Bulk, breast, and beauty: negotiating the superhero body in Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how the choice of actress Gal Gadot to play Wonder Woman negotiates between comic book fans’ expectations and society’s gender schema. It has taken 75 years for the industry to produce a film adaption of Wonder Woman, perhaps due to the ‘problem’ of female muscles. This article focuses on the significance of Wonder Woman’s muscles using theoretical frames from sports sociology. One frame is edgework, coined by sociologist Stephen Lyng about dangerous activities that amateurs perform. The second frame is the feminist analysis of women’s muscles. Women navigate the boundary between what sociologist Shari Dworkin calls ‘emphasized femininity’ and what is beyond this femininity. The article introduces Wonder Woman’s origin, then presents theory of edgework and female muscles, third, it analyzes Wonder Woman as bodywork and edgework, and, finally, discusses Gadot’s Wonder Woman body as feminist physique.

KEYWORDS:

• Wonder Woman
• Gal Gadot
• female superhero
• muscles
• gender
• edgework

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rikke Schubart

Rikke Schubart is anAassociate Professor at the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark at Odense, Denmark. She currently works on women and trauma in fantastic film and television. Her research is on the fantastic, emotions, and gender, and she combines biocultural theory and cognitive theory with a feminist approach. A recent publication is Mastering Fear: Women, Emotions, and Contemporary Horror (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), which analyses fiction horror as play with negative emotions. Other publications are Women of Ice and Fire: Gender, Game of Thrones, and Multiple Media Engagements (Bloomsbury 2016, co-edited with Anne Gjelsvik). and Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970– 2006 (McFarland 2007).