For ART 343, Feminist Art History at Allegheny College, we made podcast episodes, classroom style: scripted and presented in class, never recorded. I built this episode with my classmates Daphne and Zane in spring 2024. This is that episode, or at least my share of it, adapted to the page from my script and prep notes.
Our episode circled a handful of questions. What is a queer coded villain? Which villains in popular movies are queer coded? How does the Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy relationship get fetishized in the comics compared with their representation in the newer TV show? How are women stereotyped in movies and other media? And what does all of it do to the audience? We opened the discussion with a clip from the OSP video essay on queer coded villains, and then we got into it.
Story Time at the Back of the Bookstore
So when I was a youngin, maybe nine or ten, I was wandering around the back of the bookstore looking for Harley Quinn comics, because she was my absolute favorite. I had heard about Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn and thought, ooo, I want to learn more about relationships and such. I was at the age where I was learning about myself. I spot one, I open it up, and I am in sheer shock at what I see. I thought I was in the wrong part of the bookstore! I look over my shoulder and quickly put it back. Little me thought I was peeping in on an intimate moment between the characters, and I was not a fan. Talk about voyeurism.
But I think that really goes to say who these comic books are made for and who is consuming them. That comic probably was not made for a nine year old girl. What it was doing was appealing to the male eye and fetishizing lesbian relationships.
Harley Quinn
Writer Paul Dini created Harley Quinn in the early 1990s while writing for Batman: The Animated Series. He was inspired to create a female sidekick for Mark Hamill's Joker after seeing his college friend Arleen Sorkin play a jester in a dream sequence on the soap opera Days of Our Lives.
In the comics she was actually the Joker's therapist, and there are multiple versions of how the story goes: one where she seduces the Joker, and one where he tricks her. The canon version everyone knows is, of course, the latter. The Joker becomes both verbally and physically abusive, and rather than blame the Joker for this abuse, Harley convinces herself that Batman is to blame, because Batman is constantly getting in the way of her being with her Puddin.
In the episode I asked my co-hosts what they thought of the Margot Robbie Harley Quinn. I personally like it, other than that scene in Suicide Squad with the pan up of Harley changing.
Harley and Ivy
Both characters are highly sexualized and fetishized, and both come from backgrounds of abuse, mainly violence from men. In one version Ivy gets experimented on by someone she thought loved her. The representation of Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn as having an ambiguously polyamorous intimacy is queer baiting for an audience watching through a male gaze.
Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy are two hyper-sexualized representations of femininity in a world created through the male gaze. They are powerful in their seductive abilities, Poison Ivy with her pheromones and beauty, Harley Quinn with sheer force and sexualized violence. Their independent powers are amplified through an implied intimacy, where they are capable of seducing men together. Their performative love for each other only exists because they have both been scarred by men in the past and now must seek revenge. It is all about the men! Instead of exploring the possibility of a romantic connection between the two through the similarities in their backgrounds and their mutual respect and understanding, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn get to be sexy unofficial lovers who use their sexuality for harm rather than good. They embody the fantasy of danger enmeshed with desire, where women are given power only in their ability to manipulate men.
There is a pattern here with female villains and sexual trauma from men: Catwoman and prostitution, Ivy getting tricked and experimented on by someone she thought loved her, and Harley with the Joker. Harley also has a family background of trauma and crime, so there is that implication too.
Catwoman
The comics build into Catwoman's background that as a young girl she was a prostitute who needed to do it to survive. Full ick from that. She even has dominatrix gear kept like trophies in the comics.
But Catwoman also has some androgyny in the comics, which is interesting. In costume she has this hyper-sexualized look, and then out of costume she will go from wearing a dress to wearing a suit in the same issue.
Wonder Woman, Decade by Decade
Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston in 1942 as an alternative to what he called the bloodcurdling masculinity of contemporary comics (Emad 957), and he hoped she would help inspire needed sociopolitical change (Matsuuchi 122). The character encouraged women to join the war effort, both by physically getting involved and by economically supporting the troops and their own families through the labor force.
After the war came a rise in conservative efforts and a desire for women to stay at home while the men tried to reclaim their jobs. Wonder Woman takes on a more domestic role and becomes her assumed identity, Diana Prince, owning a flower shop and being proposed to by her love interest Steve Trevor, the man she used to be the one saving from danger (Emad 966). In the 1970s feminist movement she was portrayed as a menace, reflecting society's view of the female activists. Then in the 1990s, John Byrne created a new way of drawing her, one whose femininity is noted by large breasts and long flowing hair, beginning the era where hyper-sexuality allegedly represents the strength of female characters.
How Women Get Drawn
The males are generally drawn facing front with a focus on their musculature, but the females are often drawn from the back or from the side, large-breasted and small-waisted, long-haired and long-legged, sometimes without their faces shown at all. There is even a name for the contortion that shows chest and backside at once: the broke back pose. These portrayals are both defying and reinforcing traditional gender roles, because the women are shown as strong and powerful but simultaneously oppressed as sex objects.
One analysis of Marvel trading cards found that only 10 out of the 45 cards were female superheroes, and that they had fought in fewer battles, but the percentage of female wins and losses showed no difference from the males. The fact that women superheroes are less frequently called upon to restore cosmic order, despite their equal effectiveness, might be an indication of sexism in the Marvel Universe. And the way women get drawn has not changed much: most heroines today fit the image of a thin, yet busty, muscular power woman, which highly underrepresents the diversity of women. With an obvious design for a male-centric audience, this powerful physique is not one meant to empower women. The heroines look feminine by their physical features, but they do not share the life experiences of real women or behave as real women do.
The theory behind why women in comics are drawn this way is that sex sells, and that comic book readers are predominantly heterosexual males. But a Facebook study from April 2016 showed that 43 percent of comic book fans are women, so creators are finding fewer reasons to make comics solely for male consumers. There has been a significant decrease in the objectification of women compared with thirty years ago, and there is more attention on these portrayals now than ever. Cocca relates that to the sensibility of the third wave of feminism, which encourages analysis, critique, and production of pop culture through humour and irony. Still, too often a heroine is only seen as a female counterpart to the males. There is a problem with comic books today: the men are dominating the culture and creating women in the image that they want.
Ursula and the Movie Villains
On the film side, the queer coded villain is all over children's movies. Ursula from The Little Mermaid was based on Divine, the drag performer. And here is the thing about the trope: people relate to villains more because of it. People sympathize with the villains' inability to conform to society.
Who Is Watching
At the end of the day it is about the kids. If they keep seeing the hypersexualization of women in media, it is only going to get perpetually worse.
Sources
- OSP, “Queer Coded Villains” (video essay; we clipped it for the episode intro).
- “Queer-Coded Villains in Children's Films.” khambayswordswordswords.blog, 29 July 2021, https://khambayswordswordswords.blog/2021/07/29/queer-coded-villains-in-childrens-films/.
- Bianchi, M. Thesis on women in comics, University of Florida Digital Collections, https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/AA/00/05/96/87/00001/mbianchi-bianchi_final-draft-compressed.pdf.
- Emad (pp. 957, 966) and Matsuuchi (p. 122), on Wonder Woman's history, as cited in my prep notes.
- Cocca, on third wave feminism and the decline of objectification in comics, as cited in my prep notes.