{"id":7985,"date":"2015-05-06T08:01:56","date_gmt":"2015-05-06T13:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/?p=7985"},"modified":"2015-05-07T17:34:21","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T22:34:21","slug":"comic-books-superhero-movies-and-gender-inequality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2015\/05\/06\/comic-books-superhero-movies-and-gender-inequality\/","title":{"rendered":"Comic Books, Superhero Movies, and Gender Inequality"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new Avengers movie<\/a> just came out. I haven\u2019t seen it yet. But I\u2019m a fan of superhero movies. It\u2019s not something I\u2019m particularly proud of as a feminist. But I\u2019ve been reading comic books since I was a kid and seeing some of those characters on the big screen brings back lots of memories and childhood fantasies about superpowers. The interwebs have been alight with discussions about women superhero characters in this movie and whether those of us who care about gender equality ought to be happy about them or not. Some have argued<\/a> that Black Widow and the Scarlet Witch are feminist heroes we ought to celebrate. Others<\/a> have been more critical. Regardless of which side you fall on, it’s hard to deny that the cast of superhero men standing alongside\u00a0Scarlett Johansson<\/span> (who plays Black Widow) casts her as a bit of a Smurfette<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"The_Avengers_Cast_2010_Comic-Con_cropped-1024x518\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Over at FiveThirtyEight.com<\/a>, Walt Hickey<\/a> has written a series of posts of gender representation in comic books (here<\/a>) and comic book movie portrayals of (see here<\/a> and here<\/a>). In his initial post<\/a>, Hickey collected data from DC and Marvel Wikia databases to get a sense of all of the characters each comic book publisher had produced.* More characters have been produced than you might imagine. DC has created just shy of 7,000 characters.\u00a0 The Marvel database includes more than 16,000.\u00a0 Using this data, Hickey made some basic claims about the entire comic book universes each publisher has produced. One fact we learned from this is that the ratio of women characters to men has been slowly improving. For instance, in 2013, the Marvel universe was about 23.3% women, while the DC universe was approximately 28.5% women. But, the graphs show that the ratios appear to be leveling out shy of 30%. Men are more likely to be deceased than women. Women characters in both universes are most likely \u201cgood\u201d (as opposed to \u201cneutral\u201d or \u201cbad\u201d) characters, while there are more \u201cbad\u201d men than \u201cgood\u201d ones in both comic book universes. While there are some signs of change in this data, it doesn\u2019t come close to achieving gender parity.<\/p>\n

Using Hickey\u2019s data, I\u2019ve graphed the proportions of women in each comic book universe along with the proportion of women in Congress over the same period of time (below).\u00a0 One fact immediately apparent is that superhero women seem to be faring a bit better than women in U.S. politics.\u00a0 In fact, the proportions of women in many of the \u201cheroic\u201d professions in the U.S. fall well below Marvel and DC\u2019s universes. Women in the U.S. comprise less than 25% of federal law enforcement, less than 15% of local police and sheriff\u2019s officers, and less than 10% of state police and highway patrol (here<\/a>). Women comprise less than 4% of career firefighters in the U.S. (here<\/a>). Similarly, women are less than 20% of the U.S. military as well (here<\/a>). Virtually all of the jobs in the licit economy that involve higher than average work-related death rates are\u2014perhaps unsurprisingly\u2014dominated by men (here<\/a>). Certainly, which occupations are deemed \u201cheroic\u201d in the first place is also important to consider. Indeed, the idea of a \u201chero\u201d seems already gendered.<\/p>\n

\"Comic<\/a>Superheroes are important for lots of reasons. The stories we celebrate tell us important information about the societies in which we live. The characters we celebrate and those we oppose provide us with information about what we value. As Arthur Berger writes, \u201cThere is a fairly close relationship, generally, between a society and its heroes\u201d (here<\/a>), to which Jon Hogan adds: \u201cThe superhero comic book is part of popular culture because it can help us better understand what traits we value and why we value them\u201d (here<\/a>). Berger and Hogan seem to be asking us to consider what comic books are<\/em> doing, rather than what they should<\/em> be doing.<\/p>\n

I used to assign a short reading by Ursula K. Le Guin<\/a> to students at the conclusion of a gender studies course I taught. Le Guin is a science fiction writer (a genre dominated by men). She\u2019s perhaps best known for The Left Hand of Darkness<\/a><\/em> (1969)\u2014a story about an alien society without gender. The alien race in the story shares the biological and emotional characteristics of both sexes, only adopting sexed characteristics (both embodied and emotional) once a month. After writing the novel, Le Guin was often asked whether she believed we were headed for a post-gender society. She responded in the Introduction to subsequent editions:<\/p>\n

Yes, the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn\u2019t mean that I\u2019m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I\u2019m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist\u2019s way, which is by inventing elaborate circumstantial lies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Comic<\/a>Perhaps when we celebrate comic book universes, we are not imagining future societies and futuristic possibilities. Perhaps they are best thought of as stories about who we are today and what our society actually looks like.\u00a0 Le Guin argues that science fiction is better understood as descriptive than predictive.\u00a0 Perhaps, in other words, comic books are “elaborate circumstantial lies” about who we actually are.<\/p>\n

Beyond the numbers, however, there are also other features of gender that are difficult to ignore. Men and women superheroes are also depicted in patterned ways<\/a> that reinforce problematic assumptions about gender. Artist Kevin Bolk<\/a> re-imagined the poster for the original Avengers movie depicting Black Widow in a \u201cmasculine\u201d pose and Hawkeye, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and Hulk in stereotypical \u201cfeminine\u201d poses. The image attests to the fact that the number of women is really only the tip of the iceberg when in comes to addressing gender inequality in comic books.<\/p>\n

Comic book universes (particularly those that have become famous outside comic cons and fan circles) exaggerate and celebrate gender differences.\u00a0 There are writers and artists who push back against this tendency in the industry.\u00a0 And important strides have been made.\u00a0 Women writers and artists are receiving more recognition and support.\u00a0 Both DC and Marvel have introduced gender and sexual minority characters.\u00a0 But, which of these characters will achieve fame and fortune is more of a question.\u00a0 I don’t know of existing data on the comic book characters about which movies have been made, but my hunch is that that sample would include a higher proportion of men and fewer non-white characters than each universe boasts.<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

*The data are\u00a0publicly available at Github<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in playing around with it. The data are only collected through 2013 and only for a single continuity for each publisher \u2013 Earth-616 (Marvel) and New Earth (DC).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new Avengers movie just came out. I haven\u2019t seen it yet. But I\u2019m a fan of superhero movies. It\u2019s not something I\u2019m particularly proud of as a feminist. But I\u2019ve been reading comic books since I was a kid and seeing some of those characters on the big screen brings back lots of memories […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1958,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25814],"tags":[31140,31141,31142,31144,31139,31138,31137,31143],"class_list":["post-7985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-manly-musings","tag-dc-comics","tag-gender-and-comics","tag-gender-and-superheroes","tag-kevin-bolk","tag-marvel","tag-superhero-movies","tag-superheroes","tag-walt-hickey"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7985"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8012,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7985\/revisions\/8012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}