Faces of Abjectivity

Abstract

Raven Darkholme, also called Mystique, first appeared in Ms. Marvel #16 in 1978, beginning a long career in Marvel comics as a character of suspect alliances and shadowy glamour, a complex mixture of anti-hero and villain. Across the various X-Men lines, Mystique has maintained numerous romantic and implicitly sexual relationships with both male and female characters. The majority of these relationships are presented as heterosexual, although her homosexual relationship with Irene Adler, also called Destiny, is usually portrayed as the most longstanding and genuine. Consequently, Mystique is commonly read as bisexual, although this aspect of her character is explored to varying degrees depending on the writer and largely ignored in the X-Men film franchise. The nature of her specific mutant powers, however, require a queer reading of an entirely different sort, one that has not yet been discussed in the existing literature concerned with the X-Men comics.