Battle Scars: Wonder Woman, Aesthetic Geopolitics and Disfigurement in Hollywood Film

ABSTRACT

Wonder Woman (2017) has been one of the most lucrative entries in the recent superhero film canon. With a female lead and director, it has also proven a rich text for feminist analysis. Here, the film’s engagement with questions of gender, aesthetic judgment and disability is explored through the lens of feminist geopolitics, and connected to the alignment between immorality and disfigurement in Hollywood more broadly. It is suggested that aesthetic value is used in the film as a key organizing principle for spatial and geopolitical claims. Through this analysis, the paper suggests the potential for further studies of disability, including disfigurement, in popular geopolitics.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and Ian Kirby and Vithya Thirunavukarasou for their proofreading skills. Naturally, any mistakes that remain, despite their assistance, are my own.

Notes

1. This refers to the DC Extended Universe, which began in 2013 with Man of Steel. Captain Marvel, featuring a female lead, is due for release in 2019.

2. In this, Cameron echoed the UN, who in 2016 stripped Wonder Woman of her role as honorary ambassador for the empowerment of women and girls amid protests that she was an objectified icon (Roberts 2016).

3. Gadot’s nationality caused the film to be banned in Lebanon, where the Israel Boycott Law of 1955 prohibits any economic relations with Israel, including Israeli residents (Abirafeh 2017). For her part, Gadot was criticised by some for her pro-IDF sentiments during the Israel–Gaza conflict of 2014 (Feinstein 2017).

4. ‘Aesthetic’ is used here under its definition of ‘concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2017a). In this way, it differs from Ingram’s (e.g., 2011, 2016) work on art and the geopolitical, which has also been described as an ‘aesthetic geopolitics’ (Riding and Wake-Walker 2017), and Rancière’s (2006) on the ‘politics of aesthetics’, which considers aesthetics as ‘a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts’ (Rancière 2006, 10).

5. Disability studies refers to a critical approach to disability, conventionally traced to the foundational work of Mike Oliver. For Linton (2005, 518), ‘Disability studies’ project is to weave disabled people back into the fabric of society, thread by thread, theory by theory. It aims to expose the ways that disability has been made exceptional and to work to naturalize disabled people – remake us as full citizens whose rights and privileges are intact, whose history and contributions are recorded, and whose often distorted representations in art, literature, film, theater, and other forms of artistic expression are fully analyzed.’

6. It is also recognised that social and cultural accounts of disability, while crucial in drawing attention to how society ‘disables’, necessarily omit consideration of the embodied experience of living with impairments and/or bodily difference (e.g. Clare 2001; Shakespeare and Watson 2002).

7. Puar (2009, 161) has raised the possibility of a ‘geopolitics of affect, debility and capacity’, but beyond the title the term geopolitics is not discussed, so it is not clear as yet what this might entail.

8. Online audience reviews, especially the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), have been proffered as one method of approaching the affective dimensions of film (e.g. Dodds 2006; Ridanpää 2014). Such reviews are not discussed here principally because, as with media coverage of Wonder Woman, few consider disfigurement: of nearly 2000 reviews at IMDb, a series of search terms finds only one that criticises the film’s portrayal of Maru’s disfigurement. This is perhaps remarkable in itself, suggesting that the kinds of aesthetic geopolitics presented here are normalised to a high degree.

9. These mythological antecedents are reinforced in the film by Wonder Woman and Maru being referred to by stock fairy tale clichés; clichés that are also gendered, and imply differing levels of beauty and morality. After Ludendorff confronts the German high command over their defeatism, one German commander replies that, ‘We stand against you and your witch [Maru].’ In contrast, of course, Wonder Woman is a princess.