiteful retribution that Zeus’s wife, the goddess Hera, directs not against her adulterous husband but against his often helpless, unwitting and unwilling mortal paramours. Not only does Hera attack Diana, but the storyline of Azzarello’s early issues focuses on Hera’s murderous pursuit of the young woman Zola, pregnant with Zeus’s child. As Azzarello’s Hippolyta notes in one of the series’ many meta-fictional moments, “Hera’s jealousy is not just legend but fact” (vol.1). “If Hera learned you were her husband’s daughter,” Hippolyta later declares, “she would have murdered you in your crib” (vol. 1). The stereotypical ‘woman scorned,’ Hera becomes a familiar figure: the woman co-opted by patriarchy, reinforcing her own subordination to heteronormative marriage by persecuting rather than allying with other women against Zeus’s divinely-mandated, serial abuse of the female/feminine bodymind. 54 In the film, then, Diana has two origin stories: in Hippolyta’s telling, Diana is born, as she is in Marston’s original and Pérez’s re-writing, of the Queen’s desire to have a child, which leads her to craft an infant from clay, brought to life through her own request and by a divine spark; in Ares’ revelation at the movie’s climax, Diana is born from the sexual conjunction of Hippolyta and Zeus. We are given no additional information about the nature of this sexual relationship. However, given both Diana’s destiny as Zeus’s weapon and Ares’s revelation that “Zeus left the child he had with the Queen of the Amazons as a weapon" (1:50:00), Hippolyta’s relationship to Zeus makes Diana a product of a heteronormative sexual encounter. Hippolyta’s story, however, challenges the heteronormativity of this relationship. Instead of telling Diana about her revered father, the ultimate patriarch, Zeus, father of gods and creator of “man,” Hippolyta focuses on the agential characteristics of her own bodymind, as she has consistently done what she can to create her daughter from her own ‘sculpting,’ prayer, and desire. If we assume that Hippolyta and Zeus had sex and that Diana was born of Zeus’s desire to destroy Ares and save “man,” Hippolyta’s self-story highlights her desire and physical capacity to sculpt or grow a child of her own bodymind. In the context of the Wonder Woman comic book tradition’s constant oscillation between feminist and patriarchal commitments, Hippolyta’s story of Diana’s origins in Jenkins’s film demands to be read against the grain. Putting aside for the moment Hippolyta’s representation as an overprotective parent (at best) or dishonest (at worst), Jenkins’s Diana is simultaneously a daughter of an Amazonian culture and of a self-determining Queen, as well as the daughter of a god saviour or a female/feminine Christ-figure. Not only is Diana born of Zeus’ desire, power, and image, not only is she ‘born’ of the women’s relationships, knowledge, and bodymind culture on Themyscira, but she is also created to save “mankind,” Zeus’ creation, by destroying his destructive and jealous son and returning peace to 55 Earth. Jenkins’s movie, finally then, does not so much show Diana’s matriarchal origins in Marston and Pérez as rewritten by one of Western culture’s most powerful myths of patriarchy and paternal power, as it shows Diana reconfiguring this myth as one where the daughter intervenes to save the world, a daughter whose woman-centered education, integral bodymind, and deep homosocial bonds leave her uninterested in dominance or power. In the end, any interpretation of Jenkins’s origin stories depends on the viewer’s sense of what such stories are meant to accomplish, and whether we are willing to approach such stories as an interrogation of what counts as an individual’s true beginning. After all, as Diana tells Steve, when they are discussing heterosexual sex, Cleo’s twelve-volume treatise on the pleasures of the flesh concludes “that men are essential for reproduction but, when it comes to pleasure, unnecessary” (41:20). Give that reproduction is not an aspect of the lives of the immortal Amazons of Themyscira, heterosexual sex’s “essential” nature is immediately typed as culturally alien to Diana, unlike pleasure. Diana’s description of Cleo’s twelve-volume treatise and its casual dismissal of heterosexual sex locate women’s agency and bodymind in a pleasure that is not harnessed to the demands of reproduction. Given this social aspect of Themyscira, Hippolyta’s story erases Zeus from Diana’s origin in light of Amazonian culture’s development of woman-exclusive roles in both pleasure and reproduction. The disjunction between Themyscira’s ‘founding’ myth and its present social reality could not be clearer. As a result, Jenkins’s Themyscira has a patriarch, yet his role is minimized, negligible in fact, as the Amazonian women do not need him. 56 Chapter 4: Bodies in Wonder Woman (2017): Sexuality, the Armour of Women, and Disfigurement My argument thus far has shown how Jenkins’s film asserts a female/feminine bodymind as empowered, flawed, determined, and progressing with the careful sculpting of action scenes, scenes that take on additional complexity in the contexts of the comic book tradition’s ambivalent relationship to its founding feminist principles. The film, however, also presents other challenges for viewers interested in Jenkins’s development of female/feminine bodyminds. In fact, Wonder Woman (2017) is acutely aware of the issues that these bodyminds must navigate while operating in the broader world, a world that the film consistently describes as “man’s world.” This world is, of course, a version of a North American audience’s world. Unlike on Themyscira, in this world women’s bodies are marked by familiar patriarchal discourses around sex, sexuality, and heterosexual marriageability, as well as clothing and dress. Moreover, in the film’s “world of men,” women’s bodies are also marked by (dis)ability and normative conceptions of physical attractiveness. In this chapter, I look at three different aspects of Jenkins’s bodies that are significant in my feminist analysis of Wonder Woman (2017). The film’s depictions of sexuality, dress, and disfigurement both limit and enhance the expression of female/feminine bodyminds: heteronormative assumptions about sex and sexuality affect the physical interactions between bodyminds; and hetero-sexist norms seek to limit women’s desires, as well as fashion and regulate their bodies in relation to their sex and marital status. In the film, however, Jenkins deploys dress, in particular, as a method of revealing and contesting the woman warrior’s reduction to the monstrous body, the monstrous-feminine, discussed at the beginning of this thesis. Hence, I refer to dress and clothing as the armour of women in this chapter. Likewise, in North American culture, disfigurement marks women as monstrous and enhances the assumption that the disfigured woman is also violent, a non-normative woman. 57 Film and literature has a long history of using scarring, disfigurement, and disability to signal a character’s moral depravity, criminality, and villainy (Ellis 150-59). I problematize the use of this trope and offer a more nuanced reading of the film’s depiction of Dr. Isabel Maru, aka Dr. Poison, as a villain who is disfigured, but who also functions to highlight the pervasiveness of the monstrous-feminine. Like the two stories of Diana’s origin, the two main female characters in Jenkins’s film—the disfigured Dr. Maru and the conventionally, even stunningly, beautiful and able-bodied Diana—work in conjunction to trouble the hetero-sexist patriarchal assumptions that a violent woman is monstrous and not a woman at all. 4.1 Sexuality In Wonder Woman (2017), the woman warrior and the female/feminine society of Themyscira complicate the heteronormative language of gender, battle, and sexuality. Diana leaves the island to save the world from Ares, whom she believes has triggered and continues to feed the bloodlust underlying WWI. As she leaves with Steve, her pleasure-based and woman-centered sexuality conflicts with the cultural norms of the hetero-patriarchal “man’s world.” On the boat to London, Steve decides to sleep away from Diana. Steve is practicing the marital and, therefore, patriarchal conventions, of his society. As a result, Steve regards Diana’s body as a potential patriarchal object of exchange and keeps his distance. Clearly, heterosexist ideology sexualizes not only Diana’s body but also male proximity to her body. In this system, if Diana’s chastity becomes uncertain, her marriage potential is jeopardized. Even given the many changes that occurred in America’s sexual mores from the turn of the century onwards (Brigman 545- 58 46),10 in the film’s early-twentieth century Western contexts and the assumptions of the popular consciousness, a woman’s ability to marry well was still crucial not only to her economic well-being but also that of her family. More generally, and as a result, a woman’s social standing and moral value were explicitly tied to her sexuality and comportment. In contrast, Diana comes from a different world, a world where the lines between platonic friendships and working relationships are blurred with that of intimate and romantic relations. Diana’s reactions and questions in this scene suggest that she cannot imagine a situation where it would make sense for Steve, her comrade in a shared mission to the Western Front, to sleep in another part of the boat when there is more than enough room and bedding for them to sleep side-by-side. Diana refuses to be interpellated as a patriarchal sexual object here. She insists Steve join her, as it makes not only logistical but also relational sense for the two of them to carry on their conversation before sleeping together on the makeshift bedding. As Steve settles into a spot beside Diana, the two begin a conversation about “reproductive biology” and “the pleasures of the flesh.” Steve asks Diana, “You know about that?” His surprise here is telling, since Diana is a grown woman. Why wouldn’t she know about that? His question suggests that Steve is unable to readily imagine a world of sexual relations without the male body. Steve’s surprise then stems from heteronormativity and its erasure of non-hetero intimacy and relations. 10 William Brigman points out that by the time movies had taken up a significant place in American popular culture at the beginning of the 20th century, sexual behaviour had already undergone a sea-change, driven by urbanization and technological advancements: darkened movie theatres and nightclubs as well as the mobility provided by the automobile allowed young people freedom from parental scrutiny. WWI was a major factor in accelerating these changes in sexual mores, as men were exposed to more liberal attitudes in Europe, and women gained increased autonomy on the home front, moving into more professions than before (545-46). At the same time, we need to remember that Jenkins’s WWI context addresses more simply American audiences’ general perspective on their ‘sexual past’: that before the 21st century, Americans were more chaste and restrained. 59 Diana responds by citing “Cleo’s Twelve Volumes on Bodily Pleasure." As discussed above, Diana explains that the treatise concludes that men are “essential for reproduction, but when it comes to pleasure, unnecessary.” For Diana, then, the heteronormative matrix in which Steve was socialized clashes with Diana’s education, understanding, and (it would seem) experience of pleasure and its relationship to gender and reproduction. Diana’s explanation, ironically perhaps, objectifies the male body, as it is only useful for reproduction. It also privileges female sexual pleasure and desire over procreation. The scene suggests that the Amazons have robust and pleasurable sex lives in the absence of heteronormativity. While some critics have assumed that the night Diana spends with Steve in Veld marks the first time she has had sex, the film actually suggests that Diana is not a virgin, unless virginity is limited to an exclusively heterosexist understanding of sex. Furthermore, in the boat scene, Diana reverses the traditional sexual objectification of woman, replacing a conventional focus on the chaste female body as a marriageable object with a radical focus on the male body as a reproductive instrument. Given that Diana is the only child to have lived in her society, the male body appears completely unnecessary to Amazon society. As a result, Themyscira operates outside the false gender binaries that isolate “masculine” traits from “feminine” traits. Instead, on Themyscira we see female/feminine bodies performing traditionally feminine and masculine roles, traits, and actions without remark. As soon as Diana sets foot in man’s world, however, Steve attempts but is hard pressed to keep her undisciplined gender performance in check. Diana’s metallic and revealing armour, her sword, and her propensity for speaking-up and leading must all change so as not to attract negative attention. Diana must then disguise herself as a woman, not in the Amazonian sense but in the Western sexist-patriarchal sense. 60 4.2 Women’s Armour in Man’s World To help disguise Diana as a woman from wartime London, Steve calls on his assistant Etta Candy (Lucy Davis). As Diana tries on an assortment of clothing in a London boutique, Etta and Diana strike up a conversation about clothing and armour. The setting, action, imagery, and dialogue in this scene juxtaposes the women ‘warriors’ of the early-twentieth century movement for women’s suffrage (and the beginnings of what is now known as the Women’s Movement) to Diana’s (fictional) culture of women warriors and the impending battle with the god of war. The scene readily highlights the restrictive nature of women’s clothing at the turn of the century. As she inspects a whale boned corset, Diana asks Etta, “Is this what passes for armour in your country?” Etta replies, “Armour? No, it’s to help keep our tummies in.” Diana then asks, “Why must you keep them in?” and Etta responds under her breath with, “Only a woman without a tummy would ask that.” Two different things are happening here. On the one hand, the dialogue plays with the heteronormative disciplining of female/feminine bodies through physical means to emulate conventional ideals of beauty, here, a flat stomach. The joke—“Only a woman without a tummy, would ask that”—positions Etta and Diana in opposition, as heteropatriarchy often does, the plump Etta representing woman’s failure and Diana woman’s success in achieving this ideal. On the other hand, the dialogue also questions the assumption that female/feminine bodies must contain their physiques with restrictive clothing. Diana’s question—“Why must you keep them [your tummies] in?”—foregrounds the otherwise accepted, and gendered, practice for what it is: a sexist assumption restricting women. Diana asks this question in earnest, indicating that restricting “tummies” for the sake of social norms is for her an utterly alien concept. The scene further develops Diana’s earnest querying as she tries on several outfits, complaining that the clothing either chokes or restricts her body so that she cannot fight. 61 However, despite the social restrictions symbolized by early-twentieth century fashion, Jenkins makes it clear that women born into “man’s world” do fight and are active. As Etta points out, “We fight with our principles,” and thus, in a way, Etta and the scene answers Diana’s earlier question, a question that Steve could not answer: “What do these women wear into battle?” Etta and the scene in the boutique show that they wear plain, everyday clothing to blend in and they fight with their political action as a unified movement. As Etta goes on to say, “I mean that’s how we’re going to get the vote.” The conversation between the two women highlights the tension and slippage between the binary assumption that women are passive rather than active, as both women enter and prepare for battle, albeit in different ways. Etta concludes her politically-charged comments, however, with the humorous observation that while battling with her principles as a member of a unified suffrage movement is preferable, “I’m not opposed to engaging in a bit of fisticuffs, should the occasion arise.” Clearly, for Etta, direct physical confrontation with the forces that oppress and disenfranchise women can be imagined but expressed only in this kind of self-censoring way. 4.3 Disfigurement, the Monstrous-Feminine, and Bodyminds in Wonder Woman (2017) My analysis so far lightly touches on the fact that the film presents its hero, Diana, as a conventionally attractive, hetero-passing, white, and able-bodied woman. What I have failed to note until this point is that the film contrasts Diana’s flawless body to that of the disfigured and villainous Dr. Isabel Maru, also called Dr. Poison. At first glance, it seems that the film presents Diana and Dr. Maru as opposites, meant to represent crude categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ However, on closer analysis, this pairing is far more complicated, given the settings and politics present in the film. The film certainly presents Dr. Maru’s bodymind as disfigured and depraved. However, considering that she is a woman living in man’s world during WWI, this definition is 62 too simple. Dr. Maru is a determined and intelligent character who wishes to succeed in her field and is heavily influenced by Ares, the god of war, who uses her as his secret weapon against all humanity. Diana’s and Dr. Maru’s bodymind are marked as different and extraordinary, but the film’s presentation of Dr. Maru as disfigured perpetuates the media’s tendency to falsely represent disfigured individuals as child-like, criminal, or villainous. Film and literature have a long history of marking villainous, criminal, or morally ambiguous characters with disability or disfigurement, a trope that Phillip Kirby analyzes in the context of Jenkins’s presentation of Dr. Maru. Wonder Woman (2017) is far from alone, he notes, in using this visual trope to mark villains (916-20). According to Carla Rice and Eliza Chandler, the media represents “disability and mind/body difference” as “pitiable, child-like, dangerous and criminal, to offer some examples—which are reflective of normative culture’s understandings of and expectations for [those who live with disability and mind/body difference]. When dis-abled bodies appear in normative culture, they also appear as out-of-the-ordinary, as abnormal. Out-of-the-ordinary bodies require explanations for why they are different” (368). Film is particularly powerful in sustaining this stereotype, since in this medium the audience derives much of its information about characters and context from visual cues. Unfortunately, the film industry has exacerbated the disfigured-villain trope already present in literature. Many characters are marked as corrupt or evil through their actions, but films emphasize these aspects using disfigurement, scarring, burns, and dismemberment. This issue is one that needs rectifying, as it falsely represents those who live with such physical realities and conditions as morally corrupt. As I discuss in my introduction, and mention throughout, mass media has a tangible influence on the popular consciousness. In response to this prominent trope in film, activist movements have sprung up, such as the “I Am Not Your Villain” call to action. 63 This campaign “calls on the film industry to stop using scars, burns, marks, and other visible differences as a shorthand for villainy” (ChangingFaces). There are too few representations of disfigured and disabled individuals in the media, this community points out, that avoid this trope. This limited representation creates a false, homogenized impression of a very diverse group of people. A prominent example exists in Star Wars. Darth Vader (David Prowse) is severely burnt, disfigured, and lives as a multi-dismembered individual who uses technology—his black suit—so that he can walk and breathe (Episode IV (1977), Episode V (1980), and Episode VI (1983)). The moment in Star Wars that I would like to note here is the moment shortly after Anakin turns to the dark side in Revenge of the Sith (2005). Anakin (Hayden Christensen) falls into a river of lava during a battle with Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). He survives, but he is severely disfigured and dismembered. This moment visually marks Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader, rendering Anakin, a conventionally attractive and able-bodied white man, as disfigured to mark his moral shift from the Jedi Order to the Dark Side, from ‘good’ to ‘evil.’ Another popular example can be found in Batman movies, cartoons, and comics. For example, in Christopher Nolan’s Batman: The Dark Knight (2005), the crusading district-attorney and ‘white knight’ Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) eventually becomes the disfigured Two-Face, as he moves from dedicated public servant to deranged villain upon losing his love, Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal). In addition to losing Rachel, half of Harvey’s face is burnt off. The film presents Harvey with mangled skin, no lips, and no eyelids on the left side of his face. Again, the film visually marks a character’s moral transformation with an accompanying physical disfigurement and disability. The primary villain in The Dark Knight, moreover, is disfigured as well. The Joker has scars branching-out across his face from the corners of his mouth. Examples could be multiplied 64 almost unendingly, and film’s consistent representation of criminal and villainous individuals as disabled and disfigured perpetuates the assumption that a disfigured appearance and body signals a disfigured mind and character.11 According to Rice and Chandler, “when bodies appear to us, they do not first appear as disabled, then as gendered and then as racialized. Bodies appear as all of these things together” (368). When Dr. Maru’s bodymind appears, she is not only disfigured but also female/feminine and white. Therefore, Dr. Maru’s disfigurement, gender, race, intelligence, and occupation complicate the film’s presentation of her character. Dr. Maru, as a result, is not only a villain who builds deadly and violent weapons, she is a violent, white woman. As I have already discussed, the figure of the woman warrior disrupts borders and gender norms. As a result, film and literature often present the figure as monstrous or hyper-sexualized. To hyper-sexualize and to make monstrous are both containment strategies. On the one hand, presenting a strong and powerful woman as beautiful and sexy renders her safe, because this strategy moderates many of the threatening aspects of a powerful warrior woman. On the other hand, marking a strong and powerful woman as monstrous also renders her ‘safe,’ because this strategy marks her as undesirable, a pariah. In Julia Kristeva’s terms, Jenkins’s representation of both Diana and Dr. Maru links them to “‘abjection,’ that which does not ‘respect borders, 11 As José Alaniz has pointed out, the superhero narrative, both in comics and in film, relies on a exaggerated version of another longstanding stereotype of disability: the so-called ‘supercrip,’ a term coined by disability activists to describe those who are represented as confronting and overcoming their disability, a process that marks them as noble and heroic, in contrast to that “other despised master image of disability in mainstream culture: the sentimentalized, pathetic poster child wheeled out for telethons and tearjerkers” (55). In superhero narratives, however, superhero disability may be broadly defined as any quality that violates the figure’s longstanding white, masculine, and heterosexual parameters, including physical disability, various racialized identities, and non-conforming gender and sexual identities. See also Schalk, “Resisting,” pp. 137-46. 65 positions, rules,’ [and/or] that which ‘disturbs identity, system, [and] order’” (ctd. Creed 8). Clearly, neither Diana nor Maru “respect borders, positions, [or] rules.” Moreover, the film showcases the patriarchal assumption that women are inherently unable to respect boundaries, as women are always abject, experiencing and expressing too much, and must therefore be contained. Kirby argues that Dr. Maru’s “disfigurement is [both] a reflection of her moral bankruptcy and corruption by Ares, who whispers novel chemical formulae into her ear” and the “cost of her malicious chemical experiments” (923). Obviously, the consistent staging of disfigurement as signalling immoral or evil characters in Wonder Woman (2017) is problematic. However, given that Ares stands for the patriarchal and imperialist system driving humans towards the destruction of others through war, and given that the film foregrounds in several scenes disfigured, disabled, and injured soldiers, Dr. Maru’s disfigurement can be read with more nuance. Dr. Maru masks her facial disfigurement with a prosthetic that employs a physical implement to discipline her deviant body, much like the corset functions in the boutique scene to produce a conventionally acceptable and ideally figured female/feminine body.12 However, Dr. Maru’s characterization troubles the heterosexist expectations of the female body both in terms of her image and her occupation. Perhaps, the disfigurement of Dr. Maru’s body signifies her occupational and scientific transgressions as a monstrous woman who is also described as a 12 There are parallels between the abjection of Diana and Maru and the implied abjection of all women in “man’s world.” The boutique scene, after all, demonstrates that women’s bodyminds must be positioned and shaped in a certain way. If women do not adhere to some of the rules while protesting for their rights, then their monstrosity will be far too overwhelming. As a result, women will not be heard, and the fight for women’s rights will not progress. Moreover, Etta’s explanation of how women must fight with their principles while maintaining a certain level of decorum and respectability indicates that all women are abject. 66 brilliant chemist. Her scientific work, however, contradicts the heterosexist expectations attendant on the early-twentieth century woman, and earns her the pseudonym ‘Doctor Poison.’ Furthermore, Dr. Maru’s reaction to Steve’s attempts at seducing her reflects the hetero-patriarchal expectations placed on the female/feminine body. As Kirby notes, “Trevor’s deceit is discovered by Dr. Maru when he is distracted by Wonder Woman’s beauty (‘I see your attention is elsewhere,’ Dr. Maru says)” (923). To Dr. Maru, Steve appears to be distracted by Diana’s beauty. However, he is, in fact, distracted by Diana’s direct disregard for the sensitivity of the mission, as Steve has earlier ordered her to stay behind while he tries to learn where they will find the Germans’ new, apocalyptic weapon and what Dr. Maru and Ludendorff have planned for its use. Despite the facts of the narrative, the representation of Dr. Maru’s reading of Steve’s duplicity accurately reflects the hetero-patriarchal assumptions around female/feminine bodies as attractive only when contained, able-bodied, and conventionally beautiful. Little does Dr. Maru know that Diana’s presence signals her attempt to assassinate Ludendorff with the sword hidden down the back of the dress she has just stolen from an unsuspecting partygoer outside. While Steve is distracted by the prospect of his information-gathering being derailed by Diana’s imminent assault on Ludendorff, Dr. Maru’s comment still accurately summarizes the typical shifts in the male gaze. Jenkins’s film is not the first Wonder Woman narrative to present this contrast between two female/feminine characters, one beautiful and one monstrous. Eileen Donaldson analyzes Greg Rucka and J. G. Jones’s Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia (2002) as a graphic novel that contrasts Diana’s beauty and peaceful comportment with Danielle Wellys’s aggressively violent actions and traditionally masculine role as the avenger. Seeking revenge against several men who have forced her sister into prostitution before killing her, and seeing the authorities (the Gotham 67 PD and Batman, in particular) as complicit, Danielle takes matters into her own hands, murdering these sex traffickers. As a result, the comic presents Danielle as monstrous, “deviant,” “boyish,” and “masculine” (Donaldson 165). Depicting the monstrous-feminine and the male-led Western justice system, The Hiketeia certainly “address[es] the various aspects that undermine Wonder Woman’s legitimacy: her monstrous Amazon origins in Greek myth, her need to perform femininity, her currency as a commodity, and the general misogyny that pervades the judicial system of Man’s World which invests Batman’s authority with greater validity than hers” (162). For Donaldson, Rucka and Jones’s representation of Diana and Danielle reflects the tendency to “‘monsterize’ powerful women who do not adhere to the norms of feminine behavior” (162). The media perpetuates the assumption that violent women are an exception to the rule, and, as a result, film and literature often portray violent women as monstrous so as to signal that their particular presentation of femininity is exceptional and dysfunctional. In The Hiketeia, the opposition between Diana and Danielle is particularly blurred, so that Danielle’s extra-judicial violence is less opposed to than a shadow of Diana’s own ability to employ violence to achieve justice. In other words, violent women are not women. There is something wrong with them. According to Caron E. Gentry and Laura Sjoberg, “violent women […] are often thought of as not only bad but as bad women—in the sense that they are bad and they are women, and in the sense that their violence makes them bad at being women. In other words, they have failed as members of society and failed as women” (93). Gentry and Sjoberg conclude that “the monster narratives explain women’s violence as resulting from a biological flaw that disrupts their femininity as opposed to the mother narratives, which account for their violence through characteristics essential to womanhood […] [V]iolent women in the monster narrative are not 68 responsible for their actions, because there is something wrong with their womanhood” (93). Jenkins’s film presents Dr. Maru partly in these terms, as ‘flawed’ and not entirely responsible for her actions. However, the film’s broader feminist commitments complicate this reductive reading of Dr. Maru. The film first introduces Dr. Maru through Steve’s flashback as he tells the story of his last mission to the women of Queen Hippolyta’s court. Steve tells the Amazons about the “secret weapons” that are being “invented by Ludendorff’s chief psychopath, Dr. Isabel Maru,” remarking that “the boys in the trenches called her ‘Dr. Poison’” (24:47). As Dr. Maru is a violent woman, Steve describes her as a “psychopath,” and the film depicts her as both psychologically as well as physically disfigured. There is something ‘wrong’ with her physically and mentally. As a female/feminine chemical-weapons inventor, and a very successful one at that, Dr. Maru, in the terms set out by the monstrous-woman trope, must have a disfigured bodymind. The film also seems determined to mark Maru as an object of erotic desire, depicting her as both General Erich Ludendorff’s colleague and potential love interest.13 He does show her tenderness as he gently holds her face during the first scene in which the film shows the two working together outside of Steve’s flashback (44:43). This apparent ‘redemption’ of Maru’s womanhood is nothing of the kind, however, since any fleeting desire she experiences for him is trumped by her “psychopath[ic] nature,” expressed best perhaps in Maru and Ludendorff’s joint enjoyment of mass murder when they test the new chemical weapon on his fellow generals who 13 Sjoberg and Gentry discuss the narrative of the monstrous, violent woman in the context of Daniel Patrick Brown’s analysis of WWII Nazi Germany: “When looking at stories of women who participated in the Holocaust, Dr. Herta Oberhauser is one who stands out. Whereas other female Nazi torturers are discussed in context of their relationships with men, […] Oberhauser is characterized as a vain and lonely woman […] She was often depicted as a mentally unstable monster incapable of normal social interaction” (Brown, Camp Women, qtd. Gentry and Sjoberg 93). 69 are in the process of negotiating Germany’s surrender. Maru’s psychopathy is also, in turn, equated with her total absorption in her scientific work, a work that she undertakes wholly independently. She informs Ludendorff about her chemical developments, but he does not contribute materially to her advancements. Dr. Maru embodies, then, the two sexist tropes noted by Gentry and Sjoberg, being both “bad” and a “bad wom[a]n” (93). Sexist assumptions about violent women as psychopathic or not in control of their actions removes their agency as violent people. This coding of Dr. Maru is particularly troubling, since both Diana and Maru are violent characters though in different ways. As a result, the film has to be very careful to negotiate how their violence is understood. Traditionally, in the context of war, women are what men and the nation fight to protect. Jenkins’s film presents instead, however, two women who are full participants in war.14 As a result, both embody the monstrous-feminine, but each embody this trope in different ways. The obvious difference is that Diana is on the “good” side and Dr. Maru is on the “bad” side of this conflict. As a result, Diana is marked by extraordinary beauty and strength, where Dr. Maru is marked by her facial disfigurement and an extraordinary propensity for making chemical weapons. If we take a step back and critically examine this opposition, however, we see more telling similarities and differences. Where Diana is intelligent, outspoken, and physically hyper-able, Dr. Maru is creative, intelligent, assertive, and especially gifted in her intellectual field, 14 In American Women in World War I: They also Served, Lettie Gavin outlines the history of women in WWI. Though a central part of the war effort, women were both denied access to the battlefield, and went largely unrecognized for their service. However, women worked as yeomen, munition production and factory labourers, doctors, nurses, medical volunteers, administrative assistants, and translators. Indeed, governments and other institutions told women not to go to war. However, in WWI women went to war anyway. One way or another, they found a way and they got there (Gavin ix-xi). 70 chemical weaponry. Each woman’s treatment by her male ‘partner’ also troubles the boundaries between the two. Earlier, Steve tries to hide not only Diana’s true identity, but also her body, abilities, and intelligence, as he covers her up, brings her to the boutique for a new outfit, silences her as she speaks in the generals’ briefing room, and frequently redirects her from something that interests her.15 In contrast, the film represents Dr. Maru as a villain, but she is also a powerful and respected scientist in the ranks of the German war machine. Her scenes with Ludendorff feature exchanges of ideas and strategies, not attempts on his part to silence or placate her. Ultimately, the film supersedes the sexist and ableist assumptions that govern the presentation of these two characters, as Diana shows empathy for Dr. Maru. Diana and Dr. Maru are both women who employ violence. However, their violence stems from the need to fight and produce weapons in “man’s world.” Moreover, as I discuss in detail in Chapter 1, Jenkins depicts Diana’s actions as central to the growth and development of a female/feminine heroic bodymind. As a result, the film presents Diana as a violent woman, but one who fights to assert her body, mind and skills, in a man’s world that attempts to control and disguise her. Likewise, Jenkins’s Dr. Maru is a complex character, whose violence is an aspect of her attempts to advance her craft in a world that does not accept women chemists or scientists. Dr. Maru is monstrous, then, not in absolute terms in the film, but in terms of the sexist ideologies of “man’s world” and Ares. After Ares tells Diana at the end of the film “Look at this world. Mankind did this, not me. They are ugly, filled with hatred, weak,” he sends a AFV (armoured fighting vehicle) flying, so that Dr. 15 See the discussion in section b), above. 71 Maru rolls out under Diana’s feet. Ares continues, “Look at her and tell me I’m wrong” (2:02:31). The wind blows away Dr. Maru’s prosthetic, revealing for the first time the full extent of her scarring and disfigurement (2:02:38). For Ares, Dr. Maru is an embodiment of the moral depravity of mankind that he has just described to Diana. It is significant that Ares commands Diana to “look at [Dr. Maru] and tell me I’m wrong.” To emphasize this significant utterance, the windy, fiery, and chaotic mise-en-scène of violence and destruction not only blows away Dr. Maru’s prosthetic, but equates her disfigurement with war itself. As a result, the film seems to further perpetuate the use of disfigurement as a symbol of criminality and depravity. It does. However, given the context and the feminist leanings of the rest of the film, Jenkins’s presentation of Dr. Maru here is more complicated. On the one hand, Ares sees Dr. Maru as a visual representation of the fallibility of humankind. Diana, on the other hand, remembers that she believes in love (2:05:15), and spares Dr. Maru. Subsequently, Diana turns to Ares to counter his assumptions and says, “You’re wrong about them. They’re everything you say, but so much more” (2:04:29). Diana’s statement reinforces the fact that humans are more complicated than those crude categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Instead, humans are often a complicated mix of good, bad, hating, violent, loving, caring, fearful, and brave. The film thus suggests that Dr. Maru, as a violent woman living in WWI’s man’s world, is a normal woman who is also violent and disfigured. However, given the long history of using disfigurement to mark villains, Jenkins’s decision to disfigure Dr. Maru is still problematic. Wonder Woman (2017)’s presentation of disfigurement, dress, and sexuality demonstrates how female/feminine bodyminds are contained not only in film but also in Western society. However, the film complicates cinema’s and society’s containment strategies, as it shows that in Themyscira and in reality men can be objectified as well. Men can be objectified as 72 simply instrumental for reproduction, and unnecessary for pleasure. As a result, the film centres a non-hetero sexuality that has historically been presented as monstrous in film and literature as the non-reproducing female/feminine body is a monstrous body. At the same time, the film shows that the clothing that is often considered oppressive for women can also be adopted by women as a kind of armour. Clothing becomes an armour utilized by women to negotiate the angel/monster dichotomy as they fight for their rights in the public sphere. The film complicates the use of disfigurement to mark villains and criminals, especially women. Though Dr. Maru is considered a “psychopath” by Steve, the film offers an opportunity to understand that women are also violent and it does not mean that there is something wrong with their bodymind. 73 Chapter 5: Conclusion My analysis of Wonder Woman (2017) shows how Patty Jenkins uses various film techniques to present a number of female/feminine bodyminds. With a focus on Diana, the film and my thesis demonstrate how certain techniques can express female/feminine agency in spectacular ways, while opening up various spaces to rearticulate restrictive gender binaries. The film and my analysis decenter dialogue and thought as evidence of a character’s interiority as I and Jenkins focus on Diana’s action sequences. Jenkins’s action sequences, as a result, change the presentation of female/feminine characters in film. Thus, Jenkins’s film also alters the previously restricted and contained ways that film can present female/feminine bodyminds in the related genres of action and superhero cinema. The film consistently troubles the gendered binaries that restrict female/feminine bodyminds. It disrupts and rearticulates the mind/body, angel/monster, masculine/feminine, man/woman, and active/passive binaries in a number of ways that I have touched on throughout this thesis. Wonder Woman (2017) arrived on the heels of an overwhelming lack of female/feminine superheroes and action heroes in film, in a Hollywood that had long hyper-sexualized any such characters so as to limit their potentially monstrous implications, and in a culture pervaded still by the patriarchy’s fear of the woman warrior, the fighting woman, and the active and non-reproductive woman. Although Jenkins’s Diana is conventionally attractive, cis and hetero-passing, white, and able-bodied, the film presents her as convincingly strong and powerful. Jenkins not only refuses to use the traditional containment strategies typical of action film but also deliberately frames her film to rearticulate and undermine these strategies. For example, Jenkins utilizes the tilt shot during the scaling ladder scene to call-up and dismantle this otherwise sexist filmic practice. Instead, the tilt shot emphasizes Diana’s power, stance of 74 mastery, and her physically convincing implements that look to be immensely effective even against heavy artillery. As Diana enters No Man’s Land, Jenkins’s decision to refuse the typical containment strategies of action cinema begins to come to full realization. Accordingly, the action sequence presents her growing, fighting, and determined bodymind, as Diana’s muscles flex, and she distorts her face as she grits her teeth. The visual presentation of Diana’s effort and struggle to overcome shows her bodymind progressing towards mastery. This progress towards mastery has previously been denied female/feminine action heroes. Rearticulating this gendered trope, Jenkins creates a space for a shift in the hero’s gendered presentation on the screen. Moreover, the film’s most significant and dramatic sequences focus on Diana’s physical progress and mastery of the external world as she struggles to fight against bigger and more difficult threats. The origin story of Wonder Woman (2017) is problematic in the sense that it centres Zeus as the creator-god patriarch and eliminates the female/feminine gods. Marston’s original origin completely centres the goddesses and their creator ability. Jenkins’s decision, in contrast, removes the typically feminist and completely matriarchal beginnings of Wonder Woman’s origins. Although Jenkins’s decisions is unfortunate in this respect, it calls attention to the constant shifting of Wonder Woman’s origin story over the twentieth and twenty-first century. Moreover, Jenkins’s dual origin stories highlight Hippolyta’s and Diana’s agency, despite having a patriarchal creator-god. Hippolyta chooses to tell Diana of her desire for a child and that she chose to sculpt her from clay. The origin, as a result, emphasizes Hippolyta’s desire in action. The film consistently compares Themyscira to man’s world, an all-woman island to a world reflecting the hetero-sexist, patriarchal, and colonial Western world of real-life planet Earth. What I find in looking at this comparison is that women fight in both worlds. However, 75 they fight for different reasons. In the Amazon world, women fight because they desire to fight. Additionally, the warriors of Themyscira fight and train to continually improve. In the world of men, women fight for their political rights. They fight to end sexist oppression. In both worlds, however, women have armour. The difference is that Themysciran armour protects women from swords and arrows. Women’s armour in man’s world protects their dignity and respectful comportment as they leave the domestic sphere to fight for their rights. This entering of the public sphere puts women at risk of no longer being an angel. As a result, she can slip into the category of the monstrous-feminine. However, if she is dressed respectfully, she may negotiate this sexist angel/monster binary as she fights. Moreover, the film’s comparison of the two worlds highlights the inherent contradictions of patriarchal-sexist ideologies that regulate bodies in terms of rigid binaries, as reproductive or non-reproductive, married or unmarried, subject or object. As I use the term bodymind to discuss the film’s presentation of sexuality, I find that hetero-sexism objectifies the female/feminine bodymind as a body meant largely for exchange in the economy of heterosexual marriage. Hetero-patriarchy erases the subjectivity of the female/feminine bodymind as men regulate her sexuality depending on her marriage status. Diana, in contrast, emphasizes the fact that men can be objectified as well, as Diana is from an all-woman society, and she asserts the reality that men are not necessary for sexual pleasure. In fact, they are only needed for reproduction, a non-existent practice on Themyscira. The boat scene completely flips and rearticulates hetero-sexist norms. Themysciran female/feminine bodyminds are sexual agents wholly independent from the male/masculine body, which in turn defines the male/masculine body as a useless, reproductive object. 76 Though transgressive in so many ways, the film unfortunately uses disfigurement as a way to mark its villains, and struggles to articulate Dr. Maru’s identity outside the stereotypes of the monstrous-feminine. However, given that the film centres and celebrates Diana’s action and violence, it follows that Dr. Maru’s chemical-weaponry is another example of a female/feminine bodymind meeting and mastering the physical world and the social world of patriarchal expectations. Indeed, in history and fiction, violent women have long been presented as monstrous and deranged. Sexist binaries make it impossible for a woman to simply be a violent person. Instead, a violent woman can only be understood as ‘broken’ and ‘flawed’ in Western culture. The film, then, using disfigurement to mark Dr. Maru’s monstrous-femininity highlights this tendency as her bodymind is visually disfigured. As the film foregrounds the rearticulation of sexist binaries, however, it also presents a more complicated vision of Dr. Maru, who is spared by Diana. Diana sees Dr. Maru as a human, a complicated and flawed being, enabling the viewer to see Dr. Maru not as the monstrous, disfigured villain, but as a woman who is simply both violent and also disfigured. Though the film arguably rearticulates the assumption that a violent woman must be a monster, it does little to intervene in the long history of misrepresenting disfigured and disabled individuals as villainous or criminal. What the film does do, however, is to highlight the complexity in reading a disfigured, white, woman as a villain and how gender and race intersect with disfigurement to interact with the angel/monster binary. Movement, action, creation, clothing, and violence can all be forms of resistance against oppressive norms. As female/feminine bodyminds are traditionally limited by sexist assumptions about their movement, action, creation, clothing, and propensity for violence, they are contained and limited in their access to these forms of empowerment and resistance. As Young notes, and I discuss in the introduction, female/feminine comportment often reflects the beliefs and norms of 77 sexist assumptions. Female/feminine bodyminds are told and shown from a young age that their body is an object. In other words, “woman’s social existence” is defined by patriarchy’s continually situating her body as “the object of the gaze of another, which is a major source of her bodily self-reference” (Young 39). The female/feminine bodymind often self-refers as an object to be looked at. When I consider Young’s analysis in the context of my theorizing here in this thesis, therefore, I find that this self-reference separates the body from the mind. Thus, Jenkins’s work in Wonder Woman (2017) is incredibly significant as it counters “the modalities of feminine bodily existence [that] have their root in the fact that the feminine existence experiences the body as a mere thing—a fragile thing, which must be picked up and coaxed into movement, a thing that exists as looked at and acted upon” (original emphasis, Young 39). To be sure, not all female/woman/feminine bodyminds experience their body as a “thing.” However, dominant sexist ideology and popular culture often perpetuate this modality. As a result, this existence is one that many women, girls, and gender queer/feminine folks experience. This modality alienates female/feminine bodies from their minds and vice versa. Wonder Woman (2017)’s powerful woman-centred action sequences show a female/feminine bodymind looking at and acting upon a dangerous and risk-infused environment, and thus provides a blueprint away from the objectifying of the female/feminine body and the disconnect experienced by many female/feminine bodyminds as they move through a sexist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist, and racist Western society. 78 Works Cited Alaniz, José. Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. UP of Mississippi, 2014. Project Muse, http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=7739757. Anderson, Hannah and Matt Daniels. “The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialogue Broken Down by Gender and Age [Film Dialogue: From 2,000 Screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age].” The Pudding. April 2016. <https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/> Azzarello, Brian and Cliff Chiang. Wonder Woman. Volumes 1–6. The New 52. DC, 2011-2015. Brigman, William E. “Sexuality,” The Columbian Companion to American History on Film: How Movies Have Portrayed the American Past, edited by Peter C. Rollins, Columbia UP, 2003, pp. 545-51. Brown, Daniel Patrick. The Camp Women: The Female Auxiliaries Who Assisted the SS in Running the Nazi Concentration Camp System. Schiffer Press, 2002. Brown, Jeffrey A. Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture. UP of Mississippi, 2015. Project Muse, http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=8121831. —. The Modern Superhero in Film and Television: Popular Genre and American Culture. Routledge, 2016. Taylor & Francis eBooks A-Z, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315708980. Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Duke UP, 2003. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smj1s. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1994. Changing Faces. “I Am Not Your Villain.” ChangingFaces.Org, accessed 12 May, 2022, <https://www.changingfaces.org.uk/get-involved/campaign-with-us/i-am-not-your-villian/> 79 Cocca, Carolyn. Superwomen: Gender, Power and Representation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Bloomsbury Academic: Film & Media Studies, http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=11857693. Coogan, Peter. Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. Introduction by Denny O’Neil. MonkeyBrain Books, 2006. Curtis, Neal. “Wonder Woman’s Symbolic Death: On Kinship and the Politics of Origins.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, vol. 8, no. 4, 2017. pp. 307-320. Taylor & Francis Library SSH CRKN, https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2017.1279198. The Dark Knight. Directed by Christopher Nolan, performed by Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart. Warner Bros., 2008. DVD. Darowski, Joseph J., editor. The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times. McFarland, 2014. Davis, Blair. Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page. Rutgers UP, 2017. Donaldson, Eileen. “Femininjustice: Female Justice as Monstrous in Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia.” Extrapolation, vol. 60, no. 2, 2019, pp. 157-182. Donoghue, Courtney Brannon. “Gendered Expectations for Female-driven Films: Risk and Rescue Narratives around Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman.” Feminist Media Studies. Published online, 2 July 2019. Taylor & Francis Library SSH–CRKN, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1636111. Ellis, Katie, Gerard Goggin, Beth Haller, and Rosemary Curtis, editors. The Routledge Companion to Disability and Media. 1st ed., Routledge, 2020. Taylor & Francis eBooks A-Z, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315716008. 80 Ellis, Katie. “Producerly Disability Popular Culture: The Collision of Critical and Receptive Attitudes.” Ellis, Goggin, Haller, and Curtis, pp. 149-157. Emad, Mitra C. “Reading Wonder Woman’s Body: Mythologies of Gender and Nation.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 39, no. 6, Dec. 2006, pp. 954–84. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2006.00329.x. Finn, Michelle R. “William Marston’s Feminist Agenda.” Darowksi, pp. 7–21. Gavin, Lettie. American Women in World War I: They also Served. UP of Colorado, 1997. Project Muse Archive Complete Supplement III Collection, http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=8116050. Gentry, Caron E. and Laura Sjoberg. Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Thinking About Women’s Violence in Global Politics. Zed Books, 2015. EBSCO, http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=8868271. Genz, Stéphanie. Postfemininities in Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Introduction by Lisa Appignanesi. Yale UP, (1979) 2020. DeGruyter/Yale UP Complete eBook-Package 2020, https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300252972. Hammontree, D. R. “Backlash and Bracelets: The Patriarch’s World, 1986-1992.” Darowski, pp. 163-173. Johnson, Jeffrey K. “Super-Wonder: The Man of Steel and the Amazonian Princess as the Ultimate 1990s Power Couple.” Darowski, pp. 184-193. Jones, Pete. “Diana in the World of Men: A Character Network Approach to Analysing Gendered Vocal Representation in Wonder Woman.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 81 2020, pp. 18–34. Taylor & Francis Library SSH–CRKN, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1510846. Juschka, Darlene M. Political Bodies/Body Politic: The Semiotics of Gender. Equinox, 2009. Kirby, Phillip. “Battle Scars: Wonder Woman (2017), Aesthetic Geopolitics and Disfigurement in Hollywood Film.” Geopolitics, vol. 25, no. 4, 2020, pp. 916–936. EBSCO, https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1510389. Knaff, Donna B. “A Most Thrilling Struggle: Wonder Woman as Wartime and Post-War Feminist.” Darowski, pp. 22-29. Kohl, Paul R. “Wonder Woman’s Lib: Feminism and the ‘New’ Amazing Amazon.” Darowski, pp. 90-100. Kydd, Elspeth. The Critical Practice of Film: An Introduction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Lee, Peter W. “Not Quite Mod: The New Diana Prince, 1968–1973.” Darowski, pp. 101-116. Leed, Eric J. No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge UP, 1979. Lepore, Jill. The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Vintage, 2014. Marston, William Moulton. All Star Comics. Volume 1, no. 8. DC, 1941. —Sensation Comics. Volume 1, no. 1. DC, 1942. —Wonder Woman. Volume 1, no. 1. DC, 1942. Montin, Sarah. “‘To Uncreation Sunk’: Monstered Spaces in the Works of the War Poets.” Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier, edited by Niculae Liviu Gheran and Ken Monteith, Brill, 2019, pp. 104-114. Brill Online Books, http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=10336627. Ormrod, Jo. “Body Issues in Wonder Woman #90-100 (1994-1995): Good Girls, Bad Girls, Macho Men.” The Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture, edited by 82 Elyce Rae Helford, Shiloh Carroll, Sarah Gray, and Michael R. II Howard, UP of Mississippi, 2016, pp. 159–176. ―. Wonder Woman: The Female Body in Popular Culture. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Bloomsbury Academic: Film & Media Studies 2020, http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350137943. Pérez, George. Wonder Woman. Volume 2, no. 1. DC, 1987. Purse, Lisa. Contemporary Action Cinema. Edinburgh UP, 2011. Rice, Carla, and Eliza Chandler. “Representing Difference: Disability, Digital Storytelling and Public Pedagogy.” Ellis, Goggin, Haller, and Curtis, pp. 367-376. Riesman, Abraham. “The Untold Tale of the Comics Story That Redefined Wonder Woman.” The Vulture. 1 June 2017. <https://www.vulture.com/2017/06/wonder-woman-revisiting-the-comics-story-that-redefined-her.html> Rowe Karlyn, Kathleen. “Wonder Women: Women’s Tears and Why they Matter.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, vol. 58, 2018, n.p. ProQuest. Web. 8 Oct. 2019. Rucka, Greg. Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia, DC, 2002. Schalk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction. Duke UP, 2018. ―. “Resisting Erasure: Reading (Dis)Ability and Race in Speculative Media.” Ellis, Goggin, Haller, and Curtis, pp. 137-146. Shohat, Elaine, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2014. Taylor & Francis eBooks A-Z, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315771441. 83 Smith, Matthew J. “”Working Girl: Diana Prince and the Crisis of Career Moves.” Darowski, pp. 151-162. Smith, Philip. “Wonder Woman for President.” Feminist Media Histories, vol. 4, no. 3, 2018, pp. 227–243. University of California Press Journals, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.3.227. Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema. Routledge, 1993. ProQuest, http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=11058019. This, Craig. “Containing Wonder Woman: Fredric Wertham’s Battle Against the Mighty Amazon.” Darowksi, pp. 30-41. Tye. “The Cycle of Life Lessons.” The Iris Effect: Analytical writing from MPA students in the 2015 Film Aesthetics class. 11 November 2015. <http://theiriseffect.blogspot.com/> Valcour, Francinne. “Retiring Romance: The Superheroine’s Transformation in the 1960s.” Darowski, pp. 66-78. Wagner, Sydnee. “Racing Gender to the Edge of the World: Decoding the Transmasculine Amazon Cannibal in Early Modern Travel Writing.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, Fall 2019, pp. 137-155. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2019.0041. Wonder Woman. Directed by Patty Jenkins, performed by Gal Gadot. Warner Bros., 2017. DVD. Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith. Directed by George Lucas, performed by Hayden Christensen. Lucasfilm Ltd., 2005. DVD. Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope. Directed by George Lucas, performed by David Prowse. Lucasfilm Ltd., 1977. DVD. Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back. Directed by George Lucas, performed by David Prowse. Lucasfilm Ltd., 1980. DVD. 84 Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi. Directed by George Lucas, performed by David Prowse. Lucasfilm Ltd., 1983. DVD. Young, Iris Marion. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. Oxford UP, 2005.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
English
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Loughlin, Marie H., 1962-
The woman warrior and her bodymind in action : an analysis of bodies, minds, gender, and movement in Wonder Woman, 1941 - 2017
Text