Female Superheroes – Page 2

‘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 Over the objections of her guardian Giles, a stand-in for the stuffy and outdated rules about how superheroines should behave, she made friends and went on dates, and still managed to slay demons and kill monsters.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.

Top 10 Superheroines Who Deserve Their Own Movies

So few superheroines are given their own movies. I’m officially declaring that it’s high time we had more superhero movies starring women. The first in a series of posts, I’m starting with a list of my top 10 picks for super babes who deserve their own flicks.

This repost written by Amanda Rodriguez appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines. | Editor’s note: Since this article’s original posting in June 2014, solo films have been announced for Wonder Woman, Painkiller Jane, and Black Widow.

Most rational people seem to agree that we desperately need more representations of female superheroes to serve as inspiration and role models for girls and women alike. In truth, there is no shortage of superheroines in the world; we’ve got seriously acclaimed, seriously badass female characters from comic books, TV shows, and video games. Though these women tend to be hypersexualized or relegated to the role of supporting cast member for some dude, we still love them and can’t get enough of them. It still remains that so few superheroines are given their own movies. I’m officially declaring that it’s high time we had more superhero movies starring women. The first in a series of posts, I’m starting with a list of my top 10 picks for super babes who deserve their own flicks.

These are the superheroines I’d choose to get a movie if I ran Hollywood:

1. Batwoman

Not to be confused with Batgirl, the DC character Batwoman is the highest profile lesbian character in comic book history. A wealthy military brat who was expelled from West Point Academy due to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Batwoman is a defiant, tattooed socialite by day and a crime asskicker by night. With compelling, topical social themes (particularly with regard to queer culture), amazing action sequences and a lush, lurid and darkly magical underbelly of Gotham that we never saw with Batman, Batwoman has so much to offer audiences.

2. Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman is practically a goddess; she’s an Amazon princess with superhuman strength and agility raised only among women on the concealed Paradise Island. With her superior physical prowess and training, she constantly saves the day and her love interest, Steve Trevor. Not only that, but she also has cool gadgets like her invisible plane, Lasso of Truth, and her bullet deflecting bracelets (Wolverine’s adamantium bones ain’t got nothing on Wonder Woman’s gauntlets). The world has been clamoring for and drumming up rumors of a Wonder Woman movie for at least a decade. She’s as steeped in history as Superman, as iconic as Batman, as patriotic as Captain America, as strong as Hulk and way sexier than Ironman, and yet Superman, Batman, and Hulk have all had their own movie series AND their own series’ reboots while the rights to Wonder Woman languish on the shelf. Hell, the 70s were more progressive than today because they recognized the need and market for female superheroes when they created the beloved Wonder Woman TV series starring Lynda Carter that ran for four years. Give the woman a movie already, damn it!

3. The Bionic Woman

Speaking of the 70s and their penchant for female-driven TV shows, Jaime Sommers, aka The Bionic Woman, first had her own TV series in 1976, which was then rebooted in 2007 as Bionic Woman. After an accident nearly kills her, Jaime is retrofitted with a bionic ear, arm, and legs, giving her superhuman strength and speed in those limbs as well as acute hearing that she uses in her secret agenting. Though Jaime Sommers was imagined as a spin-off to the male-driven series The Six Million Dollar Man, she was successful in her own right and expanded the horizons of little girls in the 70s. I want Jaime to get a real movie, not just some piddly made-for-TV deal. My only requirement for said movie is that it keep the super sweet 70s sound effects for when she uses her bionic powers.

4. Samus Aran from Metroid

Samus Aran is a space bounty hunter who destroys evil Metroids in the Nintendo video game (you guessed it) Metroid. Because of Samus’ androgynous power suit, game players assumed she was a man until the big reveal at the end of the original 1986 game when she takes off her helmet. Gamers loved it. Not only that, but Metroid was and continues to be one of Nintendo’s most lucrative and popular game series, such that the latest installment of the game (Metroid: Other M) came out as recently as 2010. With ever-expanding plotlines and character development, Samus has proven that she is compelling enough to carry a series for over two and a half decades. Instead of making another crappy Resident Evil movie, I say we give Samus a chance.

5. Runaways

Runaways is a comic book series that chronicles the adventures of a group of minors who discover that their parents are supervillains. Not wanting to go down the evil paths of their parents, the kids make a break for it. Now, both boys and girls are part of the gang, but there are more girls than boys, and the women are nuanced, funny and smart. The de facto leader of the rag-tag group is Nico, a goth Japanese-American witch (um…how cool is that??). Then there’s Gertrude who doesn’t have any powers (unless you count her telepathic link to her female raptor), but she’s tough, smart, confident and is a fat-positive representation of a nontraditional female comic book body type. Next, little Molly is a scrapper and a mutant with superhuman strength and great hats who kicks the shit out of Wolverine. Finally, we’ve got the alien Karolina with powers of light and flight who explores her sexuality, realizing she’s a lesbian. Karolina ends up falling in love with the shapeshifting Skrull, Xavin, and the storyline explores transgender themes. Joss Whedon himself was involved for a time in the series, so you know it’s full of humor, darkness, and deep connections to the character. There’s so much WIN in Runaways that it’s a crime they haven’t made a movie out of it yet.

6. She-Ra: Princess of Power

She-Ra is the twin sister (and spin-off) of He-Man. Possessing incredible strength, a healing touch, an ability to communicate with animals, and a power sword that transforms into anything she wants, She-Ra is, frankly, the shit. Ever since I was a bitty thing, I always loved She-Ra, and I’d contend that with her organizing of a 99.9% female force to fight the evil Horde, She-Ra and her powerful lady friends are busting up the patriarchy. Though 1985 saw the feature length animated film introducing She-Ra’s origin story through the eyes of her brother in The Secret of the Sword, it’s time for She-Ra to have her own live action film. I mean, He-Man got his chance on the big screen with Masters of the Universe, starring Dolph Lundgren. Though I love Lundren’s mush-mouth rendition of the most powerful man in the universe, it’s universally regarded as a steaming pile of Cringer crap. I’m sure She-Ra can easily top reviews like that, especially with her women-powered “Great Rebellion.”

7. Storm

Storm, aka Ororo Munroe, is one of the most powerful mutants in the X-Men franchise. She is intelligent, well-respected, and a leader among her mutant peers and teammates. Storm also flies and controls the fucking weather. Does it get more badass than that? Storm was the very first prominent Black female in either DC or Marvel, and the fanbase for this strong Black woman grows all the time. Though the X-Men film series sprung for the acclaimed Halle Berry to play Storm, her character is habitually underutilized and poorly developed. Enough! Let’s get Lupita Nyong’o to play Storm in her origin story, chronicling her thievery in Cairo, her stint as a worshiped goddess when her powers first emerged, and her eventual induction into the X-Men. That, friends, is an epic tale.

8. Xena: Warrior Princess

Xena: Warrior Princess is a TV series that ran for six years about a couple of women traveling and fighting their way across the world, their stories weaving in and out of ancient Western mythology. Xena herself is a complex character, full of strength and skill in combat, while battling her own past and demons. Her companion Gabriel, though also quite skilled at martial arts, is the gentler of the two, always advocating compassion and reason. Together, the pair formed a powerful duo with pronounced lesbionic undertones that has appealed to queer audiences for nearly 20 years. I suspect the statuesque Lucy Lawless could even be convinced to reprise her role as this fierce female warrior who stood up to gods and men alike.

9. Black Widow

Black Widow, aka Natalia Alianovna “Natasha” Romanova, began as a Russian spy. With impressive martial arts abilities and wily womanly charms, Black Widow is renowned as one of the deadliest assassins in the Marvel universe. In an attempt to redeem her past, Black Widow joins the S.H.I.E.L.D agency and the Avengers, adding her considerable skills (that she has cultivated without the aid of magical abilities) to the team. Though I’m not, personally, the biggest fan of Black Widow, I’m impressed by her universal appeal. She’s appeared in a handful of comic book movie adaptations, most notably The Avengers, and people go ga-ga for her. Even those who care little for the rallying cry for greater female on-screen representation and even less for feminism are all about Black Widow starring in her own film. Hell, she even has a remarkably life-like action figure…proof positive that this gal has made it to the big-time.

10. Codex from The Guild

The Guild is a web series with short episodes that focuses on Codex, aka Cyd Sherman, an introvert with an addiction to massive multi-player online roleplaying games (MMORPG). In her online guild, Cyd is the powerful priestess Codex. Reality and her online personae collide when members of the guild begin to meet in real life. This is a fun and quirky web series written and created by its female star, the talented Felicia Day. Not all superheroines need to have superpowers and save the day. In fact, some superheroines just have to give it all they’ve got to make it through the day. With powers of humor and authenticity, Codex would make a welcome addition to the superhero film family.

Honorable Mention

1. Painkiller Jane

Queer Painkiller Jane has rapid healing powers like those of Wolverine, but she tends to be far grittier and darker, even facing off against the Terminator in a particularly bloody installment. She briefly had her own craptastic television series starring Kristanna Loken before it was wisely canceled.

2. Rogue

From the X-Men, Rogue is the complicated and compelling daughter of Mystique with vampire-like powers that make her nearly invulnerable but also render her unable to touch any other living creature.

3. Batgirl

Batgirl has had many permutations throughout the ages, beginning as a sidekick to Batman and Robin in comics, TV as well as film and ending with several different versions of her own comic series, including her incarnation as Oracle, the paraplegic command center for the Birds of Prey comic and disappointing TV series.

4. Power Girl

Power Girl is another version of Supergirl who, therefore, has the same powers as Superman. She is a leader among other superheroes, a formidable foe, and renowned for being “fresh and fun.”

5. Psylocke

It might seem ridiculous that so many X-Men made this list, but, damn, they have got some awesome ladies on the roster. I’m ending with Psylocke, my all-time favorite X-Men character. Elizabeth Braddock is a telepath who can use her telekinesis to create pyschic weapons. Upon her death, she inhabits the body of a Japanese ninja, eventually taking over the body completely so that she adds hardcore martial arts skills to her repertoire.

I know I missed a bunch of amazing superheroines. That’s a good thing because it means there are so many badass super babes out there that I can’t possibly name them all. Now we’ve just got to get a bunch of those ladies up on the big screen to show us reflections of ourselves and to inspire us to be more.

Sound off in the comments by listing your top female superhero picks to get their own films!

Take a look at the rest of my Top 10 installments: Top 10 Villainesses Who Deserve Their Own Movies, Top 10 Superheroine Movies That Need a Reboot, and Top 10 Superheroes Who Are Betters as Superheroines.

Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

‘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.

Rape, Consent and Race in Marvel’s ‘Jessica Jones’

Marvel’s ‘Jessica Jones’ is the latest, best example of white feminist fiction: excellent on sexism, terrible on racism.

This guest post is written by Cate Young and originally appeared at her site BattyMamzelle. It is cross-posted with permission.

Trigger warning for discussion of rape and rape culture.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones is the latest, best example of white feminist fiction: excellent on sexism, terrible on racism. There are a lot of great things about this series that speak directly to the ills that women face on a daily basis. Kilgrave, the central villain, is chillingly terrifying, specifically because the only difference between him and your garden variety abuser is his total power to enact his will. The examination of male entitlement in ways both large and small (by contrasting Kilgrave and Simpson for example) are excellent and poignant. But as I watched the 13 episode first season, I was struck by how callously black people’s lives were treated on the show, rendered into convenient plot devices in service of the white female protagonist’s character development. As a black woman viewing the show, it was easy to see that the active pursuit of liberation from abuse was not a struggle that this show believes includes me (an ongoing struggle for Marvel). Ironically, the best parts of the show are its treatment with its villain, while the worst are its treatments with its female anti-heroine.

While I do have several critiques of the show, there were a number of things that I thought were handled exceptionally well. Firstly, this is a show driven by women about the fears and terrors that women must navigate in the world shrunk down to a micro-level, enabling us an intimate look at the various levels of abuse women routinely endure. The contrast between Kilgrave and Simpson is genius, as it helps demonstrate the full scale of abuse that men knowingly and unknowingly enact on the women around them. The two men are flip-sides of the same coin. While Kilgrave simply takes what he feels he is entitled to by means of his powers of enhanced persuasion, Simpson initially takes a less forceful but no less sinister approach, exemplified in his treatment of Trish after he realizes that Kilgrave has compelled him to murder her. As Stephanie Yang writes in a Bitch Magazine review:

The warning signs are there early on. Under Kilgrave’s control, Simpson assaults Trish inside her own apartment. Once Kilgrave’s control wears off, he’s wracked with guilt and comes back to apologize. The problem is that Trish doesn’t want Simpson’s apology; she wants him to just leave. Trish doesn’t want to be reminded that she was attacked in her own home, or feel trapped by her own high-end security system while her attacker lingers outside. But Simpson is insistent, sitting in her hallway and talking to her through the intercom. Simpson makes his apology about his needs and his absolution, not about Trish’s needs, safety or mental health. It’s entirely understandable, but it’s still wrong.

Simpson and Kilgrave certainly have different motivation for their destructive actions. But as Jessica points out, intent doesn’t matter. Their actions and consequences are what matter. That’s an important distinction that needs to be made at a time when courts and media alike dismiss many real-life cases of abuse because the abuser “couldn’t know” what they were doing was wrong. Violence is a symptom of a culture that indulges bad behavior as being inherently and unavoidably part of masculinity, or even a romantic expression of desire and protectiveness.

I would go a step further and name Simpson’s insistent apologies to Trish as outright abusive on their face, specifically because they prioritize his need for absolution over her need to heal. Trish is the victim in the situation, and yet Simpson manages to find a way to center himself in the story of this trauma. As with Kilgrave and Jessica, Simpson’s abuse is rooted not in a cartoonish hatred of women as we are often led to believe, but rather in prioritizing his own will and desires over Trish’s.

The show’s exploration of rape and consent is also spot-on. Through interaction with Kilgrave’s superhuman abilities, Jessica Jones is able to make plain text of the subtext of rape culture. In one episode, Jessica makes plain that what Kilgrave did to her was rape. She says the word and invokes it over and over, explaining to him that by revoking her ability to consent, he violated her in a profound way that he can never make up for, nullifying any “kind treatment” during that time. For Jessica (and many other victims of sexual abuse) she was raped not only when Kilgrave forced sexual consent by rendering her suggestible, but also by forcing her to display trust and affection for him against her will. We see this idea replicated when Hope demands that she be allowed to abort Kilgrave’s fetus, because “every moment it’s in me is like he’s raping me all over again.”

The other great thing about Jessica Jones is that it is a show ostensibly about rape, that never depicts a rape. It can be argued that the entire engine of the show is powered by the actions of a serial rapist with many, many victims in his wake, and yet the show never feels the need to indulge in crude depictions of trauma to demonstrate how horrifying rape is. Instead, we spend extensive time examining the fallout; following Jessica and Hope as they try to cope with being violated on such a profound level, grapple with their own feelings of guilt and culpability and make it to the other side with their faculties intact. One of the things that made Kilgrave so scary in the initial episodes was the way the memory of him haunted Jessica, always lingering at the edge of her thoughts, out of sight, but never out of mind. It masterfully depicted the way that rape trauma is a burden that doesn’t go away once the act itself is over. In a year that’s been replete with depictions of rape in television, it was refreshing to see a show tackle the true emotional weight of sexual assault without using the violation itself to titillate.

On the other hand, the treatment of people of colour in Jessica Jones is often anti-intersectional and openly anti-black. Vulture‘s year end “Best of Television” list cites the show as demonstrating “a racially diverse cast, heavy on women,” a construction that belies that for many people, diversity means “add black men and stir.” To me, it is borderline disrespectful to call the show racially diverse when the only significant, named woman of colour character is dead before the narrative begins and never speaks a word, while the black male characters are all subjected to incredible violence in service of the white female protagonist. This force frames feminist representation as the representation of white women and yet again, erases women of colour from our popular narratives.

With Reva’s character, this is especially glaring. Her death at Jessica’s hands is essentially the inciting incident of the story; the act that allows Jessica to free herself from Kilgrave’s control. Reva is fridged to motivate Jessica’s escape and eventual confrontation with Kilgrave. As Shaadi Devereaux writes in Model View Culture:

[…] One has to wonder what metaphor is offered, that she has to kill a Black woman in order to finally obtain that freedom. She must literally stop Reva Connors’ heart with a single blow in order to experience her moment of awakening, enabling her to walk away from a cis-heterosexual white male abuser. It brings to mind how white women liberate themselves from unpaid domestic labor by exploiting Black/Latina/Indigenous women, often heal their own sexual trauma by performing activism that harms WoC, and how the white women’s dollar still compares to that of WoC. Like Jessica’s liberation is only possible through the violence against Reva, we see sharp parallels with how liberatory white womanhood often interplays with the lives of WoC. Were the writers consciously aware of these parallels, or was it just the same script playing out in their heads?

It’s disappointing that the show, knowingly or not, replicates the same cycles of abuse that routinely play out within the feminist movement, by positioning violence against black women as the justified cost of white women’s liberation. Jessica eventually enacts the same cycle of abuse against Luke Cage, her main love interest. Shaadi notes:

After killing Reva, Jessica goes on to stalk Reva’s husband, Luke Cage, in a compulsive and boundary-violating cycle of guilt. She finally sleeps with him…without disclosing how she was implicated in Reva’s death. She both withholds and actively obstructs him from finding out information about his own life, so that she can continue to get what she needs intimately from him. In dealing with her own demons, Jessica violates an invulnerable Black man and lays him a blow that no other character in their universe has the power to. Was this another nod to a complex understanding of gender, race and power, or another trope surfacing in insidious ways?

The issue here is that the show does not give any indication as to whether this is commentary or trope, so we are forced to assume the latter, interpreting the text as presented to us. Jessica makes a habit of using the black men around her, in service to her own ends treating them as interchangeable and disposable, a glaring and problematic oversight given the current political climate, and the historical context of black men being subjected to undue violence for the protection of white women. Jessica’s pursuit of Luke despite her knowledge of her involvement in what we are led to believe in the most painful event of his life replicates the same disregard for his feelings that we saw Simpson demonstrate with Trish. To Jessica, her own need to be in Luke’s orbit because of her overwhelming guilt and self-loathing, supersede his right to be fully informed about the circumstances of his wife’s death, and as Tom and Lorenzo astutely write in their review:

[…] Like it or not, she has the capacity to be a bit hypocritical about Kilgrave’s abilities choosing to think that there’s actually a right way to take people’s control away from them.

And Jessica very literally takes Luke’s control away by not disclosing her involvement in Reva’s death. She takes away his ability to choose not to be with the person who murdered his wife. Later, his choice to forgive is later revoked by Kilgrave, as he is forced to reconcile with her under Kilgrave’s control. Again, the invulnerable black man’s pain is not respected, but rather toyed with and manipulated by the narrative to serve the needs of white characters. As Shaadi again points out, the pattern becomes more uncomfortable and glaring as the series continues:

When her neighbor shares how Black people are more vulnerable to others’ perceptions, it invokes not sympathy but an idea of how she can use it for her own ends. The result is several scenes where she pushes Black men into people to create a scene of chaos, using the opportunity to go unseen as she breaks the law. Instead of challenging oppressive systems directly, she uses them to get what she wants and to center her own survival. We see that she has some guilt about it, but sis willing to do it for her survival and the survival of other white characters.

These scenes demonstrate that as people marginalized along a spectrum, we often leverage violence against others for our own survival, sometimes with full awareness. But is awareness enough? Or as long as power remains unchallenged, will we always be lured by self-priority, the hierarchy of own safety and access? Our hero is willing to take on the mindcontrol of Kilgrave, but not those dangers most affecting the two most important men in her life – both Black. She intimately understands that no one will believe her, but capitalizes on the hierarchy of who has enough humanity to be believed – against other marginalized identities. She can finally walk away from the mind of her abuser, but the gravitational pull of racism is still too much.

As a black woman, I’m left to wonder, is Jessica worse than your garden variety racist for acknowledging systems of oppression only to exploit them? And on a real world level, why is this behaviour heralded by viewers as feminist when it actively takes advantage of people that the feminist movement is meant to protect?

My last issue is less a problem with this show specifically and more a general trope in fiction. I expect that very little can be done about this considering the source material, but truly abhor narratives in which a black person’s “power” is that they cannot feel pain or be hurt. It is a direct callback to very pervasive superhumanization bias and stereotypes that still exist and are perpetuated today. As I have written before about this characterization, it feeds into the idea that violence against black people is not traumatic or dangerous as they can withstand the pain, and that this ability positions them as protectors of white characters who often also do them harm. It explains why young black boys are coded by white people as much older than they are, or why they think black people feel less pain. With Luke, we see this reflected in Luke’s fight scenes as person after person escalates the violence against him to no effect. He is easily able to trounce several men at once. Earlier, we also see him take a circle saw to his abdomen in order to demonstrate his power to Jessica. Later still, we see doctors poke and prod him with needles and other penetrating devices ostensibly to save him, but the scenes only reinforce what we have already been told; nothing can hurt him, and so violence against him is justified.

In the end, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the show. The way Jessica Jones deals with consent resonated with me on a deep level, but it also made me question why the show didn’t identify with me as a black woman, when I so easily identified with it. Hopefully in the next season we will see a more intersectional approach to the struggles that women face that treats its black characters with the same care that it affords the white women in the cast.

Cate Young is a Trinidadian freelance writer and photographer, and author of BattyMamzelle, a feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music, and critical commentary on media representation. Cate has a BA in Photojournalism from Boston University and is currently pursuing her MA in Mass Communications so that she can more effectively examine the symbolic annihilation of women of colour in the media and deliver the critical feminist smack down. Follow her on twitter at @BattyMamzelle.

‘Age of Ultron’s Black Widow Blunders

‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ succeeds in all the places you’d expect it to fail, but while Joss Whedon was tiptoeing around all the expected pitfalls of a major franchise sequel, he stumbled over a cliff when it came to the one character I would have most trusted him to get right: Scarlet Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, or Black Widow.

Scarlet Johansson as Black Widow in 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' — Scarlet Johansson as Black Widow in *Avengers: Age of Ultron*

I liked Avengers: Age of Ultron. A lot. What follows is going to read like a very negative review. If I could selectively switch off my feminism, I could write you the most thumbs-uppiest of glowing reviews for Age of Ultron. But I cannot, and this is why my dad would say “it’s hard to be Robin.” But if you’re a regular Bitch Flicks reader, it is also probably hard to be you (that’s sort of why we exist). And you also will probably walk away from this movie with some serious reservations.

Age of Ultron succeeds in all the places you’d expect it to fail: the new characters are compelling; the amped-up battle sequences manage to be as coherent as they are thrilling; and for a movie with 17 actors listed on its poster, it somehow manages to not feel that overstuffed. But while Joss Whedon was tiptoeing around all the expected pitfalls of a major franchise sequel, he stumbled over a cliff when it came to the one character I would have most trusted him to get right: Scarlet Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, or Black Widow.

Spoilers from here on out, friends.

When Black Widow was introduced in Iron Man 2 (a sequel which DID fail in all the predictable ways), her character was so fully entrenched in the male gaze it was kind of gross. We’re first introduced to her cover identity, Natalie Rushman: a submissive secretary who modeled in Japan and suggestively asks, “is that dirty enough for you” after leaning over to present her boss Tony Stark with a martini. But what’s even hotter Natalie Rushman? Natasha Romanoff pretending to be meek and accommodating while in fact being a badass superspy who can take out fifteen guys, hack computers, and save the day without mussing her flowing red curls (one of the worst wigs in the history of cinema, but that’s just a personal bugaboo of mine). This kind of sarcastic-quotation-marks “strong female character” is a dime a dozen in action movies and not someone I’d beg to see a standalone movie about.

Black Widow beating people up in a terrible wig in 'Iron Man 2' — Black Widow beating people up in a terrible wig in *Iron Man 2*

But then came The Avengers, where Black Widow was so much more than the Fighting Fucktoy. She was still a sexy badass, but she also got to be wickedly clever, dryly funny, warm and loyal to her friends, and in what was probably the biggest revelation for a Strong Female Character: fearful of scary things. This more solid characterization carried over to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where we continued to see Natasha’s rare moments of emotional vulnerability alongside her intellectual and physical competence.

In 'Avengers' and 'Captain America 2', Black Widow was more than eye candy — In *Avengers* and *Captain America 2*, Black Widow was more than eye candy

Black Widow had become a character I loved. And I would have given a lot of credit for that to Joss Whedon. But then he went and did this all this to her.

AoU‘s first sin against Natasha is awkwardly shoehorning her into a romantic subplot with Bruce Banner, of all people. Maybe I’d be less disgruntled about Natasha in lurve if the pairing worked better for me? But it felt pretty out of left field, and lacking in chemistry. Like they crossed off the crossed off the characters who already had love interests and flipped a coin to settle on Bruce.

Now, one of the benefits of being a well-rounded character should be the chance for a love interest. The rest of the core six all have their sweeties! But note how all of them had outside characters as their love interest. Usually our male Avengers have their own movie or movies to make space for that character, but Hawkeye’s previously-unseen wife was given screen time in Age of Ultron. It is unthinkable for Natasha to have a similar surprise husband, because “doting pregnant wife” is a complete female character as far as Hollywood is concerned. A side character male love interest is much harder for Hollywood to handle, because they see “man” and think “center of the story.”

Natasha is responsible for de-Hulking Bruce with a "lullaby" — Natasha is responsible for de-Hulking Bruce with a “lullaby”

So Natasha had to be connected to another main character, and it happened to be Bruce, and even if that didn’t feel as random to you as it did to me, it brings about some problems. First, I wasn’t crazy about Natasha having the role of soothing Bruce out of Hulk form with their”lullaby” ritual to begin with, but adding romantic overtones makes it even more skeevy. There are unavoidable allusions to domestic violence inherent to the Hulk. Having his romantic partner hold the responsibility for talking him down from his rage state, and portraying this as part of their bond, underscores this in an unpleasant way.

Scarlet Witch induces a vision of Black Widow's past — Scarlet Witch induces a vision of Black Widow’s past

Worse, Natasha’s arc in Age of Ultron got completely wrapped up in her feelings for Banner, even though we finally—finally! In her fourth appearance in a Marvel movie—got to see Natasha’s backstory, her childhood training/brainwashing into superspyness by the sinister Red Room. (Granted, we see it in a dream-like flashback that’s only long enough for you to go, “Hey, is that Julie Delpy?”).

Natasha’s history gets rolled over into her romantic subplot in the most bizarre, uncomfortable—let’s just say worst—scene in the film. Bruce is giving Natasha the speech about how she could have no future with him, gesturing around to the child’s room they are in. She tearfully reveals that she can’t have children either, because she was sterilized as part of her “graduation” from the Red Room. She speculates the forced sterilization was to avoid problems, attachments, and that “It made everything easier, even killing.” And then she calls herself a monster.

RECORD SCRATCH. Wait, a woman who can’t get pregnant is A MONSTER? On a level comparable to a dude who turns into an actual unstoppable force of destruction we had just seen level a city? What… I just… what? What!!!!????? The idea that anyone—*cough* Joss Whedon *cough*—would think infertility makes a woman something less than human is extremely gross, but it’s even worse to see Natasha internalize such warped misogyny and biological essentialism.

And I haven’t even mentioned the part where Black Widow gets kidnapped by the bad guy and locked in a dungeon. That really happens. For real for real. I assume this was to accommodate Scarlett Johansson’s pregnancy during filming, but there are plenty of ways to write her out of the story for a little while without making her a damsel in distress (send her on a side mission, any side mission, DON’T LOCK BLACK WIDOW IN A DUNGEON). And thinking about how Johansson was pregnant at the time somehow manages to make that horrible sterilization confession scene even more unpleasant.

Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch in 'Age of Ultron' — Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch in *Age of Ultron*

The only good news when it comes to Black Widow in Age of Ultron is that she’s no longer saddled with being the Smurfette, as Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch provides us with a Sassette Smurf of sorts. Cobie Smulders is also back as Maria Hill, but she doesn’t have much to do. Claudia Kim plays Dr. Helen Cho, who does things that are important for the plot but gets less character development than Hawkeye’s wife, who might as well be listed in the credits as “Hawkeye’s wife.” But even though Natasha isn’t the only woman in Age of Ultron, she’s still the one nearest and dearest to the audience, and it is heartbreaking to see her utilized so poorly.

Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh who has never been pregnant. Is she, too, a monster!?

Top 10 Superheroes Who Are Better As Superheroines

There are soooo many superheroes out there. These gents get top billing in comics, movies, and TV shows while their superheroine counterparts tend to get the shaft, existing in unwarranted obscurity or playing second fiddle to a male lead. Do these super-dudes deserve all this limelight? Is there something inherently male about them that makes them special, or would some of these superheroes be just as good, if not better off, as women?

Women versions of Avengers superheroes and villains — What if women had starred in *The Avengers*?

Written by Amanda Rodriguez.

There are soooo many superheroes out there. These gents get top billing in comics, movies, and TV shows while their superheroine counterparts tend to get the shaft, existing in unwarranted obscurity or playing second fiddle to a male lead. Do these super-dudes deserve all this limelight? Is there something inherently male about them that makes them special, or would some of these superheroes be just as good, if not better off, as women? Many superheroes have been re-imagined as superheroines (Batwoman, Supergirl, Spidergirl, etc.), and some of them should be re-cast as superheroines. Here’s my Top 10 list of super-dudes who are or should be super-ladies.

1. Thor from The Avengers

Re-casting Thor as a woman is a done deal. Marvel has taken one of its oldest and most popular heroes who’s appeared in a slew of films and announced that henceforth Thor will be a female god. She won’t exist alongside the original Thor, as so many female re-imaginings of superheroes do (even some on this list), but, instead she will supplant her unworthy predecessor, taking his place as God of Thunder in Asgard, wielding his magic hammer and his titan strength.

Thor comic panel — Thor as a woman in comic form

Despite my love of the Norse mythology from which the comic hero is derived, I’ve never much cared for Thor. He often struck me as a dumb, self-important brute of a man. Now, though, I’m curious to see how Marvel handles the transition (though I’d love if Thor was trans*, pun not intended), and I’m excited to see how a female all-powerful god handles herself.

2. Venus from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Venus: the "aquamarine" turtle — Venus: the “aquamarine” turtle

Venus de Milo is a somewhat obscure addition to the TMNT canon of humanoid, intelligent mutated turtles. Unlike the male turtles, she’s named after a work of art rather than an artist, and I’m definitely reading some lack of female subjectivity into that choice. In the short-lived live action series Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation, Venus reunites with her brothers, and while she doesn’t know martial arts like her brothers, she uses magic instead.

While it’s pretty cool that this brief and obscure series added a female turtle, it begs the question, “Why wasn’t one of the four original turtles a girl?” While apparently comic writers were mandated to not include a female turtle, for this reviewer who was once so into the Turtles that she drew their portraits and hung them over her bed, there’s really no satisfying answer. Now that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have made another comeback and are back on the big screen, it’s time to bring back Venus…only please make sure she can kick some ass with a weapon, too, and not just float around some weird balls David-Bowie Labyrinth-style.

3. Spawn

Um...yes to a badass Lady Spawn — Um…yes to a badass Lady Spawn

Todd McFarlane’s popular comic Spawn features Al Simmons, a military man of questionable morals, who dies and is brought back as a supremely powerful demonic figure to collect souls for hell. Like all good anti-heroes, Spawn refuses to play nice for heaven or hell. The comic is lush, dark, and gritty, featuring a Black hero. Spawn was turned into a moderately successful cartoon series and a craptastic film series.

Though the comics have briefly featured women having or taking over Spawn’s powers and the dreaded angel Angela has had her own miniseries, a female Spawn has never been given a real chance as a lead. We also need more superheroines of color, and since the original Spawn is a Black man, there’s no reason why a female version couldn’t also be Black. Frankly, I’d love to see a strong, dark, morally complex woman deal with being a putrefying corpse reanimated to perform an eternal mission in which she doesn’t believe. Now that’s a rich role that a woman could really dig into.

4. The Question from 52

The original DC comic book version of The Question is the male Vic Sage. Though The Question doesn’t have any super powers to speak of, he wears a faceless mask that obscures his features. In the series 52, a terminally ill Vic trains Renee Montoya, a lesbian ex-Gotham City cop and on-and-off love interest of Batwoman, to be his replacement. Thus, The Question was born anew.

The Question sometimes fights alongside her ex-lover Batwoman — The Question fights alongside her ex-lover Batwoman

I love Renee Montoya because she’s an exceedingly rare Latina superheroine, she’s also an exceedingly rare lesbian superheroine, she doesn’t have any superpowers or a trust fund but still manages to fight the good fight, and she questions everything. She’s an interesting, emotionally messed up character who figures out answers for herself, lives by her own moral compass, and every once in a while, gets to save the girl (even if that girl is a totally hardcore Batwoman). Dear Montoya, you are so much win.

5. She-Hulk

Jennifer Walters is the cousin of rogue scientist Bruce Banner a.k.a the Hulk. After a blood transfusion from him, She-Hulk is born. A star lawyer who defends the rights of the disenfranchised and an Avenger, She-Hulk also maintains much of her personality when she transforms into her green-skinned form. Often considered the strongest woman in the Marvel universe, She-Hulk is incredibly intelligent and skilled at combat. Despite (or perhaps because of) her extremely tall, muscled, green body, She-Hulk is a huge sex symbol in the comics industry.

Like her male counterpart the Hulk, She-Hulk also contends with an antihero version of her powers in the form of Red She-Hulk (Banner love interest Betty Ross who’s had a couple of cameos over the years). Both of these women are differing, but intriguing representations and applications of female power and psychology, often becoming more confident and/or aggressive in their Hulk-ified bodies, choosing when to transform, and internalizing positive or negative feelings of self-worth based on their bodies. Now if we can just get one or both of these badass babes a movie…

6. Captain Marvel

Though Carol Danvers has been known by many different names over her 46 years in comics (Ms. Marvel, Binary, and Warbird), I like her best as Captain Marvel. Though Danvers derives her latest title directly from the male Captain Marvel, the name itself has a long history with both men and women indiscriminately donning it over time. I also prefer the current Captain Marvel because she’s now penned by female comic writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, and her costume has been altered to be far less revealing and far more practical than Danvers ever enjoyed before.

Danvers has the powers of the Captain Marvel hero (and, at times, antihero) line with superhuman strength, endurance, speed, and flight. Over the years, she’s also developed abilities of her own, including light speed travel, shooting energy beams from her hands, and absorption of energy to boost her own powers. Along with that, she also has combat, flight, as well as tactical and strategic skills from her air force days. As an Avenger and a member of Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s a possibility that she’ll appear in one or both of those franchises. Lately, rumors also speculate that Katee Sackhoff will aptly play the title role in a Captain Marvel an upcoming film. Considering studios’ extreme and groundless resistance to making a woman-fronted superhero flick, it’s doubtful, but a girl can dream.

7. Darth Talon

Darth Talon: so...much...badassery — Darth Talon: so…much…badassery

My first encounter with Darth Talon of the Star Wars universe was at Dragon-con in Atlanta (yes, I’m that nerdy) where a very dedicated woman cosplayed the hell out of that dark side Twi’lek, and I lost my shit at Talon’s sheer awesomeness. With her red skin, Sith tattoos, yellow eyes, and dedication to the dark side, Darth Talon is basically a female version of Darth Maul, the primary antagonist in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.

Though Darth Talon is the villainess female equivalent of a villain (and not a superheroine at all really), she deserves a spot on this list because she has the potential to be an iconic female version of a male figure. With her strength, cunning, and loyalty to the dark side, I’ve got my fingers crossed that she’s one of the characters we’ll be seeing in the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII.

8. Black Panther

The male Black Panther (T’Challa) was the first ever Black superhero to hit mainstream comics. The lover and sometime husband of X-Men‘s Storm, Black Panther is the chief of a powerful nation in Africa known as Wakanda. To protect his people and lands from inevitable exploitation for their valuable natural resources, Black Panther hides his country from the outside world. He is a much needed Black African hero who, in a sense, rewrites the colonial history of the African continent by guarding his country from very real greed and imperialistic forces. When T’Challa nearly dies and loses his powers, his sister Shuri takes on the Black Panther mantle.

Like her brother, Shuri leads her country and possesses superhuman strength and agility along with a protective suit constructed from Wakanda’s precious, coveted mineral vibranium. Being the Black Panter, imbued with such great power and responsibility, changes Shuri. She learns the value of humility and self-sacrifice while becoming a respected diplomat and a fierce leader who makes it abundantly clear that her country is not to be fucked with. We need more representation for badass Black superheroines like Black Panther who can help us re-imagine and therefore empower a continent that has been brutally and tirelessly exploited for hundreds of years.

9. Hellgirl

A fan rendering of a Hellgirl action figure

There is no Hellgirl female version of Hellboy, the crusty but loveable demon beautifully rendered by creator Mike Mignola. There’s nothing inherently gendered about Hellboy’s red tail, sawed off horns, giant stone fist, and propensity for cigars. There’s nothing inherently male about his dark origins and his desire to overcome them to do good in the world.

In fact, I’d argue that a physically and emotionally rough-around-the-edges superheroine is just what we need. Enough of these drawings of women with stereotypically unrealistic bodies and their giant, barely covered breasts. Give us a superheroine who has to shave her horns instead of her legs, a woman who, like Hellboy, hides a gentle heart behind a jagged exterior, who struggles with depression and low self-worth but still manages to save the world.

10. Link from The Legend of Zelda

Zelda as Sheik Photo Realistic — Princess Zelda disguised as Sheik

Lastly and dearest to my heart, we’ve got the hero of Hyrule, Link, who is already pretty androgynous with his gender neutral name, dress-like tunic, long blonde hair, lithe build, and elven ears. He could easily be re-cast as a female character, if not removed completely, giving Zelda the agency to save Hyrule. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Link, but is there a reason Zelda even needs him to save the day in a video game that’s named after her?

Zelda, her alter ego Sheik, and her hero Link

Zelda, herself, is wise, magical, and skilled in combat. She even cross-dresses as Sheik, a figure who guides Link to important knowledge he needs to complete his quest. Why can’t Zelda be the Heroine of Time, supplanting Link as her savior? And while we’re at it, why the hell haven’t we had a movie version of The Legend of Zelda yet? Other than that they’d probably butcher it, I can’t think of a single good reason.

Men dressed up as female superheroes in Big Bang Theory — Men dressed up as female superheroes in *Big Bang Theory*

Though some argue the valid perspective that turning existing male superheroes into superheroines is lazy or doesn’t give female heroes their own identities, I mostly think that turning popular iconic male figures into women shows that gender isn’t that important when it comes to being powerful, capable, and a force for good in the world. In a time when female representation is often limited to sexual objectification, re-presenting male heroes as heroines in particular shows young girls that gender roles are arbitrary and that women can accomplish the same goals and be just as amazing as men. We need that right now.

Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. Her short story “The Woman Who Fell in Love with a Mermaid” was published in Germ Magazine. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

Top 10 Superheroine Movies That Need a Reboot

We all know that male superheroes get reboots for their (often shitty) movies over and over and over again. There are an ever-increasing number of Batman, Superman, and Hulk movies, not to mention a growing franchise of Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor flicks. With this mentality of quantity over quality, there’s no excuse for denying reboots to some of my favorite female superheroines and their considerably fewer films. Some of the movies that made my top 10 list admittedly sucked, and their heroines deserve a second chance to shine on the big screen. Some of the movies, however, were, are and ever shall be totally awesome, and I just want a do-over to enhance the awesome.

Written by Amanda Rodriguez.

We all know that male superheroes get reboots for their (often shitty) movies over and over and over again. There are an ever-increasing number of Batman, Superman, and Hulk movies, not to mention a growing franchise of Iron Man, Captain America and Thor flicks. With this mentality of quantity over quality, there’s no excuse for denying reboots to some of my favorite female superheroines and their considerably fewer films. Some of the movies that made my top 10 list admittedly sucked, and their heroines deserve a second chance to shine on the big screen. Some of the movies, however, were, are and ever shall be totally awesome, and I just want a do-over to enhance the awesome.

1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy catches a knife before cheerleading practice

When the film Buffy the Vampire Slayer came out in 1992, I loved it. At the tender age of 10, I was already a huge movie nerd, so I was delighted to see all those celebrity cameos (Kristy Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Pee-Wee Herman/Paul Reubens, Rutger Hauer, Luke Perry, David Arquette, and I still associate the Academy Award-winning Hilary Swank with her bit part in this flick as an annoying, backstabbing valley girl). I loved the cheesiness and the unexpected badassness of its cheerleading heroine, Buffy. The movie, though, doesn’t hold a candle to the quality, thematic breadth, character depth, epic scope and feminism of the subsequent TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer that aired 1997-2003.

Buffy has become one of the most iconic superheroines in our pop culture history. She has prophetic dreams and preternatural strength, agility, speed and healing along with the mantle of a dark destiny as “the chosen one” who must give her life in service to protecting the world from unseen demonic threats. A reboot could draw more from the material of the TV show, focusing on friendship, community and sisterhood while keeping all the action and humor that draw in crowds. Combine that with a die-hard cult fanbase, and a BtVS reboot can’t lose.

2. Supergirl

Supergirl must save the omega hedron — Supergirl must save the Omegahedron…whatever that is

The 1984 movie Supergirl, starring a young, fresh-faced Helen Slater, was another childhood favorite of mine. Even now 30 years after its release, my nostalgia-tinted view doesn’t allow me to see Supergirl as anything other than a formative superheroine movie about a woman who chooses her duty, her family, and her planet over romantic love. Though Supergirl (aka Kara) has the exact same powers as her cousin Superman (superhuman strength, flight, x-ray and heat vision, freezing breath, invulnerability and an aversion to kryptonite), Kara was so much more exciting than the Man of Steel from whom her comic incarnation was spawned.

One of the many Supergirl comic incarnations — One of the many *Supergirl* comic incarnations

Supergirl, like Superman, is an uncomplicated role model for young girls and boys. She is always brave, good, and righteous, and her moral code guides her and always triumphs in the end. I say if Superman got a series reboot, then fair is fair and Supergirl should get one, too.

3. Red Sonja

Despite Arnold's size in this poster, Red Sonja is always winning — Despite Arnold’s size in this poster, Red Sonja is the true badass here

My love of Red Sonja is downright legendary. She’s a barbarian babe and the greatest sword-wielder who ever lived. The film is full of grand, beautifully choreographed fight sequences, dramatic accents and lines that I’ll probably utter on my deathbed (“You can’t kill it; it’s a machine!“). Sonja faces off against Queen Gedren, a lesbian super villainess played by the mistress of the sword and sandal genre: Sandahl Bergman (more on her later). As a young child, I adored watching these strong, independent women face off in single combat–women who would decide the fate of the world.

Rumors of a Red Sonja reboot titillate but don't deliver — *Red Sonja* reboot rumors titillate but don’t deliver

Both based on comics, Red Sonja is part of the Conan universe. If Conan got his very own craptastic reboot of Conan the Barbarian (starring Jason Momoa of Khal Drogo fame), then it’s high time Red Sonja got hers, too. Hell, they should even make Sonja a lesbian since she’s none to fond of the gentlemen folk and just look at that Kentucky waterfall action she’s rocking. Wow, the idea of an epic lesbian swordswoman is really blowing my mind. That. We need that S.T.A.T.

4. Aeon Flux

The 2005 film Aeon Flux was generally considered a flop. Based on the animated series Aeon Flux that appeared on MTV’s Liquid Television in the 90s, the film was so loosely based on its source material that it disappointed fans and failed to engage newcomers. Animated series creator, Peter Chung, called the film version “a travesty” that made him feel “helpless, humiliated, and sad…Ms. Flux does not actually appear in the movie.”

Frankly, the movie just wasn’t weird enough. The cartoon is populated by bizarre bodies that bordered on the grotesque, trippy visuals, nonlinear narratives and complex political and philosophical musings. The animated Aeon Flux was really cool, iconic, unexpected and unpredictable. Hollywood could use an injection of surreal, nonconformist cinema. Aeon should get a second shot, one that stays truer to its eccentric cartoon.

5. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and its sequel Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life are based on the wildly popular video game series Tomb Raider. A female Indiana Jones-type adventuring archeologist, Lara Croft is an ideal heroine: brilliant, capable, inventive and athletic. Croft is proof that female-centric video games that don’t sexually exploit their heroines can be extremely successful and lucrative.

The movie, however, had a long, convoluted, boring storyline. With a Bond-style episodic approach, the film left me feeling like I hadn’t gotten to know any of the characters in a meaningful way, and even the much anticipated action sequences dragged on and on and on. I don’t want to say good-bye, though, to such a magnetic female character who draws both male and female fans. With a quality script and a judicious editor, a Lara Croft reboot could be amazing, encouraging little girls to want to be Lara Croft (not Indiana Jones) when they grow up.

6. She

1982’s She is a cult classic full of the most random-ass shit you can imagine. I was obsessed with it as a kid. Starring the arresting Sandahl Bergman, of Red Sonja and Conan the Barbarian fame, the film is probably very loosely based on the H. Rider Haggard novel She. The movie takes place in a bizarre post-apocalyptic world wherein She is a ruler of a matriarchal society. Worshiped as a goddess, She protects her people and accepts male (sexual) sacrifices. She is a warrior who goes on a journey to rescue a young woman, encountering werewolves, exploding mimes, a giant in a tutu and some green dudes who seem like they have some kind of leprosy.

Keeping the darkness and the zaniness of the original film, a reboot about a powerful, complicated, not always righteous female ruler set in a dystopian, magical world would be an exciting challenge. If I had my way, Bergman would reprise her role as She or at least have a cameo in the reboot.

7. Elektra

Though the character Elektra has a long comic book history, she first appeared as a love interest in 2003’s Daredevil. Though she died in the end of that massive pile of festering turds, she was later resurrected for her own spin-off film, Elektra, which was a box office flop. Truly, I was impressed with actress Jennifer Garner who performed the role of Elektra, mainly due to how excellent she was with the physicality of the role. She trained hard for the part and looked graceful, strong and natural in her martial arts performance and sai use, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for fat-headed Ben Affleck’s awkward, cringe-worthy fighting “skills.”

Comic Elektra and live action Jennifer Gardner

The plotline of the Elektra film was silly with a throwaway story, but I appreciate that our heroine strives to protect a young girl much like herself and presumably goes on to train this girl, bringing about a new era where women work together and aren’t pawns of a male secret group. Marvel can do better with this dark ninja assassin fighting her own demons. I vote for a do-over!

8. Sheena Queen of the Jungle

Sheena had so many super cute/cool animal pals

Another childhood favorite of mine was Sheena, starring Tanya Roberts as a female Tarzan who communicates with animals and saves her “people” and homeland from exploitation. I used to run around as a kid putting my fingertips to my forehead Sheena-style, hoping I, too, had a gift for speaking to animals (you probably know how that turned out). When I grew older, I actually became too ashamed to watch the film because it’s so painfully racist (I can’t stand that white savior trope).

The thing is, Sheena is a female icon with a lot of history behind her. In 1937, she became the first female character to have her own title. She’s had her own movie and TV series. She is self-reliant, clever, righteous and part of a unique community that includes people and animals, and she chooses her home over love. The character of Sheena speaks to women. My solution to Sheena‘s inherent racism is to make the character African and Black like the people of her community. If The Beastmaster, Sheena’s (totally sweet) animal communicating male counterpart, got his own film trilogy (in which Tanya Roberts herself co-stars) and TV show, then Sheena deserves a second shot as a new and improved Black superheroine to be a role model for the next generation of women, particularly women of color.

9. Tank Girl

Tank Girl had a pretty wacked out style — Tank Girl had a pretty wacky style

The 1995 film Tank Girl was unsuccessfully translated from its comic origins to the big screen. Despite having a series of celebrity cameos and high profile artists contribute to its soundtrack, the film, like its comic book, was a crazy conglomeration of imagery, absurdist, barely cohesive narrative and haphazard political commentary. Roger Ebert said of the film,

Whatever the faults of Tank Girl, lack of ambition is not one of them…Here is a movie that dives into the bag of filmmaking tricks and chooses all of them. Trying to re-create the multimedia effect of the comic books it’s based on, the film employs live action, animation, montages of still graphics, animatronic makeup, prosthetics, song-and-dance routines, models, fake backdrops, holography, title cards, matte drawings and computerized special effects. All I really missed were 3-D and Smell-O-Vision.

The Tank Girl comic continues its popularity — The *Tank Girl* comic continues its popularity

So Tank Girl didn’t make money. It did become a cult classic, and it was directed by a woman (Rachel Talalay), which are both wins in my book. It’s a story that revolves around a woman who doesn’t take shit from anyone. She smokes, she farts, she has tons of sex and just generally does what she wants. The anarchy of the character of Tank Girl and the defiant example she provides for women deserves another chance to show women that we don’t have to meet a feminine mold; we can call the shots and we can be as weird as we want to be…and still save the day in the end.

10. Frozen

Elsa uses her powers in Frozen — Elsa uses her powers in *Frozen*

Frozen is the highest grossing animated film of all time and the 5th highest grossing film of all time. Damn. That is some serious popularity. That is some serious proof that people are starving for quality stories about the love and relationships between girls and young women. Loosely based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale The Snow Queen, the Disney film Frozen centers around Elsa and her sister Anna, showing how their love for one another is what truly saves the day.

The power of sisters in Disney’s *Frozen*

This is the perfect opportunity for Disney to take the reins in their neverending quest for more money and reboot Frozen as a live action movie with all the bells and whistles that a mega-corporation can afford. Such a high profile movie about the beautiful and important bond between young women will help feminism more than I can say. Plus, it’ll be cool to see a live action Elsa use her sweet ice powers.

As I was compiling this list, I realized what a huge influence these superheroines were for me as I was growing up. It’s sad how few of my examples extend into the new century. Though I may have missed a few, it seems more likely that this is because Hollywood hasn’t been making movies about female heroes nearly as often as they should be. With films like Frozen, The Hunger Games, and Divergent, I hope to see a shift in that pattern that neglects the tales of heroines. These movies don’t always get it right, but their very existence is a triumph. Maybe with their success, the lazy producers of movies will dig up some of the films on my list and give them a second, maybe better chance to inspire women of the next generation.