Qu(e)erying Comic Book Culture and Representations of Sexuality in Wonder Woman

Abstract

In his paper, "Qu(e)erying Comic Book Culture and Representations of Sexuality in Wonder Woman," Brian Mitchell Peters proposes that youth culture is responsible for an arbitrary yet highly structured appropriation of what we can call high-contemporary culture. Hence, notions of pop-culture take from the past and use the present to create a highly fluid now, capable of transcending its present moment in a stereotypical fifteen minutes of fame. Part of twentieth-century pop-culture phenomena is the evolution of the comic book. The comic, in its habitual split of binaries, creates a space where young people have tapped consistently into queer themes. Queer is defined as a category that houses an option to traditional heteronormative representations for young people. An analysis of the history of Wonder Woman comics that traces her creation, her transition in the late-1960s, and a revolutionary series of comics in the mid-1990s reveals a consistent duo of queer subtexts. In his paper, Peters examines the subtextual and textual representations of gay masquerade (or drag) and lesbian jouissance in comics. The theoretical background of the paper is semiotics, queer, and psychoanalytic criticism to explore these three stages in Wonder Woman comics to present an argument that reveals the identification of queer themes by the comic's reading public as well as the cultural homophobia that creates a standard storyline and that, in turn, extinguishes habitually the detectable areas of queer text over and over again.