Submitting to Loving Authority: Wonder Woman’s DeleuzoGuattarian Ethics
Authors
Bordun, Troy MichaelIdentifiers
Permanent link (URI): http://hdl.handle.net/10017/59776DOI: 10.37536/reden.2023.5.2171
ISSN: 2695-4168
Date
2023Bibliographic citation
REDEN: revista de estudios norteamericanos, v.5, n.1 (2023), pp. 24-43 . ISSN 2695-4168
Keywords
Affect
Gender stereotypes
Deleuze
Wonder Woman
Comics
Superheroine
Document type
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Version
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional
Access rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Abstract
In this article, I read Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette’s Wonder Woman: Earth One, Volume 1 (2016)
through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophy to challenge the superhero comics narrative convention
of using violence as the sole means in a hero’s transcendent pursuit of justice. Deleuze and Guattari
critique goal-oriented sexuality as a call for different modes of thinking about ethics and interpersonal
relations. I apply their insights to superhero comics wherein we find heroes’ aggressive climaxes of physical
power that set things right, i.e., back to the way things were. Most heroes are thus goal-oriented, hyperviolent,
and conservative; they beat the villains into compliance to return the world to its previous order.
Wonder Woman, on the contrary, turns towards what I call the ethics of the caress. She deploys intimate
conversation and physical affection as well as espouses vulnerability to thereby transform her interlocutors—
whether men or fellow Amazons—into submissive counterparts to “change the world for the better”
(Morrison and Paquette 2016).
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