Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics

This competent analysis from independent scholar Langsdale (coeditor of Monstrous Women in Comics) examines the subversive qualities of four Marvel Comics series from the 2010s. She praises Dennis Hopeless and Javier Rodriguez’s 2015 Spider-Woman series, which follows protagonist Jessica Drew through pregnancy and early motherhood, for showing the character could “be both heroic and maternal.” Joe Casey and Nick Dragotta’s 2011 reinvention of Miss America, a white woman in the original 1940s comics, as America Chavez, a lesbian Latina, pushes back against conflations of Americanness with whiteness, Langsdale contends, arguing that Chavez’s quest to find a sense of belonging in New York City’s Puerto Rican community after traveling to Earth from a distant world echoes the “realities of diasporic identities.” Elsewhere, Langsdale suggests that the Wasp’s preference for de-escalating conflict through conversation pushes back against the masculinist tendency to treat violence as the most appropriate means of crime fighting, and that Ironheart’s recognition of the need for strong relationships with other Black female heroes echoes Angela Davis’s writings about the importance of collective empowerment. Langsdale’s interpretations are occasionally enlightening, if largely straightforward, celebrating how recent Marvel writers and illustrators have expanded what it means to be a hero. Comics aficionados will want to check this out. (Sept.)