Wonder Woman

The Female Body and Popular Culture

Joan Ormrod

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786725813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Wonder Woman was created in the early 1940s as a paragon of female empowerment and beauty and her near eighty-year history has included seismic socio-cultural changes. In this book, Joan Ormrod analyses key moments in the superheroine's career and views them through the prism of the female body. This book explores how Wonder Woman's body has changed over the years as her mission has shifted from being an ambassador for peace and love to the greatest warrior in the DC transmedia universe, as she's reflected increasing technological sophistication, globalisation and women's changing roles and ambitions. Wonder Woman's physical form, Ormrod argues, is both an articulation of female potential and attempts to constrain it. Her body has always been an amalgamation of the feminine ideal in popular culture and wider socio-cultural debate, from Betty Grable to the 1960s 'mod' girl, to the Iron Maiden of the 1980s.

1

Beautiful White Bodies

Gender, Ethnicity and the Showgirl Body in the Second World War

Wonder Woman’s appearance in the first issue of her comic of Summer 1942 at once proclaims her exotic credentials: ‘Wonder Woman’s story is the story of her race. It reaches far back into the golden age when proud and beautiful women, stronger than men, ruled Amazonia and worshipped ardently the immortal Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty.’¹ The origin story spends much time in laying out the Amazon’s origins and how Diana fits into this all-female society. The Amazons are creatures of myth with, as Marston illustrates in later stories, exotic rituals and rites. They worship ancient gods and flout the ‘norms’ of gender, they are stronger than men, they are scientists, philosophers, trainers and teachers.

The image accompanying this introduction is no less strange; it shows two women, fighting in an arena on kangaroos (kangas) to an audience of women. That Diana belongs to an all-female society that worships Aphrodite suggests she has a queer identity.² The introduction continues, she gives up ‘her heritage of peace and happiness to help America fight evil and aggression!’³ She leaves her utopian homeland to help America in their efforts to fight a war. In this endeavour, she is given a costume modelled on the American flag, the Stars and Stripes that suggests her allegiance to America. However, her suitability to align herself with America and gain acceptance is also shown in her body’s ethnicity. In her appearance on the cover of Sensation Comics 1, January 1942 she had a white face and a perfectly proportioned body constructed from ‘oestrogen markers’ with large eyes, flowing hair and a curvaceous figure.⁴ Yet, Wonder Woman’s body in the Marston comics represents a set of contradictions simultaneously connoting purity/pollution, discipline/anarchy, modernity/nostalgia, love/aggression. Purity/pollution themes are constructed from racial and gender discourses circulating in wartime propaganda and entertainment. Together, many of the discourses surrounding Wonder Woman’s body in this era form parallels with the showgirl body of the early twentieth century which epitomized the ideal body of the American woman. This ideal body articulated ideas about women and ethnicities.

Wonder Woman’s body shows its inspiration to the showgirl idealized body model in three ways: through her ethnicity, through her agency in public spaces and through the fetishized body. William Marston’s ideological agenda is introduced, when applicable, but my aim is not to foreground his ideas as this has already been extensively explored, as discussed in the Introduction, by other researchers.⁵ Rather, I broaden my analysis to examine the showgirl body, Second World War propaganda and films in this era to show how Marston and Peter created Wonder Woman as the ideal woman, but in doing so they constructed her from negative body images.

Wonder Woman was created to be perfect. For instance, Wonder Woman 10, 1943 aligns Wonder Woman’s strength and her perfection when she is measured for shoes, and the assistant exclaims, ‘My goodness, Wonder Woman, you’re strong but you have perfect beauty measurements!’⁶ In another story in the newspaper strips written and drawn by Marston and Peter on 7–9 December 1944, Wonder Woman’s measurements are described as ‘perfect “Modern Venus” measurements’.⁷ Her beauty reinforced Wonder Woman’s acceptance in America through her erotic capital.⁸

Wonder Woman’s erotic capital was as integral to William Marston’s plan as her strength in his often cited quote, ‘Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves and … [boys will] … be proud to be her willing slaves!’⁹ Although ‘allure’, like ‘beauty’, connotes physical attraction, unlike the neutral qualities of beauty, allure actively seduces and controls, fascinating people with its charm.

Erotic capital made Wonder Woman an ideal immigrant in the cultural melting pot of America in the 1940s when race and ethnicity were integral to notions of American identity.

In turning to ideal notions of beauty and allure, Marston was influenced by the image of the showgirl, popularized in the early twentieth century by theatrical entrepreneurs such as Florenz Ziegfeld, George White and Billy Rose. The showgirl was not only beautiful but she epitomized modernity and racial purity.¹⁰ In contrast, Wonder Woman’s main foes epitomize ethnic pollution, disease and physical defections.

They are often Axis agents, led by Mars, God of War, or his underlings, General Greed, the Earl of Deceit, Baroness Paula von Gunther or Doctor Psycho who use force, coercion or violence to achieve their ends. Doctor Psycho, for instance, is a dwarf who hates women because they spurn his stature and ugliness. He has the power of mind manipulation and the ability to make facsimiles of people out of ectoplasm and uses these to turn people against women’s inclusion in the war effort. In the early comics, Wonder Woman’s arch enemy is Paula von Gunther who takes pleasure in enslaving, torturing and experimenting upon women. Wonder Woman’s other major foe is the Cheetah, heiress Priscilla Rich, whose intense jealousy of Wonder Woman causes her mind to split in two causing her animal side to emerge. The ugliness of these foes’ natures contrasts with Wonder Woman’s positivity and beauty.

The first part of the chapter explores the construction of bodies within the context of Second World War culture, and focuses upon the overlapping discourses constructing race and gender from that period. These can be identified in wartime propaganda and emphasize themes of purity and disease, discipline and anarchy. This sets up the second half of the chapter that deals with Marston’s ideas of female empowerment and the showgirl body, the uses of bondage, bodily and mind obeisance to authority and the greater moral good. However, the showgirl body also connotes some of the negative characteristics attributed to Axis agents and foes.

Gender and Ethnicity in Second World War Propaganda: Pure/Impure, Health/Disease

The production and dissemination of propaganda became more sophisticated from the First World War to the Second World War, mainly through the expansion of technologically more advanced such as mass disseminated radio, sound film and the expansion of the graphic and print media, in advertising through Madison Avenue, the hub of the American advertising industry. From December 1941 the mass media were mobilized in a propaganda campaign. Graphic and film propaganda were sourced through the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) controlled information and Madison Avenue output. All provided overt propaganda and their main issues surrounded recruitment of soldiers and women into the war effort, public information, rationing, the loose lips campaign, warnings against venereal disease and fund raising in buying War Bonds.¹¹ Promotional campaigns and Hollywood films emphasized personal responsibility, morality, sacrifice, a united front and duty.¹² Print, broadcast and film propaganda that represented race and gender were informed through binaries such as good/bad, clean/diseased, pure/impure, fantasy/mundane. These binaries were a product of racial and gender discourses that privileged a specific body type – the white male body – as the body of knowledge and power within America.

Much racial and gendered propaganda in the Second World War was based upon the two sets of binaries against targeted groups such as Japanese, German and so-called ‘loose’ women. The moral panics against these groups bore similarities and were rooted in discourses of bestiality, disease and pollution. Like the racial imagery of poster and cinematic propaganda against the ethnicities of the Axis, stories representing the Japanese and Axis powers from Marston and Peter incorporate elements of disease, madness and the challenge to the controlled body. For reasons of simplicity, I focus on Asians, Mediterranean, Caucasian and Germanic ethnicities but do not delve into African Americans who are analysed in depth by Hanley and Sandifer.

Posters and films promoted the virgin/whore ideology with the sexually active woman as diseased and men as their victims. The ‘loose’ woman gave herself too freely and, like the racialized body, was zoomorphized, and made animalistic. The War Office released statistics that suggested the loss of seven million days and the discharge of 10,000 servicemen due to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Disease was invisible and did not differentiate its victims. The US surgeon general, the US Public Health Service and the Federal Security Agency produced films and posters to combat the spread of STDs. Labelled ‘penis propaganda’, ‘Susie Rottencrotch’ films and posters warned against the risk of catching STDs from even the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Wonder Woman and the Body in Popular Culture
• 1 Beautiful White Bodies: Gender, Ethnicity and the Showgirl Body in the Second World War
• 2 ‘Here Be Monsters’: The Mutating, Splitting and Familial Body of the Cold War
• 3 The New Diana Prince! Makeovers, Movement and the Fab/ricated Body, 1968–72
• 4 The Goddess, the Iron Maiden and the Sacralization of Consumerism
• 5 Taming the Unruly Woman: Surveillance, Truth and the Mass Media Post-9/11
• 6 Whose Story Is It Anyway? Revisiting the Family in the DC Extended Universe
• 7 The Once and Future Princess: Nostalgia, Diversity and the Intersectional Heroine
• Appendix: Main Story Arcs and Body Themes in Comics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright