“Don’t Underestimate Her Ability to Talk, It’s Her Superpower”: Epistemic Negotiation and the Power of Community in Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville Series

Rhonda Nicol’s “‘Don’t Underestimate Her Ability to Talk, it’s Her Superpower’: Epistemic Negotiation and the Power of Community in Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville Series” interrogates the action heroine of the urban fantasy genre. By contrast to most authors of the genre, Carrie Vaughn, posits Nicol, highlights her protagonist’s interpersonal skills and community-building abilities, making them equal in value to physical power. The series thus posits a heroine easily identifiable to female urban fantasy readers while she questions the value of toughness for female empowerment.

The Dragon Lady of Gotham: Feminine Power, the Mythical East, and Talia al Ghul

In “The Dragon Lady of Gotham: Feminine Power, the Mythical East, and Talia al Ghul,” Tosha Taylor considers the gender and race politics of Batman’s most complex enemy and ally. The chapter explores patterns of Orientalist fantasy in the character’s actions and appearance. Working from the initial Orientalist inspiration for Talia’s villainous family as related by the character’s creators, Taylor posits that Talia’s chief function in the D.C. universe has been to embody the stereotype of the “Dragon Lady,” an exotic temptress capable of unconscionable acts of betrayal. The chapter examines Talia’s forty-year struggle between villainess and heroine and argues that her agency depends on her conformity to Western myths about Arabic and East Asian woman. The study concludes with consideration of whether Talia might at times serve as metatexual indictment of Western heterosexist fantasy, craftily appropriating stereotypical images of Orientalism in order to manipulate heterosexual male characters.

Forced Glory: Katniss Everdeen, Bella Swan, and Varieties of Virginity

Rhonda V. Wilcox’s “Forced Glory: Katniss Everdeen, Bella Swan, and Varieties of Virginity” contrasts Twilight’s Bella Swan and The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen. There are many parallels between the characters, from triumph despite low self-esteem within a first-person narrative to being forced to wear elaborate outfits that serve as signs of power. In early repudiation of marriage and the mother, they reflect the pattern of independence illustrated in Janice Radway’s conceptualization of the romance heroine. Virginity is also central to this pattern, where mental impermeability offers a metaphoric echo. Ultimately, where the characters most differ is in agency. Bella’s protection from (mental) penetration is an inborn ability that helps assimilate her into patriarchy. By contrast, Katniss pretends to have sex while being able to choose virginity. She purposefully and much later chooses procreation, while Bella and Edward assert that in their love, they had no choice.

Of Jungle Queens and Amazons: Marvel’s She-Hulk as Poststructural Feminist Icon

J. Richard Stevens begins the collection with “Of Jungle Queens and Amazons: Marvel’s She-Hulk as Post-Structural Feminist Icon,” considers the contemporary transformation of another action heroine, She-Hulk, from the jungle queen archetype. Stevens emphasizes her humanitarian mission, the strength of her voice against the masculine conventions of superhero narratives, and the ways in which her visual image challenges traditional sexual objectification.

Hillary Orbits an Alternative Universe Earth: Interpreting the USA Network’s Political Animals as Science Fiction

Marleen S. Barr’s “Hillary Orbits an Alternative Universe Earth: Interpreting the USA Network’s Political Animals as Science Fiction” concludes the section with an exploration of Sigourney Weaver’s character, Secretary of State Elaine Barrish Hammond, as a fantasy figure. Weaver resonates contextually through the science fictional heroines she portrayed in Aliens and Avatar while her character in Political Animals (2012) echoes the life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Through such parallels, argues Barr, the series exemplifies a power fantasy, recasting Clinton as an alternative history superhero.

Situating Starbuck: Combative Femininity, Figurative Masculinity, and the Snap

Ewan Kirkland’s “Situating Starbuck: Combative Femininity, Figurative Masculinity, and the Snap” studies the action heroine in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) television series. He argues that Starbuck exemplifies a transformation of the 1970s male action hero in post-Alien action adventure science fiction and fantasy, where women warriors increasingly feature as a generic staple. Situating Starbuck in relation to action heroines from film, television, and digital games as well as the academic arguments that circulate them affords an understanding of the gender politics of the character, and the extent to which she challenges dominant representations in popular culture.

Introduction

Who or what is the “Woman Fantastic,” and what does it mean to engage critically with this figure in today’s American media landscape? Just positing this question offers the beginnings of an answer. As the contrast between “women” and “woman” suggests, the Woman Fantastic is a gendered textual and cultural construction. Hence, “she” is entirely fantastic—less projection, stereotype, or imago than symbol, sign, or trope, an always already artificial creation. Within the realm of the popular, “she” is a sales pitch, the offer of a model or mask through which the feminine and/or female can be reified. Woman always denies the emperor has no clothes, and in this way Woman is always fantastic....

Claiming the Throne: Multiplicity and Agency in Cinda Williams Chima’s The Seven Realms Series

Katherine A. Wagner and Megan McDonough turn to issues of intersectionality and young adult literature in “Claiming the Throne: Multiplicity and Agency in Cinda Williams Chima’s The Seven Realms Series.” The authors find that possession of agency dominates female protagonists in the young adult fantasy genre, but that complexity of character is equally vital, offering a blurring of rigid gender, ethnicity, and class boundaries. Through the concepts of multiplicity and intersectionality, Wagner and McDonough study sixteen-year-old Raisa ana’Marianna, heiress to a realm that has been ruled by women for centuries. Rather than having to challenge patriarchal rule, Chima’s protagonist must come to understand identity as irreducibly multiple, as seen in feminist intersectionality, in order to claim agency.

Body Issues in Wonder Woman 90–100 (1994–1995): Good Girls, Bad Girls, Macho Men

Joan Ormrod begins the section with “Body Issues in Wonder Woman 90-100 (1994-1995): Good Girls, Bad Girls, Macho Men.” In an era that saw the emergence of violent, silicone-breasted, wasp-waisted bad girls, D.C.’s Wonder Woman’s sales dropped. In response, Diana/Wonder Woman was reconceptualized to fit the new mold. Study of this shift to elongated, muscular bodies in fetishized clothing and soft-core porn poses, argues Ormrod, is productively achieved through application and critique of Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze. Then, positing an alternative model based on Turner’s notion of the “somatic society,” Ormrod reads the superhuman body as a metaphor for the body within wider culture, offering a historically contextualized commentary on women’s changing place in society in the 1990s.

Placing Parker: Negotiating the Hegemonic Binary in Leverage

Extending the significance of race and class in the first two chapters, Elyce Rae Helford adds attention to sexuality in “Positioning Parker: Negotiating the Hegemonic Binary in Leverage.” Through a queer feminist lens, Helford explores popular culture’s reliance on the doctrine of natural kinds and hegemonic binarism—where the human world is divided into two mandatory, privileged, distinct, and non-overlapping categories. She posits the character of Parker in TNT’s action-drama Leverage (2008-2012) as exemplification of the Woman Fantastic through attention to the ways in which character history and superheroic (or anti-heroic) thieving abilities challenge gender absolutes. Simultaneously, argues Helford, Parker’s romantic relationship with the series’ African American computer hacker character challenges the combined effects of incest and miscegenation taboos. This case study illustrates hegemonic negotiation of the theory of natural kinds that continues to dominate popular culture.