Re: Gender Stereotyping In Comic Books
Laverne Levenstein
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The essence of any narrative is to create characters and situations that allow you to quickly identify the protagonists of a story and illustrate a point. The great fictional characters, such as Antigone, Don Juan and Luke Skywalker materialise stereotypes which structure the imagination, thus perpetuating ancestral prejudices that are transposed in our daily life and which weigh on social relations. While the era is fighting discrimination including racism, sexism, homophobia. We might wonder to what extent the comic book, itself a great producer of stereotypes especially in Belgium and France, promotes or on the contrary deconstructs their perpetuation?
On the contrary, moral qualities and mastery of technical modernity are resolutely on the side of Tintin and the white colonisers. Tintin is courageous in everything he does, both when he dives looking for Snowy who drowns at the start of the story, but also when he goes hunting for lions, or fighting against diamond traffickers. It is ingenious when it uses an electromagnet to draw arrows from these enemies, or when it gets rid of a leopard or an elephant. The work of the colonisers through Tintin and the action of the missionaries are valued.
Tintin does justice like King Solomon in the Bible, by cutting in half a hat that two young Africans were fighting over; he treats a patient with a quinine tablet; he teaches. The action and the benefits attributed to the colonisers are systematically highlighted. With Tintin, the coloniser is magnified, he is the man who brings technical modernity through cinema (Tintin is organising a first screening in an African village), or medicine. The West imposes itself as a colonial power because it is based on an industrial and technical revolution which gives it an obvious strategic advantage: this is also the self-justification of colonialism in Tintin in the Congo.
In short, in Tintin in the Congo the African is presented as a big, lazy and somewhat naive child, saved by the white coloniser who brings medicine, justice, peace between the tribes: this is the whole vision of paternalistic racism inherent to colonialism which is expressed here to define an agreed and consensual vision of colonial action in the interwar period. Africa is presented as a welcoming, exuberant and exotic continent.
In the United States, the changes in representation have followed a similar trajectory but that they have been determined by the history of the country. The main changes took place from the end of the Second World War, when the black veterans returned from Europe after having fought under the American flags, and were still facing De Jure segregation in the Southern States. Since then, militant associations like the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) have campaigned against caricatures of African American soldiers in cartoons and comics.
We are committed to challenging stereotypes and promoting diverse representation, particularly of Black women, in the world of comic books. Explore our black woman comic book featuring dynamic characters, funny and captivating stories.
The popularity of modern comic books has fluctuated since their creation and mass production in the early 20th century, experiencing periods of growth as well as decline. While commercial success is not always consistent from one decade to the next it is clear that the medium has been and will continue to be a cultural staple in the society of the United States. I have selected this type of popular culture for analysis precisely because of the longevity of the medium and the recent commercial success of film and television adaptations of comic book material. In this project I apply a Critical lens to selected comic book materials and apply Critical theories related to race, class, and gender in order to understand how the materials function as vehicles for ideological messages. For the project I selected five Marvel comic book characters and examined materials featuring those characters in the form of comic books, film, and television adaptations. The selected characters are Steve Rogers/Captain America, Luke Cage, Miles Morales/Spider-Man, Jean Grey, and Raven Darkholme/Mystique. Methodologically I interrogated the selected texts through the application of visual and narrative rhetorical criticism. By using this approach, I was able to answer my guiding research questions centered around how these texts operate to reinforce, subvert, and modify socio-cultural understandings related to the race, gender, and economic class in the United States.
Comic books, a form of American popular culture, offer a window into the past, allowing researchers to track societal changes over several decades. The purpose of this study was to determine if, how, and how much female gender roles have changed in Marvel Comics from the Silver Age (1960) to the present (2014) to help understand how popular culture portrays and treats female characters. It was hypothesized that female gender roles in Marvel Comics in the last decade have become less stereotypical and more equitable as compared to the 1960s, as determined by the sevenpoint quantifiable rubric. The seven-point rubric underwent inter-rater reliability tests twice, with ten experienced raters. The researcher reviewed 68 Marvel titles for a total of 788 Marvel comic books broken down by decade from 1960 to 2014.
According to Bradford Wright (2001), "Few enduring expressions of American popular culture are so instantly recognizable and still so poorly understood as comic books . . . Just as each generation writes its own history, each reads its own comic books" (p. 1). Comic books are a litmus test for pop culture itself. Comics do not exist in a vacuum. They are steeped in the thoughts, feelings, and values of their writers and readers. Female gender roles in comic books often reflect these values and attitudes, and they both illustrate and chronicle the year in which they were published.
Popular culture and comic books offer the reader an inside look at how society functioned when they were written. According to Dr. Christina Blanch (2013), "One benefit of analyzing gender through comics is the ability to track attitudes over time" (para. 5). Comic books often parallel American culture, values, and politics.
During the 1940s, comic book art inspired life and often imitated it. The comic books of the 1940s inspired women to be more than homemakers. The authors tried to inspire women to become part of the war effort, to leave their homes, enter the workforce, and fill the jobs previously held by men. This was the Golden Age of Comics, and the decade when female superheroes were christened symbols of American strength, freedom, patriotism, and independence (Larew, 1997, p. 592).
With the end of World War II and the return of the male work force, women were relegated back into the home. There was a backlash and return to conservative family values in which men were the breadwinners and women the homemakers. Comic books reflected the swinging of society's conservative pendulum with regard to female gender roles. During the late 1950s, female superheroes were slowly vanishing. First, they were treated as powerless sidekicks to their male counterparts. Then, they began disappearing altogether. As women were forced out of the public sphere, they also vanished from comics (Larew, 1997, p. 596).
Women are often marginalized in the superhero universe as in American culture. Comic books frequently perpetuate social or cultural gender stereotypes or both. For many young boys, comic books act as an agent of socialization, modeling social values, and gender roles (Ito, 1994, p. 90).
The most comprehensive comic book study analyzing female gender roles was Karl Larew's (1997) "Planet Women: The Image of Women in Planet Comics, 1940 1953." It analyzed the number of female superheroes in Golden Age Planet Comics and the number of times they graced the comic books' covers (p. 592). In addition to Larew's, only two other quantitative comic book studies of female gender roles have been completed: Kinko Ito's (1994) "Images of Women in Weekly Male Comic Magazines in Japan" and Erik Palmer's (2008) dissertation "Superheroes and Gender Roles, 1961 2004." Ito dealt only with contemporary Japanese publications while Palmer analyzed only Marvel Comics' cover art.
From these very limited quantitative studies and other research, seven indicators of female gender roles or status were developed. The indicators or categories include: comic book cover art, the Bechdel Test, storyline, occupation, balance of power, female sexualization, and violence against women.
The analysis of comic book cover art seems to be the only consistent factor that researchers have explored. These explorations include the number of women on the cover, the number of female superheroes in relation to the number of male characters, the size and proportion of the female characters, and their activity, passivity, or both (Larew, 1997, p. 596).
The next indicator and arguably the least wellknown is the Bechdel Test. The test was developed by Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist, in her comic strip, "The Rule." It was originally created as a test for film, has been adapted for television, and is flexible enough to be used with other media. The Bechdel Test has three criteria: The first is that the material must have at least two female characters with names; second, those two female characters must speak with each other; and third, that conversation must be about something other than men (Ulaby, 2014).
Writers often overlook the female perspective, because male storylines are considered dominant or universal (Scheiner-Fisher, 2012, p. 222). This is true in comic books and other literature. In the Golden Age of Comics, female characters were used almost entirely as companions or sidekicks to their male counterparts.
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