Gender Studies and Queer Studies

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how scholars situate comic books as a fertile ground for that something else. Both Gender and Queer Studies scholars confront marginalization. The bulk of comics scholarship viewing the medium and its narratives through the frames of gender and queerness concerns breaking down assumptions that sexuality, biological sex, and gender necessarily exist in patterns of normality versus abnormality. The construction of the superheroine exists on a continuum of subversion of normative gender roles and reinforcement of hegemonic norms. Comic book heroines therefore reconcile power and femininity in a medium that historically renders that relationship a paradox. This gender spectrum is of course fluid and unstable, especially when it intersects the spectrum of sexual orientation. The reciprocity between Gender Studies and Queer Studies exists in overlapping narratives and hermeneutics. The recognition of explicit, implicit, and disappeared sexuality is a significant part of Queer Studies' approaches to studying comics.