“Sweetheart, This Ain't Gender Studies”: Sexism and Superheroes

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Notes

1. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

2. See Claudia Card's “Rape as a Weapon of War” in Hypatia 11, 6 (1996), http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/journals/hypatia/hyp11-4.html (accessed December 30, 2008), Cynthia Enloe's “The Gendered Gulf” (in Collateral Damage: The New World Order at Home and Abroad, Ed. C. Peters (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 93–110, Susan Jeffords’ “Rape and the New World Order” in Cultural Critique, Fall (1991): 203–15; and Judith Hick Stiehm's “The Protected, the Protector, the Defender” in Women's Studies International Forum 5 (1982): 367–76, for some of the most influential essays on the subject of gender and protectionism.

3. Enloe, “The Gendered Gulf.”

4. Jeffords, “Rape and the New World Order.”

5. Martha McCaughey, Real Knockouts: The Physical Femininity of Women's Self-Defense (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 37.

6. Jocelyn Hollander, “Vulnerability and Dangerousness: The Construction of Gender Through Conversation about Violence,” Gender & Society 15, 1 (2001): 83–109. See also Iris Young's Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) for an analysis of the implications of girls’ perceived incompetence on athletic performance.

7. Hollander also points out that “women's lack of strength relative to men is the result not simply of different physiology but of gender expectations that valorize feminine delicacy and thinness and discourage athletic ability, while men's great strength and agility are due, in part, to more extensive physical training” (2001, 85). See also Young (1990) for an elaboration of how these perceptual constraints affect performance.

8. Some would argue that Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001) also broke new ground in this regard. However, while that series also featured women as protectors, it did not challenge the narrative of protection itself.

9. As feminist critics of the series have pointed out, race was a problem on Buffy, at least until the final season, with the addition of African American actor D. B. Woodside as Principal Robin Wood and a host of potential slayers who were more racially and ethnically heterogeneous than in the past. See Cynthia Fuchs’ “‘Did Anyone Ever Explain to You What Secret Identity Means?’: Race and Displacement in Buffy and Dark Angel” in Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ed. Elana Levine and Lisa Parks (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 96–115.

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Carol A. Stabile

Carol A. Stabile is director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society and professor of English and Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Her most recent book is White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in US Culture. She is currently finishing a book entitled Black and White and Red All Over: Women Writers and the Television Blacklist