Bitch Flicks – Page 20

Why Black Widow Is the “Realest” Superheroine of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Yes, Even After All Those Tropes)

It is this factor alone why Black Widow is so important. She is the longest standing female protagonist within the Marvel film franchise, having starred in ‘Iron Man 2,’ ‘The Avengers,’ ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier,’ ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ and most recently, ‘Captain America: Civil War.’ She was the only female Avenger in both Avengers films (until Scarlet Witch switched sides at the end of ‘Age of Ultron’), and as such was subject to being the onscreen vessel of female representation in a superhero super-team otherwise occupied by straight white men.

This guest post written by Kayleigh Watson appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

Black Widow: the original female Avenger. Actually, up until recently, she was the only female Avenger. Scarlett Johansson had her work cut out in carrying the unspoken burden of representing women everywhere in one of the highest profile, highest-grossing franchises to ever exist onscreen.

To date, her character has only ever been written by and directed by men. It is apparent that the linchpins of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are very male skewed, with the only woman currently having contributed to screenplays being Guardians of the Galaxy’s Nicole Perlman, who is returning for Captain Marvel alongside recent recruit Meg LeFauve. Perlman herself stated that writing Captain Marvel has been a far more stressful project than Guardians of the Galaxy ever was, and that she and LeFauve will catch themselves saying:

“‘Wait a minute, what are we saying [here] about women in power?’ Then we have to say, ‘Why are we getting so hung up on that? We should just tell the best story and build the best character.'”

As nice – and preferable – as that would be, it simply is not possible currently. Every woman onscreen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is a minority compared to the sheer amount of male characters and therefore automatically complicit in representing every woman, everywhere, all at once.

If there were more women, then this would be less of an issue, but with one female lead protagonist per area or sub-franchise within the MCU, it is simply not the case.

Let’s break it down; first, the love interests: Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, Iron Man franchise), Betty Ross (the never-to-be-seen-again Liv Tyler, The Incredible Hulk), Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, Thor franchise), Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell, Captain America franchise); the “super-heroines”/allies: Gamora (Zoe Saldana, Guardians of the Galaxy), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen, Avengers: Age of Ultron/ Captain America: Civil War), Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly, Ant-Man), Maria Hill (Colbie Smulders, as part of S.H.I.E.L.D).

And the antagonists: um, Nebula (Karen Gillan, Guardians of the Galaxy).

Of course, there is some crossover in the above – Scarlet Witch was once an active antagonist, whilst Peggy Carter morphed from Captain America’s (Chris Evans) sidekick to valued, rounded lead protagonist in the TV series Agent Carter (now regrettably cancelled after its second series) – but when it comes to the film series itself, female character progression is largely limited, unlike that of the male characters.

It is this factor alone why Black Widow is so important. She is the longest standing female protagonist within the Marvel film franchise, having starred in Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron and most recently, Captain America: Civil War. She was the only female Avenger in both films (until Scarlet Witch switched sides at the end of Age of Ultron), and as such was subject to being the onscreen vessel of female representation in a superhero super-team otherwise occupied by straight white men.

A lot of pressure rested on her shoulders and, for the most part, Joss Whedon — director and screenwriter of The Avengers, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, and a writer renowned for strong female representation in his work – got it right. Black Widow was proactive and strong; professionally, she was not treated any differently onscreen by any male character (outside of an aside near the start of the film where a Russian captor declares her “nothing but a pretty face”). She embodied a typically male approach to the role – a spy, a fighter, trusted with liaising and retrieving individuals. She was not referred to in a sexual manner. She was valued for what she brought to the table as an active participant in the narrative, which is, quite often, a rarity in itself.

Yet when we step back from the film itself and regard Black Widow, her relations, backstory, and aesthetics in regards to the wider narrative of the character, it is clear that not everything is as perfect as it initially seems.

Yes, she is the only woman serving in the Avengers in an Avengers film to date – though no doubt that is set to change with Scarlet Witch joining the fray in Captain America: Civil War. That’s tokenism, and let’s not even get started with the lack of racial representation within the two Avengers films. Next door to that, we find voyeurism, for as wonderfully as Scarlett Johansson manages to pull off that skin-tight cat-suit, do varying camera angles of her rear really benefit, well, anything (the same goes for the bare male torso, to a degree)? She is a visual Fighting Fuck Toy for the Male Gaze in a manner that Johansson has been for a large portion of her acting career, her attractiveness having her very often typecast as various femme fatales in films including The Spirit, Under The Skin, Her (yes, even her voice is that sexy).

Black Widow manages to be sultry in a subtle way, yet one of which her male counterparts never feel the need to be, for even when they are removing their shirts (hello Thor and Captain America), their partial nudity is never really as overtly sexual as the implied, fully-clothed, alluring physicality of Black Widow. Male nakedness, even when recognized by other characters – such as Portman’s reaction as Dr. Jane Foster in the first Thor film – is presented in some practical purpose, even if it’s merely a change of shirt. Black Widow’s sexual allure is ever-present, to the point of it making her a femme fatale, which is itself apt, given her implied dalliances with, at some point, every member of the original Avengers team bar Thor.

First appearing as Natalie Rushman, the sexy secretary alias (yes, really) of Natasha Romanoff in Iron Man 2 of whom Tony Stark takes an interest (Pepper Potts declares Rushman as a “very expensive sexual harassment lawsuit” waiting to happen), then as Black Widow in The Avengers, she flits from thereon in between that femme fatale mode to mothering figure. Following Hawkeye’s (Jeremy Renner) possession by Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Black Widow makes it her personal (she owes him a debt) mission to wake him from his reverie, hinting at a less-than-professional past, whilst in Captain America: The Winter Soldier she and Cap share a tense bout of therapy whilst on mission.

Age of Ultron sees Johansson’s character haphazardly paired as the “beauty” in a “Beauty and the Beast” romance with green-eyed angry-guy the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo); she is the only one capable of calming him — thanks to her womanly ways — and the two bond over perceiving themselves as a “monster,” she due to her forced sterilization as part of the Black Widow program and subsequent inability to bear children (thanks Joss Whedon, for this clumsy handling of backstory vs. sideplot) and he for more, er, obvious reasons.

So yes, we are left as of yet with a monstrous, mothering femme fatale. We appear to be ticking off tropes here, so it almost appears laughable that a single character has somehow managed to embody every perceivable onscreen female threat towards men. In Black Widow being such a threat to masculinity – via the presumptuous attempts to consume with her monstrously suffocating, simultaneously mothering and seductive ways – it is only natural that the camera attempts to regain control of her via its voyeuristic lens, right?

Wrong. For in their attempt to expand on Black Widow’s backstory – something that intrigued many fans due to her persistent lack of a solo venture – all Whedon and company have resulted in is a fetishization of her emotional trauma. As stated by Johansson, Black Widow “never made an active choice. [She’s] a product of other people’s imposition.” The fact that her backstory contains emotional trauma and systematic abuse is not a surprise. But for it to be so trivially handled in a high-octane superhero menagerie instead of a solo film presumes that the perceived (aka Male 60%: Female 40%) target audience merely has no time for women matters, but in reality perhaps that is just the writers. Even had it been handled as part of a Captain America or Iron Man sequel, odds are that it would have fared better, given there being less clamor per character for screen time, and for it to have been handled instead during one scene of an Avengers film is simply lazy.

So yes, in trying to regain control of the female Avenger, the lens has to make her a sexual object whilst the narrative fetishizes her as emotionally damaged and such, less than. Black Widow’s past is her weakness, and she always tries to make up for her dark days as an assassin; as both she and Loki allude to in The Avengers, she has red on her ledger. In working for espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D, she gets to make up for some of her murky past. She also serves the patriarchy, with it being an international, militarized organisation: this is a reconcile-or-die situation, and as such the character of Black Widow has effectively been tamed.

All of this sounds very ominous and, in reading this, you are probably wondering exactly why and how Black Widow can be perceived as the “realest” heroine within the MCU. The unfortunate truth is, despite her being the embodiment of so many tropes, she is the original female Avenger and equal (minus her and Hawkeye’s lack of supernatural ability – or expensive suits) to that of her male Avenger peers. She is not typically made a Damsel in Distress as love interests often are; she saves the other Avengers, albeit, occasionally in a mothering fashion. Throughout films she has been rounded out in a manner that many other token women of other MCU sub-franchises simply do not have the privilege of, and in that way, is it better that her character be fleshed-out in a contrived and melodramatic manner or not at all?

It is a tough call, but in Marvel films (not the television series) she is the only female character who surpasses one-dimensionality, and as sad as it is to say, in the MCU this is the best that we get.

Kayleigh Watson is a writer and occasional illustrator from the UK. After realizing that her childhood ambition of being a vet would mean she would actually have to cut up pets (ew), she decided life would be better spent absorbing art and telling others about it. Her years spent studying for her BA (Hons) English and Creative Writing also involved music blogging, reading SF, and watching lots of Buffy. She currently writes about music for female-centric site The Girls Are as well as talking film and TV (or trying to) at her new blog Post-Modern Sleaze. A collection of her work can be found at what kayleigh said, and she tweets about all of the above under @kaylwattson. Her GIF game is strong.

How Hawkgirl Saved Me

This is about my favorite chess-playing, mace-wielding, war-crying, winged superheroine role model: Shayera Hol. … Hawkgirl taught me to be observant. She taught me that it’s possible to come through trying times. She taught me that being able to think was just as important as being able to fight, and that good and evil aren’t always absolutes.

This guest post written by Maggie Slutzker appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

As a teenager, I was strictly a DC girl. My comic collection was World’s Finest, the Justice League, and everything Batman. I loved Justice League, Batman the Animated Series, Batman Beyond, and just about all of the accompanying movies. In my twenties, I still look back to those books and even watch those movies on occasion. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had, as an adult, about Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. (If you don’t know who Andrea Beaumont is, you need to check it out.)

But something’s happened to DC. They just can’t seem to get it together. They have embraced that gritty “realist” style that’s so fitting of Batman, and yet they seem to have forgotten the core values of their most prominent heroes. When I was fourteen, nothing would have made me happier than a Batman/Superman movie. And for Wonder Woman to be involved? I would have cried sweet tears of joy. My friends and I would have flocked to the theatre, and then celebrated afterward by watching all the animated movies.

Now, things are different. When DC announced Batman v. Superman, I only felt worry in the pit of my stomach — worry that, I might add, turned out to be completely justified. (Killing off Mercy Graves before we’ve even been introduced to her? Why don’t you kill all my hopes and dreams before I live them, too?) And with a Wonder Woman movie on the horizon, well, I have my hopes…but I know better than to expect greatness from DC’s live action movies anymore.

Does it sound like I take comics too seriously? Maybe so. Definitely so. But if you’re a fan yourself, you can understand how important heroes are, and the part they play in our lives. So while I’m apprehensively excited for (FINALLY) a Wonder Woman movie, this isn’t going to be about her. This is about my favorite chess-playing, mace-wielding, war-crying, winged superheroine role model: Shayera Hol.

Hawkgirl.

Say it too fast and it sounds like you’re saying “hot girl.” This was very frustrating to me as a kid when I tried to tell people who my favorite superhero was. Sometimes I would just give up and say “Batman,” because technically I knew more about him anyway. But my entire obsession with superheroes and comics stemmed from watching the Justice League cartoon, and loving Hawkgirl. Let me clarify here and now that the Hawkgirl I’m talking about is the hero from the TV series, and not the comics. When I became a fan, it was about 2005. At that time, I really wasn’t interested in learning about Hawkman. I couldn’t find a lot of comics that were solely about Hawkgirl, and when she was involved she wasn’t quite the Hawkgirl I knew from the cartoons. I had the damnedest time finding Hawkgirl action figures, which I was only able to track down at theme parks and the Toys R Us at Times Square. And why was she Hawkgirl instead of Hawkwoman? I can’t speak to that. Still, I loved her so much.

Martian Manhunter couldn’t read her mind. Batman couldn’t beat her at chess. Dr. Fate’s magic couldn’t touch her. Even Aquaman, that irritable Atlantean snob, had a healthy respect for her. She wielded her Nth metal mace with a war cry. She saw faith as a crutch, a sort of oppression, and she expressed confusion about it to Wonder Woman and Aquaman. She stood up to the evil god Exthultu when he came for Earth and Solomon Grundy’s soul. Her bond with Solomon Grundy would later draw her back to the show, after being cast out.

Wonder Woman was the explicitly feminist character on Justice League, and in a way one could argue that Hawkgirl was made out to be the stereotypical “cool girl” of the group. Some might say she was the yellow Power Ranger to Wonder Woman’s pink, but their personalities and their relationship developed beyond that. Both women were foreigners, but Wonder Woman was more warrior princess, where Hawkgirl saw herself as a soldier. While they were different, they were both always totally willing to go into battle for their friends, including each other. Hawkgirl had a stronger bond with the Flash, and of course, Green Lantern. She could also identify with Superman and Martian Manhunter, the other lost “aliens” of the group. And she had some of the best lines. When Wonder Woman said, “[Men] can’t possibly be that essential to your life,” Shayera said, “Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it.” When, for the millionth time, Flash said he was the fastest man alive, she said, “Which might explain why you can’t get a date.” And, for Toonami fans who remember, “You think I need this mace to take you down?”

Hawkgirl also fell for John Stewart, the Green Lantern. Thanks to the Joker, their love was fulfilled, unlike that of Wonder Woman and Batman. Theirs was an interracial relationship, and while the show never mentions race or explicitly makes it a source of conflict, it was meaningful that it was shown and that fans became invested in it. The two came, literally, from different planets, but both were fighters with military experience, strategic minds, and truth to their own selves. For cartoon characters, they shared amazing chemistry.

Hawkgirl’s storyline on the show became more important as Justice League came to its end, and Justice League Unlimited began. (Amazing opportunity, or huge mistake? I’ll let you decide.) Within the confines of the TV series, Shayera Hol turned out to be a spy sent from her home planet, Thanagar. In “Starcrossed,” everything the Justice League has come to know and trust crashes down on them. Just in case there’s someone reading this who plans to watch the series, I won’t go too deep into detail. I will only say that Shayera has to choose between destroying her new home, Earth, and leaving her old home completely vulnerable to death in battle. To get critical, the writers made it a little too much about Hawkgirl choosing between two men, but as we know from popular YA fiction, movie producers can’t get enough of love triangles.

As someone who would later try her hand in fields related to justice, I was taught some important lessons by the “Starcrossed” episodes. The first is that, no matter what mask you wear, Batman will always know who you truly are. The second is that when you’re torn between two people, places, or situations that you care about equally, you must be able to objectively look at what is right, and what is wrong. When Hawkgirl realizes that Earth will be destroyed, she changes course completely. She makes this final decision without religious faith, without unfair bias, and, first and foremost, with the protection of Earth’s citizens in mind. We have human politicians who can’t even do that.

For all of her flaws and perceived treachery, Hawkgirl’s faith in her team inspired me. In the episode “In Blackest Night,” John Stewart is accused of an unthinkable crime. This is before any romance, and Hawkgirl isn’t the first of the group who is certain that John didn’t do it — that would be Superman, ever the boy scout. But when Hawkgirl leaves the courtroom to find that John’s friends deserted him, she’s enraged at their near-instant abandonment. She fights them, and not long after, the Green Lantern Kilowog goes to John’s defense. Something glossed over in the series is that Hawkgirl is a detective; that was her job on Thanagar. Hawkgirl follows and investigates a witness that she can immediately tell is a liar, and this is ultimately what saves John from a completely unbelievable mistake. (I have many more thoughts about this episode, mainly that the justice system in space is just as unorganized as the ones here on Earth.) She goes on to earn the respect of the entire Green Lantern Corps.

Because of her skill, her loyalty, and her ethics, nearly everyone Hawkgirl ever came into conflict with in a work-related capacity would eventually come to respect her. Aquaman, for instance. Dr. Fate. Amazo. Wonder Woman, twice. The Green Lanterns. The connections and reconnections she made after “Starcrossed” speaks volumes. And when her Hawkgirl disguise is no longer an option, Shayera becomes a superhero without an alternate identity: she is simply herself.

Watching Justice League enhanced my female friendships. I specifically mention female friendships because there’s an overarching idea that when young girls get into comics — and video games for that matter — they do it to impress boys. Nothing could be further from the truth. (The only boy who influenced my love of superheroes was my little brother, who as a three-year-old spent at least a year dressed as Batman. We still call my dad Robin.) I forced my friends to watch Justice League with me, because that’s just what I did with shows and books that I love. Guess what? They loved it, too. My best friend and I decided we were Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl.

My best friend and I had long debates about different episodes. We spent hours upon hours creating our ideal live-action cast. When Hawkgirl addressed that Wonder Woman had to be magic to fight in that outfit, we appreciated it. We definitely shipped Batman and Superman. And, since Netflix wasn’t an option, my whole family got involved when I watched Justice League and Justice League Unlimited every week. When I excitedly anticipated Shayera’s return to the show, they understood. My mother was particularly furious when Shayera and Green Lantern’s romance didn’t get neatly wrapped up. Super powers or not, a good story is a good story.

It’s simple, really. Hawkgirl and superheroes lead us to love and inspiration. Even as fictional characters, they give us hope. It means a lot to be guided in that direction by someone who in some way shares your identity. Hawkgirl taught me to be observant. She taught me that it’s possible to come through trying times. She taught me that being able to think was just as important as being able to fight, and that good and evil aren’t always absolutes.

And when all else fails, grab your electric mace.

Maggie Slutzker is a writer and feminist living in New York. Check out her Facebook page, “A Little Something for the Ladies,” or follow her on Twitter @suchaslutzker.

‘Barbarella’ and the “Savagery” of Futuristic Sexual Politics

One version of Barbarella draws her as a progressive, sex-positive, and role model-worthy character that saves the universe. … Barbarella the character might be the worst example of a superheroine by many of our contemporary expectations for a female lead not least because of the ambiguous dynamics of her (sexual) agency. … ‘Barbarella’ as a film remains a superheroine movie with a mission: save the future of sexual politics.

This guest post written by Olga Tchepikova appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

Oh Barbarella Psychedella… notorious campy Queen of the Galaxy and a retro sci-fi enthusiast’s dream come true. In my mind, she exists in two distinct versions: One — the more permanent one that I find to be true for the longest time between refreshing my memory — draws her as a progressive, sex-positive, and role model-worthy character that saves the universe. The other — which I become aware of every time I refresh my memory — reminds me that although Barbarella may be at the center of every scene during her mission she is not always the catalyst of action. Based on this conflict, I am hesitant to call Barbarella a superheroine. However, I think it is valid to label Barbarella a superheroine movie. But what exactly is the difference?

Barbarella has been praised for parodying the image of a hyper-sexualized astronaut woman especially with regard to the sexist organization of space travel programs in the 1960s and often classified as a feminist film for its display of a sexually active female protagonist. Lisa Parks wrote a wonderful essay on space programs and Barbarella in the book Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s (1999) edited by Hillary Radner and Moya Luckett. Indeed, the heroism we find in this movie seems inevitably bound to a fixation on sex. But precisely because the film’s iconography so strongly predicates Barbarella as intergalactic sex kitten, it is important to acknowledge that contrary to the popularized image of her promiscuous pursuit, she almost never actively seeks out sexual partners. Rather, she responds to other people’s sexual desire for her. But instead of dwelling on questions about erotic agency, I would like to point out that the sexual heroism we might associate with Barbarella is strongly contingent on the futuristic setting of the story — a setting we are completely detached from, but cannot help but read through our internalized socio-cultural conventions regarding sexuality. Consequently, in the story’s terrain, it is especially intriguing that sex as we know it has become irrelevant, or — in the characters’ own words — even “savage.”

In Barbarella’s version of the future ‘making love,’ or that which we refer to as romantic physical intimacy, does not exist anymore. “Love” may be the official motto of the Republic of the Earth, but there is no sex in it. In fact, the sexual future we see here is a neoliberal dystopia. Sex has been deemed too distracting — a threat to maximum efficiency. With the help of science, people in the 41st century take pills and touch hands for one minute “until full rapport is achieved.” For the best possible effect, their “psychocardiograms” must align. And to further emphasize the routine of this practice, we find out that only the poorest of the populace — the ones who cannot afford pills and psychocardiogram readings — have sex in the form of ‘genital intercourse with their clothes off.’

In a future shaped by such conventions, Barbarella is requested to find Durand Durand who is, as it turns out later, a scientist-turned-megalomaniac that wants to take over the universe. Her search leads to Sogo (the future’s abbreviated version of Sodom and Gomorrah) — a city where the “primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility” (Barbarella’s words) is alive and well. In Sogo, pleasure and death are the two main forces in action, making it an exceptional location in the pacified, hyper-scientific universe of 4000+ AD. And it is here that we realize that the “neurotic irresponsibilities” Barbarella is worried about strongly resemble the 1960s fantasies of counter-cultural hedonism and excess. Only in Barbarella’s era, their bad reputation is grounded in the disturbance of efficiency, not a lack of moral conventions.

Certainly, Barbarella’s main agenda is not to lay out the path our society might be taking in the coming centuries. It is a campy sci-fi film after all. But can we really fully dismiss that this could be our future? One where there is, as a rule, no sex in love and no love in sex?

There are plenty of ways in which sexuality (and love, for that matter) has been and continues to be regulated for the sake of a random status quo maintained through directed shaming and punishment. Aside from the long tradition of monitoring and restricting women’s physical, mental, and emotional faculties, ‘those in charge’ have also been persistently harassing individuals and communities displaying non-(hetero)normative desires and identities. And this rigid tenaciousness causes the personal to remain political until further notice, or at least until we live in a time like Barbarella’s day and age — where you don’t have to bother putting on clothes for discussing a diplomatic mission with the president because ‘naked’ is not synonymous to ‘sexual’ anymore. And even if it was, ‘sexual’ would merely mean a match of psychocardiograms, allowing for the best possible experience of touching hands for a minute.

The separation of sex and love exemplified in Barbarella’s universe is not as uncommon as it used to be — at least in newer public discourse and social behavior. Casual sexual encounters, or ‘hook-up culture’ in the mouth of people who disapprove, can be both a means to ridicule people who are interested in bonding with their sex partners — as suggested in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — or a convenient code to avoid the distracting nature of romance and emotions for the sake of personal fulfillment and success in other spheres of life. As of now, we like to exhibit emotionally detached sexual encounters for the sake of efficiency as a personal choice — something that can or even will be reversed if we choose. But what if, indeed, it were possible to achieve ‘full rapport’ with another person without going through the trouble of physical intercourse and being exposed to the dangers of disease contamination and emotional attachment?

The definite separation of sex and physical sensation à la Barbarella takes this idea far out of the already tense and fragile comfort zone defining our culture’s progressive and inclusive attitudes towards sexuality. From where we stand now, a social norm that dictates this separation seems almost dehumanizing. Do we really want to be that progressive? It is one thing to think sexual intercourse without emotional attachment, or sexual sensation without sexual partner(s), but it is hard to think sexual sensation without the respective physical, and maybe even emotional stimulation. However, the over-exaggeration of this idea, to me, is fundamentally what defines the sexually heroic nature of Barbarella from the vantage point of a culture that recycles this film’s iconography on a regular basis — not least because somewhere along the way, she makes the ‘efficient sex’ of the future look ridiculous.

Barbarella was created during a time of social and sexual revolt but placed in an age where the hyper-civilized earth community overrode this one human trait that continuously has been causing trouble throughout history. Despite being a strong believer in the futuristic world order, she reverts to ancient practices that go against a lot of the principles working to maintain the 41st century’s social order and recognizes the productive potential of sexual distractions. She chooses body fluids over pills, feeling over pragmatic ritual, quality over quantity. In the eyes of the future, she becomes “savage.” In other words, she becomes like us. Her choice for ‘the old-fashioned way’ champions sex — even the casual type — as an important form of social activity, not a disturbing call of nature.

Barbarella the character might be the worst example of a superheroine by many of our contemporary expectations for a female lead not least because of the ambiguous dynamics of her (sexual) agency. But that is now, and this was then. Barbarella as a film remains a superheroine movie with a mission: save the future of sexual politics. Indeed, it seems like the sexual libertinage of counter-culture might be a smaller evil than time-efficient, pharma-induced orgasms to be received through fingertips. But then again, it is another 2000+ years until the 41st century — more than enough time for sexual intercourse to be declared “savage.”

Olga Tchepikova has lived, studied, and worked across various places in Europe and the U.S.. Her mind in free time, as well as in research, is mainly occupied with films about and critical theory on subculture, outsider figures, horror, violence, death, sexuality, and the sex industry.

‘Supergirl’s Feminism and Why the TV Series Works

Even with her powers, Kara is the underdog who has to evolve to overcome insurmountable odds, thus making her relatable to viewers. With the series being entitled ‘Supergirl,’ it shouldn’t be a surprise that feminism is a prevalent theme. What is a pleasant surprise is how well the series tackles it.

This guest post written by Dennis R. Upkins appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

At 8 years old, I would wake up early every Saturday morning to tune in and watch Superboy. Over the years, I’ve been a faithful viewer of the original George Reeves Superman series, Lois & Clark, the Bruce Timm animated series, the live action films, and of course the comics. I’m a comic book guy through and through. For me, Superman isn’t just a superhero. He is THE superhero. I’m very protective of the Man of Steel’s mythos and legacy. Suffice it to say, I had my concerns when the CBS series Supergirl was announced.

Somehow when I wasn’t paying attention, my reaction evolved from, “The pilot was cute, I guess I’ll tune in,” to “Jesus Christ is it Monday night yet? I need my Maiden of Might!!!!”

There’s a number of reasons why the series works and works well. For starters, the cast. Actress Melissa Benoist embodies the essence of the eponymous heroine much like Christopher Reeves and Lynda Carter respectively encapsulated Superman and Wonder Woman. In addition, the series is a fresh take on Supergirl and her alter ego Kara Danvers. In previous incarnations, Kara was often depicted as headstrong, impulsive, reckless and angsty, often as a foil for her older and more mature cousin, Clark. For that matter, the same can be said for Conner Kent aka Superboy.

Whereas Clark’s meek and bumbling demeanor was often a facade to conceal his identity, for this Kara, it is who she is and her powers don’t change that fact. Case in point, the girl can’t keep her secret identity to save her life as the series illustrates numerous times. Kara is an ingenue with a huge heart. She often finds herself in over her head whether battling Fort Ross escapees or navigating through minefields often known as life.

Even with her powers, Kara is the underdog who has to evolve to overcome insurmountable odds, thus making her relatable to viewers.

With the series being entitled Supergirl, it shouldn’t be a surprise that feminism is a prevalent theme. What is a pleasant surprise is how well the series tackles it. Sadly in 2016, positive portrayals of powerful women outside of Shondaland continue to be rare. This is especially the case for speculative fiction. Too often, female characters are developed by undercutting other female characters. Not the case with this series. Whether it’s Kara, Lucy or Alex, all of the heroines and villainesses are different but formidable in their own right.

If there is a breakout MVP for the series, the title easily goes to Kara’s snarky boss and unlikely mentor, Cat Grant, played flawlessly by Ally McBeal herself. Calista Flockhart effortlessly steals virtually every scene she’s in with her performances. The sharp-tongued heart-of-gold mentor archetypes are typically reserved for male characters, thus making this iteration of Grant and her relationship with Kara rare for television and all the more amazing.

As the Flash crossover, “World’s Finest,” illustrates, this is a series that knows how to have fun and be creative. New fans and Kryptonian OGs like myself are on the edge of our seats wondering what surprises are in store: the introduction of Martian Manhunter, the Cadmus tease, or hints that Alex Danvers might one day evolve into this universes’s Alex Luthor. It is my hope that Vasquez’s role is beefed up next season and other marginalized DC alums are introduced be they Alysia Yeoh and/or Natasha Irons.

If I have one complaint to register about Supergirl it would be this is one of those times I wish I was a father. I wish I had a young daughter to watch the show with. Just as I tuned in religiously every Saturday as a kid to watch Superboy, it would be cool to pass along a family tradition to the next generation. Supergirl is a heroine that young girls can watch and look up to. Just as importantly, she is a heroine young boys can watch and learn from. One thing is for certain, season 2 can’t get here fast enough.

Is it Monday night yet?

See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘Supergirl’ and Room for the Non-Brooding Superhero

Dennis R. Upkins is a speculative fiction author, equal rights activist, and proud Atlanta, Georgia native. His writing credits include Stranger Than Fiction, Hollowstone, and West of Sunset. Upkins was a former staff writer for Comicbook.com. He regularly critiques and analyzes the representation and portrayal of minorities in media and has been a contributor to Prism Comics, Bitch Media, Black Girl Dangerous, Geeks OUT, and The Nerds of Color.

‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and the Humanization of the Superheroine

Often carrying the burden of representation in a genre overrun with male characters, superheroines were strong or weak, clear-headed or in constant need of saving, but rarely complex or allowed complicated internal lives, and even more rarely truly relatable. Buffy changed all that.

This guest post written by Kaitlyn Soligan appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

Before there was a girl on fire, or a woman in an office with a drinking problem and a dark history, before there was, even, a cheerleader whose salvation could save the world, there was the chosen one. She alone would stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She was the slayer.

Our generation’s slayer was Buffy Summers, and she was a mess. By turns bubbly and serious, flirtatious and driven, insecure and confident, Buffy Summers worried about boys and her birthright, rising demons and her parents’ divorce, algebra and the somehow ever-present threat of global apocalypse. While there were superheroines on page and screen long before Buffy – the iconic Wonder Woman, Batgirl, and X-Men like Storm were represented on both – none had ever been allowed to be so human, particularly on television and in movies, where they were mostly absent. Often carrying the burden of representation in a genre overrun with male characters, superheroines were strong or weak, clear-headed or in constant need of saving, but rarely complex or allowed complicated internal lives, and even more rarely truly relatable.

Buffy changed all that.

Buffy worried about make-up, her curfew, whether or not a boy liked her, and how she would ever get her homework done on time in the moments between plunging a stake into the heart of multiple attacking vampires. Over the objections of her guardian Giles, a stand-in for the stuffy and outdated rules about how superheroines should behave, she made friends and went on dates, and still managed to slay demons and kill monsters. She was funny and goofy and sweet and deadly serious when occasion called for it. Buffy broke hearts and had hers broken, said things she shouldn’t to lovers and friends and family, hurt people and stood beside them when they needed her most. She was phenomenally imperfect as a woman and as a heroine.

Buffy’s battles, real and metaphorical (and occasionally metaphorically revealing what was all too real), panned the camera to the battles of girls more generally and forced it to linger on what was uncomfortable and almost always previously unacknowledged. In “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” Buffy fights an invisible foe who turns out to be a fellow classmate who disappeared for lack of attention. The episode examines the visibility of the female and the female body – and the ways these related to the feminine – in multiple ways, with Buffy and her classmate Cordelia battling for the title of May Queen before battling for their lives. Many episodes dealt with intimate partner violence; in “Ted” Buffy battles her mother’s violent boyfriend, while in “Beauty and the Beasts” she faces a classmate abusing his girlfriend. Throughout all of these episodes and arcs, Buffy is both average – experiencing jealousy, vulnerability, the need for company and compassion, pushing her friends and family away and then pulling them back in close – and superhuman, fighting against unnatural forces with equally unnatural strength.

Buffy’s humanity also marked one of the earliest moments of feminism brought to bear on the superhero genre – not a mere personal feminism limited to character portrayals, but a structural feminism, with an acknowledgement of structural systems of oppression, played out within and on characters and throughout story lines. In “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” Buffy faces the structural systems that exploit women’s bodies and turn them against one another as competitors. In “Ted,” her mother’s boyfriend is controlling and manipulative, gaslighting her, an eons-long practice even before we had a succinctly encompassing term for it. In “Beauty and the Beasts,” Buffy faces her classmate’s reality as a victim of assault while simultaneously exploring her own past as a survivor of abuse. Buffy and the other female characters were constantly underestimated because they were women. No episode ended with a neat lesson in which every male character realized the error of their ways and repented, and this underestimation often had long-term, structural, and painfully realistic consequences for the characters.

While Buffy’s humanization broke new ground for superheroines, it also brought into relief against that image the limits of what was still possible on television. While the many white female characters on the show were deliberately complex, the first featured recurring Black character, Kendra, was largely two-dimensional. Bearing the burden of representation, Kendra’s efforts to find acceptance through perfection reflected the limits experienced by women of color, a choice between being “good” and acknowledged, or not good enough and ignored, pushed further back into the margins both visually and narratively. While Black male characters on the show – most notably the cool and organized Mr. Trick and the steady and almost unbearably sexy Principal Wood – were good and evil, kind and ruthlessly ambitious, flawed and righteous by turns, Black female characters came in by inches and retreated just as quickly back outside the frame.

In Season 7, at the end of the series’ television run, Buffy discovers that her powers come from a spell cast long ago by men in Africa who needed a protector. One girl was chosen – likely not voluntarily – to be that protector: the First Slayer. And her power passed from one generation to the next. Buffy’s power is literally drawn from a history of Black women around the world; their sacrifices over thousands of years have enabled her rebellion from girl soldier to human being over the objections of a system designed to imprison, use, and discard her. As a white woman in her own place and time, Buffy could do what they could not.

In the end, Buffy enlists another woman, Willow, a powerful witch and, not incidentally, one of the first recurring LGBTQ characters on television, to reclaim and redistribute that first power, allowing every girl in the world with the potential to become a Slayer to rise up simultaneously, together. The act was at its heart a symbolic gesture hearkening to the notion that white women whose privilege has been gained at the ongoing expense of many other women, particularly women of color, have a responsibility to both destroy the system and build a better one, one that has far more universal benefit. In her final moments, Buffy chose between being special – one girl in all the world – and building a platform on which she would be only one of many, only as special as she made herself, meaningful not at the expense of others’ lack, but of her own making – as her own woman.

She went to prom and saved her classmates from a giant dragon. She mourned the loss of her mother and fought a fallen God. She fell in love and died and got aggravated with her roommates and worked in fast food and slayed demons. 2017 will mark 20 years since Buffy first aired, and Buffy would be truly old for a slayer now – nearly 40. If she felt all her years and more at sixteen, with her outsized responsibilities, one can only imagine how she would feel today, and it’s understandable: Buffy is the grandmother of the modern superheroine. These dark, flawed, occasionally failed, damaged, traumatized, real girls and women onscreen and in comics – from Katniss Everdeen to Jessica Jones to Joss Whedon’s own later heroines like Firefly’s Zoe – owe a great deal to the strides Buffy made in her complexity, her humanity, her failings, and her growth alike, as do we. After all, she saved the world. A lot.

Kaitlyn Soligan is a writer and editor from Boston living in Louisville, Kentucky. She writes about that, and bourbon, at www.ivehadworseideas.com. You can follow her on twitter @ksoligan.

Daisy Johnson, Superheroine of ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ — And Why She Matters

What makes Daisy special among superheroes is that she embodies all of these tropes as the centerpiece of a network television series — and is also a woman. Not only that, she is a mixed-race woman — and not a token one, but one surrounded by other women, of various ages, races and backgrounds.

This guest post written by Lee Jutton appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines. | Spoilers ahead.

Much more family-friendly and comic-book kooky than its dark, disturbing and acclaimed Netflix siblings, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is often treated like the black sheep of the Marvel Cinematic Universe by critics, audience members and even Marvel itself. Having just wrapped its third season, S.H.I.E.L.D. boasts one of the most underrated ensemble casts on television — not to mention one of the most diverse. Said cast features many amazingly complex, flawed, and fantastic women heroes who juggle trying to save the world with their own personal quests for family, love, acceptance, and peace of mind. In a television landscape where female characters frequently suffer and die just to further the storylines of their male co-stars, S.H.I.E.L.D. consistently gives these women their own stories and allows these stories to drive the show forward. Chief among them is Daisy Johnson, an ace computer hacker who joins S.H.I.E.L.D. to dig up information on her unknown parents and ends up discovering that she is a superpowered Inhuman.

When S.H.I.E.L.D. debuted in Fall 2013, the advertisements implied that it was a vehicle for Agent Phil Coulson, played by Clark Gregg, who was mysteriously raised from the dead after meeting a tragic end in The Avengers. I eyed these ads with trepidation, looking forward to an opportunity to enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe every week but worried that Coulson wouldn’t be able to carry a show. Turns out, the reason why S.H.I.E.L.D. excels is because he doesn’t. The true star of S.H.I.E.L.D. is Daisy, who over the course of three seasons goes from having no family to being torn between two — S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Inhumans — to finding herself alone again. This tumultuous inner conflict is what cements Daisy as S.H.I.E.L.D.’s emotional center and one of the more complicated characters in the male-dominated Marvel Cinematic Universe. She is not a perfect superheroine, but as one of only a few currently gracing our screens, she should not be taken for granted.

Daisy, played by Chloe Bennet, has evolved so much since the show’s pilot that she no longer goes by the same name. The series introduces her as Skye, a member of the hacktivist group Rising Tide who spent her childhood getting passed around a series of foster homes. Skye is trying to dig up information on her birth parents, who she believes were connected to S.H.I.E.L.D.; it is revealed partway through the first season that she was dropped off at an orphanage by an unknown S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. It says a lot about the lack of diversity in television that for awhile, everyone assumed that said S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, and Skye’s mother, was going to be Melinda May, played by Ming-Na Wen. (Bennet’s father is Chinese-American; her given name is Wang, but she now uses her father’s first name as her surname.) Two Asian-American actresses on the same program? There must be a connection, many fans mused, despite not wondering the same about all of the white actors on the show.

At first, Skye is little more than a vehicle for the audience’s entry into the covert world of S.H.I.E.L.D. Many of the early episodes spend too much time debating Skye’s loyalties, and the repetition grows exhausting. Audience members who survived this slow-moving, low-stakes freshman year were rewarded with a much more exciting sophomore season and a much more well-rounded Skye, now a full-fledged S.H.I.E.L.D. agent with the trust of her team and top-notch training from known badass Melinda, definitely the most competent agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Another shout out to Ming-Na Wen, who beats up men twice her size and half her age on a weekly basis.) Skye has not yet found her birth parents, but in S.H.I.E.L.D., she has finally found some form of family and identity.

That long-sought sense of stability doesn’t last for long. Soon, Skye is introduced to her birth parents, given her real name — Daisy Johnson — and transformed into an Inhuman. Her power is a literal embodiment of the upheaval and instability that plagues her life — the ability to create earthquakes. As the only Inhuman member of S.H.I.E.L.D., Daisy finds herself once again feeling alone; her powers are viewed as a potentially dangerous liability while she is still struggling to gain control over them. Daisy turns to the Inhumans to find a new sense of belonging as well as an understanding of her powers, only to find herself with divided loyalties when her vengeful Inhuman mother tries to sell her on a war against S.H.I.E.L.D. In the end, Daisy sides with S.H.I.E.L.D., but not without a great sense of loss and regret for what might have been in regards to her all-too-brief time with her mother. Daisy comes away with a desire to use the powers of S.H.I.E.L.D. to find, train and protect other Inhumans; the conflicts that desire causes within both groups becomes one of the driving forces of the series. Literally everything that follows ties into this uneasy alliance, brokered by a driven and determined Daisy, which devolves into conflict when the ancient Inhuman Hive shows up with the goal of coercing other Inhumans to help him conquer humanity.

The arrival of Hive subjects Daisy to a horrific brainwashing experience that turns her against S.H.I.E.L.D. and makes her content to follow Hive’s every order — even if it meant nearly killing her old partner, Mack. The storyline is eerily reminiscent of Jessica Jones’ experiences at the hands of Kilgrave, but without the overt references to rape — though, watching Daisy contently nestle her head on Hive’s shoulder while he plots the downfall of humanity is enough to send shivers down one’s spine. Even after being cured of Hive’s brainwashing, Daisy suffers from aftereffects similar to a drug withdrawal, while simultaneously berating herself viciously for having put her team in danger. Her sense of personal responsibility for actions she committed without having any control over them is heartbreaking, to the point that it would verge on melodramatic if Bennet was not such a capable actress; like the character she portrays, she has definitely developed better control over her abilities over time. By the end of the finale, Daisy abandons S.H.I.E.L.D.– but, it’s not all bad. She returns to a state of isolation and mistrust similar to the one we first found her in, but there’s one big difference: now she knows who she is. That identity as an Inhuman, and the desire to use her powers to help others and to atone for her misdeed while under Hive’s control, is what drives her forward. Daisy might be a fugitive from justice, but in the moment that the woman who newspaper clippings refer to as Quake uses her powers to escape S.H.I.E.L.D., hot on their former agent’s tail, she truly comes into her own as a superheroine.

The character of Daisy is not perfect; some think that others save her too frequently, though I think she returns the favor just as often. Nor is her storyline terribly revolutionary; struggles of identity and the need to reconcile both the heroic and non-heroic sides of one’s personality are not uncommon in superhero stories. What makes Daisy special among superheroes is that she embodies all of these tropes as the centerpiece of a network television series — and is also a woman. Not only that, she is a mixed-race woman — and not a token one, but one surrounded by other women, of various ages, races and backgrounds. In the Marvel movies, there are hardly ever enough women to have a conversation together, while on S.H.I.E.L.D. the women converse regularly, and about all sorts of topics unrelated to men. They mentor each other and challenge each other. They frequently are the ones giving the orders (and defying them) and are respected by their peers. None of these things should be extraordinary any more — and yet, they still are. Dee Hogan sums up S.H.I.E.L.D.’s sense of equality pretty well in this description of a scene in the season three finale for The Mary Sue:

“During this stretch, the ladies to do [sic] a whole lotta butt-saving without having to die in the process, which helps maintain gender parity in terms of who saves whom this week while thankfully not adding to the year’s Dead Female Character tally.”

What can Marvel’s movies learn from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s small-screen superheroines? Why do the films, as enjoyable as I find them to be, always tend to disappoint in their depiction of women, and how can they improve? Representation at the highest levels definitely helps — co-showrunner Maurissa Tancharoen is an Asian-American woman, and Marvel’s other women-centric series, Jessica Jones and the dearly departed Marvel’s Agent Carter, had women literally running the show. It might seem like a deceptively easy solution, but it’s one that DC, at least, has taken to heart in giving Monster’s Patty Jenkins the reins on the much-anticipated Wonder Woman. One hopes that the perpetually-delayed Captain Marvel, adapted from Kelly Sue DeConnick’s iteration of the comics by Guardians of the Galaxy’s Nicole Perlman and Inside Out’s Meg LeFauve, will fill some of the void (if it ever makes it to the multiplex). Until then, I’ll continue keeping company with Daisy Johnson, superheroine of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Lee Jutton has directed short films starring a killer toaster, a killer Christmas tree, and a not-killer leopard. She previously reviewed new DVD and theatrical releases as a staff writer for Just Press Play. You can follow her on Medium for more film reviews and on Twitter for an excessive amount of opinions on German soccer.

Elektra in ‘Daredevil’: Violence, White Masculinity, and Asian Stereotypes

Elektra is in some ways, the most problematic character. … Yet there is something strangely compelling about Elektra, not as an extension of the show’s tired prejudices against Asian people, but as a woman who despite her questionable origins transcends the limiting Strong Female Character trope. …Her presence in and of itself disrupts the masculine hegemony of violence in the show.

This guest post written by Kelly Kanayama appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

When it comes to sensitive depictions of people of color, Marvel’s Netflix show Daredevil has a fairly terrible record. There’s Claire Temple, portrayed by Afro-Latina Rosario Dawson, who helps the white male hero but can never be with him; that privilege is reserved for Karen Page, the embodiment of pure, white womanhood. There’s Madame Gao, who checks all the boxes of the Inscrutable Asian stereotype: the exact nature of her Asianness can never be revealed, she appears to spend her time sipping tea and painting whatever this is, and her communication mostly consists of vague pronouncements. Then there are the hordes of nameless and – as a result of their face coverings – literally faceless ninjas, whose sole purpose is to be dispatched by Daredevil, as his skill in their own martial arts is just that impressive.

And then there’s Elektra Natchios, half-Asian, half-white, sexual, violent, dangerous, and in some ways, the most problematic character on the show.

Elektra functions partially as a contrast to Karen: the femme fatale of color tempting a moral white man away from his virtuous path and, because the two are linked, away from a good-hearted, white woman. To underscore this dichotomy, Karen typically wears whites, neutrals, and blues, like the Virgin Mary would, whereas Elektra’s wardrobe consists of red and black (the vamp’s colors) with accents of gold or the metal of a blade.

Although the series presents Elektra as Daredevil’s equal in terms of fighting prowess, the show disempowers her by attributing this to her status as a living weapon of the Hand. As a woman of color, she is inherently an empty vessel to be filled, with ultimately no agency regarding her actions. Even more worrying, the responsibility for her lack of self-determination lies with her fellow Asians; the Hand may have the occasional non-Asian member, perhaps highlighted to sidestep accusations of racism, but its operation and aesthetics are pure East Asian stereotype. This dynamic ties into other media depictions of people of color suffering the most oppression at the hands of their own – such as any Western news story about South Asian, Middle Eastern, and/or Muslim women – which often serves as justification for the exercise of white privilege over non-white individuals or communities. We might not be perfect, but we’re not as bad as them. It’s fine to bomb their countries, because otherwise they’ll just keep on oppressing.

It must also be noted that the only named Asian characters besides Elektra are Madame Gao and Nobu, whose name no one bothers to mention for most of Season 1 (I resorted to calling him Hot Suit Guy until then). For the most part, Asians in Daredevil are a monolithic mass, the menace of the Other against which a powerful white man must rise.

To meet this challenge, white men repeatedly prove their worthiness to rule by mastering Asianness. Daredevil and Stick are more proficient in Asian martial arts than the warriors of the Hand, while the Kingpin demonstrates his intelligence by speaking to Madame Gao and Nobu in their own languages. These men are thus “better” than their Asian counterparts, as seen in the Kingpin’s ability to convince Gao and Nobu to cooperate with him, or in the fact that both Elektra and Daredevil are both trained by Stick but the latter manages to not become a killer, due to a morality that the Asian Elektra can never have.

Daredevil is a white man’s world. Asians are just getting beaten up and dying in it.

Yet there is something strangely compelling about Elektra, not as an extension of the show’s tired prejudices against Asian people, but as a woman who despite her questionable origins transcends the limiting Strong Female Character trope. In addition to being half of a white woman/woman of color romantic polarity for Daredevil, her presence in and of itself disrupts the masculine hegemony of violence in the show.

Here’s a drinking game I wouldn’t recommend playing with Daredevil: take a sip every time the title character growls “my city.” You’ll pass out in the first fifteen minutes. It’s a key phrase in deciphering his motives behind defending Hell’s Kitchen, which aren’t simply rooted in the desire to stand up for victims of crime. If that was all he wanted, he would have stuck to his day job as a lawyer for the poor and the otherwise marginalized, without the need to sneak out after dark to break some bones. “My city” connotes ownership and, in turn, the right to treat the city’s occupants however he sees fit, since they as part of the city belong to him. The Punisher also comes to this situation from a (former) position of institutional authority. As a former Marine who was deployed in the Middle East, he represents the exercise of U.S. and largely white male-dominated power with the goal of establishing order, and still refers to himself as a “soldier.” This is the language of possession and imposition, spoken by the show’s white male leads.

Elektra displays little concern for such ideologies. Her accent marks her as an outsider in Hell’s Kitchen and in the U.S., and the phrase “my city” is absent from her conversation, as is its more neutral variant “this city.” She is a foreigner, a woman, and a person of color who is at least somewhat removed from her male counterparts’ battles of ownership and authority – and is their equal at what they do best in their efforts to impose the order of white patriarchal institutions upon their surroundings. To drive this point home, Elektra’s most sexualized moment is inextricable from her first display of physical power, as these are combined in that boxing ring scene – first through a fight where she and Matt are evenly matched, then through a passionate coupling where she spends most of her time on top.

In a show where violence equals authority, being the living weapon of the Hand grants her a status similar to those of Daredevil‘s male leads, investing her with the ability to fight alongside or against them as an equal. While Elektra’s is a different type of violence from that carried out by the Punisher or Daredevil with a different source, it is nonetheless effective.

Granted, this part of the plot is still highly objectifying. Perhaps I’m trying to justify my love for a character whose own backstory undercuts her power by finding alternate readings of the indefensible; even in 2016, as an Asian-American woman, I often have to settle for the problematic and compromised or nothing at all. It is a rare occurrence to see a powerful woman on-screen who looks like me and who isn’t entirely composed of racially fetishized tropes: the clingy schoolgirl, the murderous geisha, the dominatrix ninja, or some unholy combination thereof. Elektra may bear aspects of these tropes, but she is by no means reduced to them – in a show where authority is reinforced by successful acts of violence and such acts are the purview of white men, she undermines this supremacy through her own violence and her existence as a female Other of color among the male, the white, and the powerful.

Kelly Kanayama was born and raised in Honolulu but now lives in Scotland, where she is pursuing a PhD in comics research. She has written about comics and superheroes at Bitch Media, SciFiNow, NPR: Code Switch, Women Write About Comics, and Mindless Ones. Her poetry on comics and pop culture has appeared in Room Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, and the British Science Fiction Association magazine Focus. You can follow her on Twitter @kellykanayama.

Why Scarlet Witch May Be the Future of Women in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Having a superhero grapple with the right use of their power is hardly a new theme and it’s central to the broader narrative of ‘Captain America: Civil War.’ But allowing a female superhero to tackle the same dilemma on a deeply personal level feels quietly subversive. …Women superheroes can be inhumanly powerful without being reduced to a boringly infallible female badass caricature.

This guest post written by Maddie Webb appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines. | Mild spoilers for Captain America: Civil War.

There is a lot to dissect in Captain America: Civil War, which is what makes it so compelling to watch. It’s a film overflowing with political allegory and highly anticipated character introductions, building to perhaps the most emotional climax to a superhero film ever seen. It is therefore understandable that most of the reviews and buzz around the film don’t seem too interested in the small role Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch plays in the greater plot machinations of the superhero showdown. This is kind of a shame because her character arc gives me hope for the other women superheroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), whose treatment of their all too few female characters in the past has been checkered at best.

Introduced in Avengers: Age of Ultron alongside her brother Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff)’s entrance into the MCU seemed to be more of a result of Marvel’s endless pissing contest with Fox rather than anyone actually wanting to do something interesting with the character. Sure, she gets to mess with the Avengers’ minds and rips out Ultron’s mechanical heart, but she never feels like a three-dimensional human. Instead, she exists more as a tool to move pieces into place and create conflict within the team. Though not at quite the same level as the treatment Black Widow gets in the film, which some people saw as tantamount to character assassination, Wanda’s introduction is, like the rest of the film, a bit underwhelming.

Imagine my surprise when leaving Civil War, the first thing I wanted to do was read House of M so I could fall in love with Scarlet Witch’s comic counterpart as well as her movie form. In Civil War, Scarlet Witch doesn’t just drive the plot forward but she’s allowed to exist as a fully formed young woman, all without undermining the fact that she is the most powerful character that has been introduced into the MCU so far. That is so exciting to me it’s kind of ridiculous. It’s also no small feat considering incredible unbridled power in the hands of a young woman is something that pop culture often fails to portray with any nuance. As film critic Bob Chipman commented, in traditional storytelling, “Male characters that get power can be destructive if they abuse it, but female characters with power will be destructive period.” This is not the case here.

In the opening of Civil War, an incident in Lagos results in major civilian casualties due, at least in part, to Wanda’s actions. Although, Captain America himself admits that he, as their leader is responsible, the wider world decides that Scarlet Witch is the one who cannot be trusted, perhaps since she isn’t the all-American hero Steve Rogers is. For a short time, she is public enemy number one and she reacts in a deeply emotional and human way, questioning her own actions and purpose as an Avenger. One of the worst tropes of modern action screenwriting is the “strong woman,” the omni-competent badass who on the surface is empowered but realistically is devoid of any complexity or characterization. Here Wanda is the antithesis of that, a young woman who is at once undeniably strong but emotionally complex, perhaps even a little fragile. It may be a small plot point in the broad scheme of the film but it’s a moment of subtle and important character development. Rather than breaking down entirely or being completely without remorse, the film presents Wanda’s guilt as both understandable and authentic, but most importantly, something that strengthens her as the plot progresses.

Having a superhero grapple with the right use of their power is hardly a new theme and it’s central to the broader narrative of Civil War. But allowing a female superhero to tackle the same dilemma on a deeply personal level feels quietly subversive. Wanda’s powers aren’t a curse and haven’t corrupted her, like with so many female characters, but she also learns that as her abilities grow so will the consequences of her actions. “With great power comes great responsibility,” is a well-worn superhero trope but it’s normally one reserved for men.

Even the traditional and potentially problematic elements of Wanda’s relationships with the other characters are resolved in a satisfying way. Her relationship with Vision is sweet, genuine, and has none of the clumsy melodrama of Black Widow and Bruce Banner’s forced romance (despite how I sound, I don’t actually hate Age of Ultron). Their relationship is based on mutual experiences of feeling like the “other” in a world that doesn’t quite know how to react to them and the burden possessing a greater power they don’t quite understand. Furthermore, when it becomes clear that Vision is willing to keep Wanda in the Avengers compound against her will, in one of the coolest moments in the film, Wanda makes it abundantly clear that even Vision isn’t strong enough to stop her from doing what she wants.

In fact, Tony Stark and Vision not trusting Wanda is a huge part of why she chooses Team Cap; she’s strong enough to leave a team when she knows she’s not respected. In one of my favorite interactions in the film, Wanda accuses Tony of trying to lock her in her room and when he tells her it was for her own good, she responds by dropping a car park on his head. While her surrogate father figures, Captain American and Hawkeye, refer to her as just a kid, Wanda’s heroic displays in the now legendary airport scene show that she can handle herself and her powers just fine.

Maybe this is what really gets to the heart of why I’m so jazzed about Scarlet Witch in this movie and the potential of Captain Marvel, the Wasp and the future women in the MCU (personally, I’m praying for Squirrel Girl). With the right script and actress — Elizabeth Olsen really is stellar here — Civil War proves that women superheroes can be inhumanly powerful without being reduced to a boringly infallible female badass caricature. The conclusion of Wanda’s mini character arc consists of learning and empowerment. As Vision warns her, that choosing Captain America’s side will mean people will never stop fearing her power, she replies, “I cannot control their fear, only my own.” Forget Team Cap or Team Iron Man, that sounds like a woman whose team I want to be on.

Maddie Webb is a student currently studying Biology in London. If she doesn’t end up becoming a mad scientist, her goal is to write about science and the ladies kicking ass in STEM fields.

‘Catwoman,’ ‘Elektra,’ and the Death of the Cinema Superheroine

Now, don’t get me wrong – neither ‘Catwoman’ nor ‘Elektra’ are by any means good movies. The first is silly, the second dull, and both are confusing and ugly, with little interest in their source material and an odd propensity to give characters magical powers. They deserved to fail – but they didn’t deserve to take an entire gender down with them.

This guest post written by Heather Davidson appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

Cast your mind back, if you can, to a time before superhero films dominated the box office. A time before the one-two punch of Iron Man and The Dark Knight revolutionized the genre and made no summer complete without half a dozen comic book adaptions hitting screens. This was the world Catwoman and Elektra premiered in. The latter a spin-off from 2003’s Daredevil, the former inexplicably completely unconnected to the following year’s Batman Begins, both were complete flops. Catwoman failed to make back its budget, Elektra barely did, and they both received a critical mauling.

When movies fail, studios go looking for explanations. In this case, they looked at the failure of Elektra and Catwoman, as well as the failure of the film Supergirl back in 1984, and they came to a conclusion: superheroines don’t sell. It’s a conclusion that Hollywood seems to have adopted as gospel; last year, Wikileaks published a 2014 email exchange between the CEOs of Marvel and Sony with the subject line “Female Movies,” in which Elektra, Catwoman, and Supergirl were cited as “disasters.” The reluctance among the big studios to greenlight any more “female movies” is obvious – when Wonder Woman premieres next year, it will have been twelve years since we last saw a movie with a woman superhero in the lead role.

Now, don’t get me wrong – neither Catwoman nor Elektra are by any means good movies. The first is silly, the second dull, and both are confusing and ugly, with little interest in their source material and an odd propensity to give characters magical powers. They deserved to fail – but they didn’t deserve to take an entire gender down with them.

All the complaints you can make about Catwoman and Elektra can be levelled against so many other superhero movies (with the possible exception of the whole magical powers thing): Green Lantern, Daredevil, Superman Returns, and Jonah Hex. Like Catwoman, Elektra, and Supergirl, the protagonists of these flops shared a gender – yet you would never see them in a list entitled “Male Movies.” The reasons given for their failure are many and varied: they had poor scripts, dull action scenes, bad special effects. This isn’t a privilege afforded to women-led movies; everything comes back to the gender of their protagonist.

However, calling Catwoman and Elektra “female movies” is disingenuous. Both movies were directed by men, with male screenwriters and an almost all-male team of producers (Catwoman does give a producer credit to Denise Di Novi). The lack of women’s voices on the production teams is blatant. Elektra is interested in its protagonist’s gender only so far as it creates the opportunity to put Jennifer Garner in a revealing outfit and have her kiss another woman. Meanwhile, Catwoman’s idea of womanhood is that of a boardroom full of men desperately trying to appeal to women aged 18-39, complete with a ‘sassy’ best friend and plot revolving around face cream.

We’ve never had a superheroine movie engage with gender and womanhood in the way TV series like Jessica Jones or Supergirl have in recent years; all it takes is a woman in a visible role (outside the male protagonist’s love interest, of course) for a film to become a “female movie.” For Hollywood, the experience of the white, straight, man is universal, but he can’t empathize with anyone else. As such, even in ensemble pictures like the X-Men or Avengers franchises, the superheroines are marginalized in the movies and their marketing in favor of their male co-stars. Of the 60 items produced to tie-in to the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron last year, Scarlet Johansson’s Black Widow featured on just 3. The issue was obvious enough for Mark Ruffalo, who played her love interest in the film, to publicly demand Marvel produce more.

This marginalization extends to women behind the camera as well, as Anne Hathaway noted in an interview with the Los Angeles Times’ Rebecca Keegan in 2014:

“A male director can have a series of failures and still get hired. Sometimes movies don’t work, and I feel like if it stars a woman or is directed by a woman, the wheels can’t fall off the train. If this movie directed by a woman does well and this movie directed by a woman does well and then one doesn’t, it’s ‘oh, people don’t like movies directed by women.'”

It’s been sixteen years since X-Men kicked off the superhero boom of the 2000s, and we have yet to see a comic book blockbuster directed by a woman. That’s not to say women have been entirely absent from the director’s chair – Lexi Alexander (who repeatedly advocates for women filmmakers in Hollywood) directed the low budget Punisher: War Zone in 2008, and Patty Jenkins was hired to direct Thor: The Dark World, but left during pre-production. Marvel Studios, at least, gained a reputation for being willing to take risks on unproven directors, like Marc Webb and the Russo brothers, or those whose previous projects had lost money, like Joss Whedon, and James Gunn. However, this approach evidently only extends to male filmmakers. While Marvel claims to be in talks with women directors about the upcoming Captain Marvel movie, and Jenkins is currently overseeing post-production on Wonder Woman, we’ve spent a decade and a half without female representation in a genre that has come to dominate Hollywood. The failure of Catwoman and Elektra may have erased women’s faces from the superhero film, but they never even gave our voices a chance.

With the first female lead in over a decade and first female director ever, the pressure is high on Wonder Woman to succeed. Protest over the lack of representation for marginalized groups in Hollywood has, thankfully, gained enough mainstream prominence in the last few years that, even if the movie crashes and burns, it’s untenable for the studios to continue excluding women as they have. However, you can be sure that if the film does flop, fingers won’t be pointed at its bizarre scripting system, its troubled production, or its ties to an equally unsettled cinematic universe. The reasons for its failure will begin and end with the gender of its star and director.

In linguistics, there’s a concept known as ‘markedness.’ Out of two paired terms, one will be ‘unmarked’ and other ‘marked.’ The unmarked term is the norm – walk, host, lion. In contrast, its marked equivalent stands out – walked, hostess, lioness. ‘Superheroine’ is a marked term. The actresses who play them are marked, as are the “female movies” they star in. For the past decade, they’ve been marked for failure, by a studio system dominated by short-sighted male executives who can’t see past previous failures. We’re entering a new era for superheroes on-screen, where women again have a seat at the table. We can’t let them take it away again.

Heather Davidson is a web developer-cum-graphic designer-cum writer, with as much of an attention span as that implies. She writes about tech, the niche corners of pop culture and radical activism – preferably all at the same time. Follow her on Twitter @heatherlauren.

‘Supergirl’ and Room for the Non-Brooding Superhero

This guest post written by Allyson Johnson appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

It would seem that as of late the superhero genre has taken a turn for the dour and morally dubious. Dark Knights battle Men of Steel, a genius, grieving billionaire clashes in ideologies with a soldier out of time which leads to violence; mutants bring the end of days as Hot Topic gets free advertising in what could be the big surprise in Suicide Squad. Hell’s Kitchen offers up a bloody and bruised vigilante and a psychologically scarred heroine and even The Flash, the previous home to the peppiest characters, has had its hero battling demons and facing past traumas. The joy of Barry’s world has dimmed as of late as Zoom has vowed to take everything and everyone that he loves.

Then, across multiple worlds, there is Supergirl, and she is delightful.

It’s hardly a reach to call Melissa Benoist’s Kara Danvers a genuine ray of sunshine. While many may have enjoyed Henry Cavill’s scowling, apathetic Superman, I’d much rather watch Benoist light up the screen with her optimism. Embodying all that is good, honest and hopeful in superheroes; she bursts onto the screen beaming with satisfaction in getting the chance to save the day.

There is an indisputable charm to Kara’s strong will that can go toe to toe with the might of her fist. Here is a young woman that believes so strongly in her fellow being that she tries talking to many of the baddies of the week rather than immediately resorting to fighting. Her kindhearted and giving spirit is ultimately what sets her apart from the other heroes that have populated television and movies for the last few years (with exceptions, obviously.) Kara has more in common with Steve Rogers than Clark Kent in terms of media representation. While she and Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen certainly share attributes (rendering adorable results) the latter is more prone to wallowing than Kara who deals with her problems head on. This is highlighted in the follow-up from the events in “Falling” where Kara has been affected by red kryptonite. Out of control for an episode while her very worst thoughts come snarling out of her, she is branded as a threat to the city. When she awakens from the trance, she sobs out of despair (add Melissa Benoist to actresses who make me cry by crying) and it’s all due to the grief she experiences at how mean-spirited she had become. She doesn’t waste time by ruminating or talking about how it’s all her fault (ahem Arrow). Instead, despite being admittedly shaken, she goes about her day with the mindset of doing anything and everything in her power to regain the trust she worked so hard to earn.

Kara isn’t without her trauma, having left a planet minutes away from destruction and having to willingly leave everyone she’d ever known and loved. Rather than wear her tragedies as a burden (and this is something she shares with Gustin’s The Flash) she utilizes her sadness as a way to help others from enduring the same pain. She thrives on her city’s ability to find hope in the darkest moments, both becoming a beacon for it while also turning to them for courage. Young, unabashedly gleeful about what her powers embolden her to do while striving to better herself, Kara Danvers is the embodiment of what we all expected to see in Superman when we stepped foot into the theater for Man of Steel.

So often in our superhero origin stories, the hero faces a tragedy that influences who they become. It just so happens that rather than allow hers to burden her with a sense of guilt, Kara instead utilizes it as a catalyst for purpose. Where Oliver Queen in Arrow was led down a path of self-righteousness and murder all in the name of “protecting his city,” Kara helps out the girl facing down a schoolyard bully. Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent seem to believe that the humans they save are a mere nuisance in Batman v. Superman, while Kara believes every problem from worldwide mind control to saving a girl’s pet snake out of a tree is worthwhile.

Even the supporting characters, who typically would have been reduced to one note, antagonistic foils for our protagonist, are given a sense of directive purpose. Lucy (Jenna Dewan Tatum) could have been stuck in love triangle hell but instead the two women share a mutual respect. Then, there’s Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart), a journalism mogul who ends up not only mentoring Kara and Supergirl but also proves to possess the warmest heart of any of the characters on the show.

It’s a shame that such richly drawn characters could be buried in such tiresome plots and story development. One of the reasons I’m excited about Supergirl jumping stations from CBS to The CW is the creativity that will now be allowed for its writers. Greg Barlanti, Ali Adler, and Andrew Kreisberg have gone to great lengths to depict characters with love and respect. Now they have time to flourish on a channel with a less restrictive model. Regardless, it would have remained a staple in my weekly roundup, largely due to its leading lady.

There is a larger than life quality to the characters of Zack Snyder’s DC Universe and even in Marvel’s current run where heroes such as Scarlet Witch and Vision join the rankings. Supergirl, despite her otherworldly origins, feels human. Despite her weekly battles with aliens from other worlds or meta-humans from earth, she’s grounded by her optimism and her caring relationships with others. Perhaps there is more drama to be derived from angst and anger, but when we look to Supergirl, we see the face of a hero we would want to see rescuing us, and also, a hero we can all strive to be. I don’t know when it became “uncool” to have heroes who find it burdensome to help others (and in fear of exacting a hyperbole, this isn’t the case all across the board) but while it’s certainly fashionable to have the antihero in the lead or carry a chip on their shoulder, it’s equally as satisfying to watch a hero come speeding into sight, grin in place, and ready to save the day.

See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘Supergirl’s Feminism and Why the TV Series Works

Allyson Johnson is a 20-something living in the Boston area. She’s the Film Editor for TheYoungFolks.com and her writing can also be found at The Mary Sue and Cambridge Day. Follow her on twitter for daily ramblings, feminist rants and TV chat @AllysonAJ.

How the ‘X-Men’ Films Failed Iconic Black Female Superhero Storm

To me, this is where the ‘X-Men’ films utterly fail Storm as a character. While her comic form is definitely a sympathetic and understanding person, more importantly, she is a warrior trained in hand-to-hand combat, an orphan, a divorcee, a Black woman in a leadership role on a team of mostly white men, a wife, a mentor, and an activist.

This guest post written by Sara Century appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

Originally introduced in 1975, Storm is widely celebrated as the first Black female superhero. Although The Butterfly in comic magazine Hell-Rider is technically the first. While the first Black male recurring character in a Marvel or DC comic predates Storm by 12 years, it’s impossible to minimize the importance of even her first appearance, especially as she is the first Black woman “to play either a major or supporting role” in Marvel or DC comics. To dissect how the X-Men film franchise fails the previously established iconic character of Storm, we must first view her other incarnations.

In the comics, Storm (Ororo Munroe) is a mutant who has the power of weather control and the ability to fly on wind currents and control lightning. She has been a recurring character in the X-Men for the last 41 years. Storm is introduced as a girl who was orphaned at age six, thereby thrown into a world where she had to fend for herself. She fell in with a group of children who were also pickpockets, and she lived in Cairo until she set out on her own. Discovering her mutant powers around puberty, she was worshiped as an African goddess by what amounted to being a fairly problematic depiction of rural Africans before being discovered by Xavier. At that time, she joined the X-Men.

At first a serene pacifist, life with the X-Men forced her to encounter multiple ethical quandaries. She grew slowly more comfortable with violence, leading into the famous storyline in which she fights Callisto of the Morlocks, kills her, claims leadership of the Morlocks, completely forgets about them, and ultimately returns leadership to turns-out-not-THAT-dead Callisto. There’s a lot going on in that storyline, but it did give us punk Storm. Disavowed by the costume’s designer Paul Smith as “a bad joke that went too far,” he obviously has no grasp of how that look more than anything else ignited an undying love for Storm in artistic, queer, and feminist subcultures that lasts to this very day. She led the team even after she temporarily lost her powers, up until she took a brief hiatus to hook up with a character named Forge in one of the better early Storm stories, “Lifedeath” and “Lifedeath II.”

The 1990s saw Storm’s development meander under the traditionally listless direction of writers like Scott Lobdell, culminating in a marriage between her and Black Panther that was severely out-of-character for them both. The move was another example of the common mistake comic book companies make, where they think that marrying one of their most powerful female characters to an established male character and making her more or less his sidekick/wife will make women want to read comics. Sidenote: it pretty much unfailingly doesn’t. Black Panther annulled their marriage behind her back, Marvel lost it’s only Black couple, and Storm rejoined the X-Men.

Importantly, and seldom mentioned, Storm is one of the X-Men who shows the greatest ability to change her methods of operation over time; Storm’s versatility sets her apart. In comparison with other female comic book characters, whose moments of growth often come off as stilted and out of character, Storm developed into a completely different person via a logical chain of events. Writers used her fear of enclosed spaces for years as her “kryptonite,” but in recent years, we see that Storm is no longer afraid to be trapped, having undergone about a decade of therapy to deal with the problem. She mentored the X-Men character besides herself that is most known for her queer subtext, aka Kitty Pryde. When Kitty reacted negatively to her punk look, Storm struggled until she found a way to reconnect with her. Storm went to the desert to find herself again after she lost her powers, fell in love with Forge, and then went to Japan and had a fling with a woman named Yukio when things didn’t work out. She lost her powers, and yet remained the leader of the X-Men. She was queer-coded for decades, and finally Marvel writers admitted to her bisexuality in the last couple of years. She is consistently one of the few characters in the X-Men universe that examines herself with any kind of objectivity.

Because the character has existed in multiple different mediums under the dictates of dozens if not hundreds of different creators in her time, there have been multiple takes on her. The version of Storm in the animated television series X-Men that ran from 1992 to 1997 shared few similarities with Storm in the comics. Rather than the street tough child that became a goddess and then an X-Man like in the comic, in the animated series, while a similar background remained, writers played up Storm’s trauma more than the skills she learned as a thief on the streets of Cairo. I believe it was this early on that the image of Storm in public consciousness began to go awry. Don’t misunderstand, I love animated TV series Storm. Her theatrical nature is absolutely true to the comics, and it’s one of her most important traits; every sentence she speaks is a declaration of her awe-inspiring power. Even though I tend to sort of chuckle at the melodrama in her grandiose, booming voice, it is consistent with everything I love about the character. However, in the animated series, Storm’s only settings are 1 or 11, there is no mid-point. Even the seemingly casual sentence, “I’ll meet you at the monorail,” becomes “I SHALL MEET YOU – AT THE MONORAAAAIL!” She’s great, but she lacks in human characteristics, and appears as larger than life in even the most relaxed contexts. She’s either yelling or she’s asleep, there is no third option.

In the 2000s animated television series, X-Men: Evolution, Storm is portrayed as a teacher, older than most of the other X-Men, with the exceptions of Professor Xavier, Beast, and Wolverine. In the show, she is the aunt of Spyke, and the recruiter of new X-Men, which puts her in a supporting role. This is a Storm based more closely to her original version, and not the current comic book form. She was not the Storm that stabbed Callisto, led the Morlocks, or married Black Panther, but, rather, simply a teacher at the Xavier Institute, and thereby just so happens to occasionally be involved in skirmishes with supervillains. Storm is authoritarian and even disciplinarian, but, consistent with the comics, she is also the voice of reason.

Famously, the X-Men films have been the worst to the character, treating her as a B-lister. Played by Halle Berry in X-Men, X-Men 2 (X2), X-Men: The Last Stand, and X-Men: Days of Future Past, thus far her film version’s most memorable moment is regrettably the universally cringe-inducing line, “Do you know what happens when a toad gets struck by lightning? … The same thing that happens to everything else.” The context for the line is worse, as it occurs immediately after getting beaten up by the notoriously useless villain Toad, and before getting stabbed by Wolverine as shapeshifter Mystique has taken her form. Halle Berry’s time as the focal point in all the fight scenes of the X-Men franchise combined clocks in at around two minutes of screen time, most of which is spent slowly levitating while her eyes change color. Her role in X-Men 2 is essentially to empathetically listen to Nightcrawler talk about his problems.

To me, this is where the X-Men films utterly fail Storm as a character. While her comic form is definitely a sympathetic and understanding person, more importantly, she is a warrior trained in hand-to-hand combat, an orphan, a divorcee, a Black woman in a leadership role on a team of mostly white men, a wife, a mentor, and an activist. I don’t believe that the movies have to follow the comic to the letter, but I don’t feel like I’m going that far out on a limb to say that any attempts to add even just one of these facets to Storm’s movie persona would be deeply appreciated by X-Men fans. That is to say, I hope that X-Men: Apocalypse will give Storm a better turn, but likewise I feel my skepticism is warranted, given the previous history of the franchise neglecting the awesomeness of all of its female characters, Storm most notably of all.

References:

Born to the Queen: Why Can’t the X-Men Movies Capture the Majesty of Storm

Storm and the X-Men as Racial Projects

Sara Century is a multimedia performance artist, and you can follow her work at saracentury.wordpress.com.

‘Honey Pot’: The Super Fun Experience of Writing a Female-Driven Action-Comedy

Writing women as interesting, multi-layered individuals with a rich inner life isn’t impossible, so the fact that men continue to write women with so little substance isn’t because they can’t. It’s that they won’t. And the fact that there aren’t more female-driven comedies isn’t because (sorry to bring this nonsense up again) they aren’t funny, it’s because mostly men run the show and most of them don’t value women as anything other than wives and ‘yacht girl in bikini.’ They don’t see women as funny and interesting and smart and worthy of 90 minutes, so they don’t write for them and they don’t include them. It’s. A. Choice.

This is a guest post written by Jessica Quiroli.

In 2015, Glamour magazine published an article by Megan Angelo titled, “Let’s Rewrite Hollywood, Shall We?” In it, she cited frustrating statistics about the state of women in movies. One of them was that “in 2014 33% of speaking roles in major movies went to women.” While the article overall was fascinating and frustratingly informative, it was the sidebars that caught my eye; particularly one written by Nikki Glaser.

The sidebars were mini-stories written by women, re-imagining male-driven movies, such as Die Hard (One of my favorite action movies, by the way. Also, Christmas, but never mind that.). In the re-telling of famous movie scenes, women were given re-defined roles in the lives of the men the movies focus on. My favorite was by Glaser, who took on Entourage, the movie. Confession: I’ve never seen the TV show and definitely missed the movie. But I knew the premise and some of the characters’ names. I didn’t have an issue with the series as it was based on Mark Wahlberg’s friends, but was never interested enough to watch it.

Glaser wrote about “Topless Yacht Girl,” that stock female character that hangs on a man and has no other function and, of course, no lines, at least not often. Here, topless girl on a yacht finds the character of Johnny Drama to be “one of the dumbest people with whom she’d ever spoken.” She’s a pretender, trying to get by, putting up with men that annoy her because they have all the power. She’s also given a name (!) Catherine. Catherine eventually “grabbed her top, ran toward the railing, and dove into the shallow surf.” She swims “confidently to shore” to begin a better life, where she’s valued and happy.

That article has been on my desk throughout the writing process of my screenplay, Honey Pot.

Also hanging around in a stack of inspiration: another Glamour article, an interview with Glamsquad CEO, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson who’s quoted saying, “Be your own best advocate”; and a Women’s Health piece on Reese Witherspoon, who provided a tweet I’ve made an Instagram photo of: “Successful women don’t have a lot of time for people who don’t lift them up.” (I imagine Catherine reading that same article and getting inspired to yacht-dive to freedom). The other thing that Witherspoon inspired me to remember in that interview is that we must do something about all of this. And that’s going to take a lot of work, creativity, solidarity and commitment (Also see the study of women in film, focused on screen time and amount of dialogue for female characters in film by Polygraph Cool, conducted by Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels.)

I’ve been dabbling in screenwriting for a few years, working on it, reading about it, and studying the art form in every way I could think of, outside of taking courses. In the absence of that, I bought the book by Lew Hunter, a professor of screenwriting at UCLA, which is his curriculum in book form, or as close as it gets. I reached out to him and consulted him for advice. After a mishap mailing him a script three years ago, I e-mailed him my first truly serious, heartfelt attempt a baseball screenplay called Minor League Guys in 2015, and he gave me some excellent feedback. Then I realized that I hadn’t told the story I wanted to, so I started over and e-mailed the new version a few months later. He gave high praise for the re-write and I began putting myself out there professionally. I’m still figuring that out. I’d been a baseball writer for a decade, skipping college, and over time figured out what I really wanted to do. I’ve logged many miles and hours developing my craft. Baseball kind of found me, but writing was always my destiny.

Minor League Guys is about four baseball players at different stages in their careers, it was about the world I knew; but what was also important to me, was that the women in the story be given a real voice, a rich inner life, and, you know, lines. The wives of the players aren’t background noise with nothing to do but serve the male characters stories: they’re women who own businesses, go to school, are supportive of one another, and also expect support from their husbands. They all have very equal partnerships with their significant others. Another of the main characters is a woman who works in the front office of the fictional team. In her introductory scene, she’s in command, giving directions and informing others around her. I was mindful with their lines. And none of them are unstable, without personality, or nameless, sitting around in bathing suits.

Perhaps this is what that golden beacon of light Witherspoon was referring to; create the thing you want to see in the world instead of just being upset about what’s missing. And so, that set me on a path I’d been thinking of for a while. A comedy about two women, who get caught up in a crime caper, full of wild twists and turns, lots of fun, and plenty of action. They would have so many lines!

I have a passion for comedies like Superbad and Pineapple Express, and I thought about how women don’t see enough of those kinds of comedies for themselves. The kind where life goes off the rails and your whole day or week is an unraveling adventure full of pitfalls and peril. And most of it is hilarious. My favorite feminist comedies in the past few years have both starred Melissa McCarthy: The Heat and Spy. What freaking fun films. I also admit, despite how much you might frown reading this, that I loved The Other Woman. Yes, it’s about three women in love with a dude that’s lying to them all. But they become instant friends and teammates. We root for them as friends, and as smart women who want to teach that guy a lesson. They outfox him. And they look glamorous doing it and I loved that, too.

But we need more and we deserve a variety of stories, particularly comedy, in which women are the center of the action and they’re not trying to win over a guy or have that be the entire focus. Think about buddy-cop movies like Beverly Hills Cop or action-comedies like The Other Guys or funny westerns or coming-of-age sex comedies. Women want those too. We want to see ourselves.

Honey Pot originated from a writing prompt and developed over a year and a half. I have to sit with characters a while, getting to know them and hear them (so writerly, I know) before I begin. I write down lines, scrawl scene ideas on a college notebook, and take mental note when something interesting or funny happens that I think I could become a scene.

When I sat down to begin, I had a page full of possible titles. I wanted something like Superbad, that had punch to it and sounded like a good time, but also sounded like the name of an awesome music group from the 70’s. I wanted it to imply something about the story in an animated way. But for all the fun I had in mind, other elements were pulling me to expand my vision. I was thinking about street harassment, women in small business, equal pay, single motherhood, how image defines us, and sexual shaming. I also wanted to make fun of movie-making when it comes to roles for women. They’re always the wife/girlfriend/fiancée/mistress on the phone, waiting for the guy to return from the fun, hi jinx, danger and actual story. I felt myself drawn very naturally to weaving these elements into a funny story. Ultimately, every comedy, even the most absurd, has heart. In the creative flow, I was hearing a new voice. The Catherines’ of the world have a lot going on and plenty to say about the way the world treats them.

On the first page of notes, the very first line I scrawled was about slut-shaming. It was funny and served a purpose to the overall story. I realized that this was clicking. I was doing all the things in every scene I needed to. I didn’t want to preach, but show professional, happy women with strong friendships, and healthy personal lives. They have their insecurities, inconsistencies, family issues, and uncertainty about what the future holds. But they’re confident in their abilities. They enjoy life on their own terms. And they’re each other’s allies.

In the midst of dealing with life, and making important business decisions while financially strapped, in walks a client that shakes things up, and sets the characters on a wild path. I ask myself, “Will women have fun watching this?” I remained mindful of the ways in which they spoke to each other, to others in their lives, and how they viewed themselves.

Writing women like that isn’t difficult. It really isn’t. Writing women as interesting, multi-layered individuals with a rich inner life isn’t impossible, so the fact that men continue to write women with so little substance isn’t because they can’t. It’s that they won’t. And the fact that there aren’t more female-driven comedies isn’t because (sorry to bring this nonsense up again) they aren’t funny, it’s because mostly men run the show and most of them don’t value women as anything other than wives and ‘yacht girl in bikini.’ They don’t see women as funny and interesting and smart and worthy of 90 minutes, so they don’t write for them and they don’t include them. It’s. A. Choice.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t know if I could be funny on paper. AND write an action-oriented movie that wasn’t about baseball. AND pay tribute to the mystery stories I’ve always loved. I had no idea if I could do any of those things. But I was inspired and motivated and went from there.

A few years ago, I wrote a screenplay that focused on the life of a woman who had grown up in baseball as the daughter of a player and married a player. She was full of life and sexuality and confidence. In the early part of her life, she was challenged by her father’s strident views and rebelled. I submitted it to the Francis Ford Coppola-created Zoetrope website, where readers were allowed to comment on scripts. One man sent me a message I’ll never forget. Of the heroine, he wrote, “She’s obviously a slut.” I stopped submitting my work there. Subjecting myself to a guy like that didn’t help me as a person or writer. But I remember that now as I pursue telling more women’s stories. I refused to allow the word “slut” or “bitch” (though I understand the use in things like, oh, an amazingly timely website!) or any of the words we use for women and don’t blink an eye about.

In Honey Pot, I wanted to elevate the female experience, the female language. I wanted to write a fun, smartly entertaining story that women could love. I want them to see other women rooting each other on, and working as a team. I want to see myself, having fun, and figuring out how to save the day.

It doesn’t feel groundbreaking. But when I look at women in comedic films, I realize that funny women doing fun, interesting things is still a work in progress. So, let’s keep making progress. We’ve been left out of the fun long enough. I believe Catherine agreed.

Jessica Quiroli is a minor league baseball writer for Baseball Prospectus and the creator of Heels on the Field: A MiLB Blog. She’s also written extensively about domestic violence in baseball. She’s a DV survivor. You can follow her on Twitter @heelsonthefield.