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Gender, feminism, and heroism in Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men comics

Hero characters and their narratives serve as important sites for negotiating a culture’s values. Informed by sexism in Western cultures, female heroes often construct and perpetuate women’s statuses as second-class citizens. However, female heroes also can and sometimes do work against such representations. This thesis argues for a third wave feminist interpretation of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men comic books as a text that brings multiple feminist perspectives into conversation with each other and that opposes certain patriarchal systems. Through narrative and formal analysis, I explore female X-Men Emma Frost and Kitty Pryde as characters who reject gender essentialism and misogynist value systems and whose relationship addresses concepts of difference in third wave feminism. Using similar methods, I also explore an interpretation of villain Danger as a failure to integrate radical feminist ideologies into third wave feminism. I believe that Astonishing X-Men provides an example of how norms of the mainstream superhero comic book medium, which scholars have criticized as sexist, can be reworked for a new generation of feminists. / text

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/11903
Date23 June 2011
CreatorsSharp, Molly Louise
Source SetsUniversity of Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Formatelectronic
RightsCopyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works.

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