What makes 'Wonder Woman' relevant?

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman, in fact, has a complicated, even schizophrenic, heritage. She’s been portrayed by such diverse actors as the perky Cathy Lee Crosby and Lynda Carter, who endowed her with both a competent, working woman aura and a dose of eroticism (Lynda Carter, I discovered, is the subject of a lot of Wonder Woman fetishist erotica on the Internet these days). An Internet poll about who should play Wonder Woman, if the series were revived today, uncovered equally diverse ideas— people suggested Cher, Lucy Lawless, Angela Bassett, and Demi Moore. Clearly, in our cultural imagination, Wonder Woman is a character with many faces.

Things only get more complicated when you consider the frame narrative that explains 10 Wonder Woman’s existence. She was born as Princess Diana (interestingly paralleling another icon of womanhood) in an Amazon community that seems pretty clearly grounded in lesbianism. Although the women in this harmonious and idyllic Amazon community have gone to great lengths to hide and protect their island from incursions by men, they are nonetheless delighted when a male American army officer inadvertently crash-lands in their utopia. So smitten with him are they, in fact, that they stage a ruthless physical competition to decide who will get to pair off with him. When Diana (later Wonder Woman) wins, she happily abandons her position as a royal ruler of the Amazons to accompany him back to the United States and take a boring desk job as a lowly secretary in the army. She even trades in her cool Amazon garb for a pair of glasses 20and a meek, submissive manner.

Of course, these good-girl accoutrements can’t hold Wonder Woman’s Amazon nature in check. Faced with evil or danger, she spins herself into a wild tornado and emerges in her glamorous (though seemingly impractical) star-spangled swimsuit and kinky, high-heeled go-go boots. She skillfully pilots an invisible airplane, wields a golden lasso, and fends off bullets with her wristbands made of a mysterious metal called “feminum.” In the name of the “forces of justice and freedom,” Wonder Woman will scrap with just about anyone— originally created to fight Nazis, she actually goes on to replicate their white-supremacist doctrines, killing off Japanese people whom her comic book portrays as demonic, and fighting to the death against her African double, Nubia. In a recent comic 30book, she completely abandons the apparently socialist tenets of the Amazons and emerges as a champion of capitalist entrepreneurialism, saving a trendy, financially lucrative urban bistro from the machinations of a computer geek. To quote the superhero herself, “Great Hera!” —can’t she get her politics straight?

Of course, all of these contradictions within Wonder Woman point to the evolution of and contradictions within our social constructions of womanhood. One of the founding principles of feminist criticism is the need to be conscious of the ways that gender is a constructed category, to realize that there is nothing inherent or essential about what we associate with the feminine. As first-wave feminist Simone de Beauvoir put it, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman; . . . it is civilization as a whole that produces this 40creature which is described as feminine.” But beyond this foundational acknowledgement of social construction (and even this concept is debated within feminism) and a general concern with the effects of power, there is little that binds what we call “feminist criticism” into a homogeneous, or even very coherent, doctrine. There are Marxist feminists who are concerned with the way economic oppression coincides with gender; linguistically based feminists who are interested in uncovering how the very structure of language itself betrays a masculine bias and in finding new modes of expression to better accommodate women. There are feminists who look for evidence of subversive resistance and empowerment in the history of women and feminists who are interested in tracing oppression and victimization.

50Feminist criticism is expanding into a more general level to include such areas as the construction of masculinity and the constitution of sexual orientation. It is being infused with insights from the realm of Queer Theory complicated by post-colonial scholars and scholars of race who consider the ways gender intersects with nationalism, class, and race. As feminist critic Theresa de Lauretis suggests, “A new conception of the subject is, in fact, emerging from feminist analyses of women’s heterogeneous subjectivity and multiple identities . . . the differences among women may be better understood as differences within women.” It is important to realize that not only does feminism as a movement exist in the face of these contradictions and complications—within feminist criticism, within gender studies, within individual literary texts and within our 60understanding of the individual woman as a subject—but that it cannot exist without them. Perhaps, like Wonder Woman, feminist criticism remains vital because it is astonishingly diverse, open, and rigorously self-problematizing.

Question

Multiple choice

What makes 'Wonder Woman' relevant?

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman, in fact, has a complicated, even schizophrenic, heritage. She’s been portrayed by such diverse actors as the perky Cathy Lee Crosby and Lynda Carter, who endowed her with both a competent, working woman aura and a dose of eroticism (Lynda Carter, I discovered, is the subject of a lot of Wonder Woman fetishist erotica on the Internet these days). An Internet poll about who should play Wonder Woman, if the series were revived today, uncovered equally diverse ideas— people suggested Cher, Lucy Lawless, Angela Bassett, and Demi Moore. Clearly, in our cultural imagination, Wonder Woman is a character with many faces.

Things only get more complicated when you consider the frame narrative that explains 10 Wonder Woman’s existence. She was born as Princess Diana (interestingly paralleling another icon of womanhood) in an Amazon community that seems pretty clearly grounded in lesbianism. Although the women in this harmonious and idyllic Amazon community have gone to great lengths to hide and protect their island from incursions by men, they are nonetheless delighted when a male American army officer inadvertently crash-lands in their utopia. So smitten with him are they, in fact, that they stage a ruthless physical competition to decide who will get to pair off with him. When Diana (later Wonder Woman) wins, she happily abandons her position as a royal ruler of the Amazons to accompany him back to the United States and take a boring desk job as a lowly secretary in the army. She even trades in her cool Amazon garb for a pair of glasses 20and a meek, submissive manner.

Of course, these good-girl accoutrements can’t hold Wonder Woman’s Amazon nature in check. Faced with evil or danger, she spins herself into a wild tornado and emerges in her glamorous (though seemingly impractical) star-spangled swimsuit and kinky, high-heeled go-go boots. She skillfully pilots an invisible airplane, wields a golden lasso, and fends off bullets with her wristbands made of a mysterious metal called “feminum.” In the name of the “forces of justice and freedom,” Wonder Woman will scrap with just about anyone— originally created to fight Nazis, she actually goes on to replicate their white-supremacist doctrines, killing off Japanese people whom her comic book portrays as demonic, and fighting to the death against her African double, Nubia. In a recent comic 30book, she completely abandons the apparently socialist tenets of the Amazons and emerges as a champion of capitalist entrepreneurialism, saving a trendy, financially lucrative urban bistro from the machinations of a computer geek. To quote the superhero herself, “Great Hera!” —can’t she get her politics straight?

Of course, all of these contradictions within Wonder Woman point to the evolution of and contradictions within our social constructions of womanhood. One of the founding principles of feminist criticism is the need to be conscious of the ways that gender is a constructed category, to realize that there is nothing inherent or essential about what we associate with the feminine. As first-wave feminist Simone de Beauvoir put it, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman; . . . it is civilization as a whole that produces this 40creature which is described as feminine.” But beyond this foundational acknowledgement of social construction (and even this concept is debated within feminism) and a general concern with the effects of power, there is little that binds what we call “feminist criticism” into a homogeneous, or even very coherent, doctrine. There are Marxist feminists who are concerned with the way economic oppression coincides with gender; linguistically based feminists who are interested in uncovering how the very structure of language itself betrays a masculine bias and in finding new modes of expression to better accommodate women. There are feminists who look for evidence of subversive resistance and empowerment in the history of women and feminists who are interested in tracing oppression and victimization.

50Feminist criticism is expanding into a more general level to include such areas as the construction of masculinity and the constitution of sexual orientation. It is being infused with insights from the realm of Queer Theory complicated by post-colonial scholars and scholars of race who consider the ways gender intersects with nationalism, class, and race. As feminist critic Theresa de Lauretis suggests, “A new conception of the subject is, in fact, emerging from feminist analyses of women’s heterogeneous subjectivity and multiple identities . . . the differences among women may be better understood as differences within women.” It is important to realize that not only does feminism as a movement exist in the face of these contradictions and complications—within feminist criticism, within gender studies, within individual literary texts and within our 60understanding of the individual woman as a subject—but that it cannot exist without them. Perhaps, like Wonder Woman, feminist criticism remains vital because it is astonishingly diverse, open, and rigorously self-problematizing.

It is representative of all the propitiations made by the women which is the basis of the feminist movement.
It leaves room for the variability that is inherent in a subject as vast as a woman.
It helps in homogenizing the concept of feminity.

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself

Accepted Answer

It tends to explain via a narrative, the contradictions in women that are stressed upon by the feminist movement.

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